Unraid doesn't use RAID in the sense you're thinking, it uses a single drive (or multiple drives) to store parity to recover from a single drive (or multiple drive) failure. More parity drives = can survive more data drives failure. so 1 Parity (1p) can support say 20 data drives and if 1 dies it's OK, no data loss. If you have 2P you can loose 2D, if you loose more D than P you still have all the data accessible on the other drives unlike R5 etc. Simply put Power Gating is intel's technology to turn off un-used cores, think 8 core CPU only powering 1 core when idle.
Plex server/Backup NAS from old parts.
- Thread starter Salty22
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Unraid doesn't use RAID in the sense you're thinking, it uses a single drive (or multiple drives) to store parity to recover from a single drive (or multiple drive) failure. More parity drives = can survive more data drives failure. so 1 Parity (1p) can support say 20 data drives and if 1 dies it's OK, no data loss. If you have 2P you can loose 2D, if you loose more D than P you still have all the data accessible on the other drives unlike R5 etc. Simply put Power Gating is intel's technology to turn off un-used cores, think 8 core CPU only powering 1 core when idle.
Spent a few days reading and pretty clued up on unraid now, just one quick question (save me registering on another forum for now).
In my rig I’ve got a 250gb SSD as boot drive, a 2tb old crappy hdd and two 3tb WD reds.
I’m planning to put the two 3tb reds into the unraid machine when I build it, but for now I’m going to be too skint to afford anymore disks.
The two 3tb reds are nearly full, I’m guessing unraid requires you to format the disks before creating an array so would I have to buy/borrow with enough to hold what’s on the WD reds for a few hours while I bulld the new unraid array?
In my rig I’ve got a 250gb SSD as boot drive, a 2tb old crappy hdd and two 3tb WD reds.
I’m planning to put the two 3tb reds into the unraid machine when I build it, but for now I’m going to be too skint to afford anymore disks.
The two 3tb reds are nearly full, I’m guessing unraid requires you to format the disks before creating an array so would I have to buy/borrow with enough to hold what’s on the WD reds for a few hours while I bulld the new unraid array?
Unraid won't allow you to add a disk without pre-clearing it, that pre-clear on a 3TB drive will take a lot longer than a few hours at single pass and you'd normally do multiples (3 minimum). All data will be lost, every sector written to and then re-read and verified. You can add one disk, copy data to it, then pre-clear the other disk and add that. When you ad the second drive it'll be as a parity drive if you want to have any backup, so i'd suggest you add in this order with the caveat that you have no protection till you are done.
1. Pre-clear a 3TB RED.
2. Install Unraid with the drive you cleared in step 1.
3. Copy data from 2TB to Unraid.
4. Pre-clear 2TB drive.
5. Add 2TB to unraid drive pool.
6. Copy data from other 3TB to pool.
7. Pre-clear remaining 3TB RED.
8. Add drive cleared in 7 to unraid as a parity.
You will now have 3 drives with 5TB of parity protected pool. An SSD cache drive is advisable if you plan on running a lot of IO heavy things like sonarr/radarr/NZBGet/Plex etc as you don't want to run that on the pool, same with VM's.
This assumes you have enough space to do this and it will not be a quick process.
A simple/cheap option would be GSuite with unlimited storage for a few quid each month and just use that if your connection is fast enough, it's perfect for media storage. If you want a nice simple way of doing it you have two unraid plugins that will allow rclone to mount GSuite and another to expose it to dockers etc., or use PlexGuide as a VM, I know people spending circa €15 a month with automated downloads, unlimited storage and adding 20TB/month of content, you can do it for about £8 a month if you run local rather than using a VPS.
1. Pre-clear a 3TB RED.
2. Install Unraid with the drive you cleared in step 1.
3. Copy data from 2TB to Unraid.
4. Pre-clear 2TB drive.
5. Add 2TB to unraid drive pool.
6. Copy data from other 3TB to pool.
7. Pre-clear remaining 3TB RED.
8. Add drive cleared in 7 to unraid as a parity.
You will now have 3 drives with 5TB of parity protected pool. An SSD cache drive is advisable if you plan on running a lot of IO heavy things like sonarr/radarr/NZBGet/Plex etc as you don't want to run that on the pool, same with VM's.
This assumes you have enough space to do this and it will not be a quick process.
A simple/cheap option would be GSuite with unlimited storage for a few quid each month and just use that if your connection is fast enough, it's perfect for media storage. If you want a nice simple way of doing it you have two unraid plugins that will allow rclone to mount GSuite and another to expose it to dockers etc., or use PlexGuide as a VM, I know people spending circa €15 a month with automated downloads, unlimited storage and adding 20TB/month of content, you can do it for about £8 a month if you run local rather than using a VPS.
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I’m tempted to hang on building it until i can afford two 4tb reds and an SSD for a cache drive.
Just upgrade my cpu/mobo/ram and wait a couple months to do the nas then.
Is there any way to get NORDVpn working on unraid? Been googling and can’t seem to find anything about that particular Vpn.
I wouldn’t mind but I’ve just paid for 3 year subscription
Just upgrade my cpu/mobo/ram and wait a couple months to do the nas then.
Is there any way to get NORDVpn working on unraid? Been googling and can’t seem to find anything about that particular Vpn.
I wouldn’t mind but I’ve just paid for 3 year subscription
Caporegime
I use a 1tb spinner for a cache drive which runs 3 vm's, plex, torrent and sonarr/radarr dockers with no ill effects.
I did stipulate NZBGet and therefore news which results in RAR/PAR work which is significant IO in itself, on a slow connection with light use, a spinner is probably OK, but load up the IO with writes to the cache drive, multiple r/w operations for torrents, RAR/PAR checking, library scanning, transcode writes and the odd VM and it's really not OK, everything begins to grind and that's not cool.
Binhex VPN images require you to specify IP's on unsupported providers, it's not hard, they're just locked down not to do DNS.
Caporegime
Well sans NBZ that's my setup and it doesn't grind, so I guess the only difference is the parring.
Do you need to transcode? Are you going to use local storage or GDrive? What else other than Unraid will it be running? VM's etc?
If you can direct play/stream then older micro servers (G8) are cheap and reasonably efficient, designed with 4-6 drives in mind and quite capable of a basic unraid set-up. If you are happy to build, then you have a lot more options.
Be warned, the more drives you add, the more likely it is you'll suffer a drive failure eventually and the more parity drives you are likely to want to cope with multiple failures. SSD cache (and indeed SSD's to pass through direct to VM's) are also a consideration. I literally spent thousands on drives/hardware over the years to populate two servers + multiple storage pods, now I pay google $10/m and Hetzner a few quid and don't have to worry about it.
If you can direct play/stream then older micro servers (G8) are cheap and reasonably efficient, designed with 4-6 drives in mind and quite capable of a basic unraid set-up. If you are happy to build, then you have a lot more options.
Be warned, the more drives you add, the more likely it is you'll suffer a drive failure eventually and the more parity drives you are likely to want to cope with multiple failures. SSD cache (and indeed SSD's to pass through direct to VM's) are also a consideration. I literally spent thousands on drives/hardware over the years to populate two servers + multiple storage pods, now I pay google $10/m and Hetzner a few quid and don't have to worry about it.
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We normally stream Plex to the front room Xbox one, bedrooms LG tv and fire sticks in two other bedrooms so don’t think any of them use transcoding do they?
I do have Plex on my iPhone and android tablets but it’s not that often I use them.
I wouldn’t mind using the unraid pc for my torrent clients etc but I don’t plan on really using for anything else.
Maybe pi-hole but that’s about it from what I’ve seen they can do.
Soldato
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- 20 Oct 2008
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It'll depend on how the video is encoded and whether the playback device can 'Direct Play' it or not.
I found that some of my older 1080p files always get transcoded when I play them back on the Fire TV. Nowadays I make sure I encode everything so it'll playback without conversion (although my server is more than capable of handling it).