January 22, 201115 yr I have experience dealing with SANS and NAS boxes in industry, now I am looking for something a little more affordable for personal and couple small companies I look after. My understanding of this product so far the server software allows you to create a JBOD? I take it you don't have to create raid groups and carve luns? Are you capable of having a hotspare encase the parity drive fails or another drive fails? If a drive is full will the software start writing to the next disk or is that something you have to do manually or setup when installed? Say you have 10 drives can you have a file copied across 5 of them to help performance. or is your I/O hitting 1 drive where the file is located? How easy is it adding a drive to an existing server for added space? Is there a web gui for setting up or do you need a strong knowledge of Linux? Any one know how this software compares to a hardware raid group? And last is 21 drives the most it can handle or can it expand to more? sorry if these questions have been asked already but i could not find much about the product on the website.
January 22, 201115 yr I have experience dealing with SANS and NAS boxes in industry, now I am looking for something a little more affordable for personal and couple small companies I look after. My understanding of this product so far the server software allows you to create a JBOD? JBOD + parity. I take it you don't have to create raid groups and carve luns? You do not. Are you capable of having a hotspare encase the parity drive fails or another drive fails? No. But the array continues to work with one failed drive. A warm spare can be kept ready for fast manual replacement. I use my cache drive as a warm spare. If a drive is full will the software start writing to the next disk or is that something you have to do manually or setup when installed? You can configure user shares to do this automatically. Say you have 10 drives can you have a file copied across 5 of them to help performance. or is your I/O hitting 1 drive where the file is located? There is no striping. Each file is stored on a single disk. How easy is it adding a drive to an existing server for added space? Yes. Add a disk and any shares that use the new disk will grow by the size of the new disk. Is there a web gui for setting up or do you need a strong knowledge of Linux? There is a web GUI. Any one know how this software compares to a hardware raid group? It does not. And last is 21 drives the most it can handle or can it expand to more? The current maximum is 22 (1 parity, 20 data, and 1 cache disk). Future versions will support more disks. sorry if these questions have been asked already but i could not find much about the product on the website. See here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ
January 22, 201115 yr Author dgaschk Thanks for the very quick response, you answered my questions and I will check out that link. I did want to clarify 2 of my questions with you then I think this is solved. If a drive is full will the software start writing to the next disk or is that something you have to do manually or setup when installed? You can configure user shares to do this automatically. When this is done does it go to the next drive or the next available drive say 5 disks Drive 1 is Movies, Drive 2 is Music Drives 3-5 empty. Drive 1 is full will it start using Drive 2 or go to Drive 3. or does that depend on how you set up the user shares. Any one know how this software compares to a hardware raid group? It does not. It is like comparing apples to oranges just wondering how the software performance is compared to a hardware raid. for redundancy I know the raid it better.. and available disk space the JBOD is better. Still debating which way to go. again thanks for the quick help and info..
January 22, 201115 yr Author Did not see that FAQ thanks for pointing that out.. looks like I got some reading to do..
January 22, 201115 yr With User shares you pick what drives are in a User share and by the way you can have multiple shares per disk if you like. So if you are using Disk1,Disk2,Disk3 depending on how you setup it up it will actually write data to all 3 drives giving you ONE large share. "Big O Disk". If you are low on space you can tell the software to add Disk5 and then Disk5 becomes part of the Share expanding how much space you have. Adding drives is pretty easy: You simply shut down the array Shut down the PC. Insert New Disk Turn on PC Assign New Disk to the Array Start array Configure your User shares Walla you just added more space.
January 22, 201115 yr Here is a discussion on performance: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9746.0
January 22, 201115 yr JBOD means just a buch of disks. unRAID does this but it also does more. unRAID has what's called user shares. You can have multiple user shares. You can configure a user share to use certain drives and you can tell unRAID how to spread the data out over those drives. This is a little different that unRAID just being a JBOD. My user shares are Movies, Music, Storage, TV_Shows and Pictures. The Movies and TV_Shows go to 2 drives each. The others are limited to a single drive. Peter
January 22, 201115 yr Author lionelhutz thanks for the info I know what a JBOD is and it sounds like unraid offers some of the basic and minor advance features you would find in enterprise systems such as the DXi7500 or 5500 which are both really big JBOD's that I manage along with EMC arrays I look after as well. Now if unraid comes out with deduplication with out jacking licensing up that would be cool.. Again thanks for the very quick responses. After reading your replies and some things on the FAQ and other threads, sounds like this a cheaper solution for me. I think this one is solved Thanks again for all the help
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