Setting up Home media server again, suggestions?

2013 · 29 Nov 2023 at 23:30

Gabby said:
RAID 5 needs a minimum of 3 disks to work. You lose the capacity of one disk (in the same way that unraid does) for the privilege of using RAID 5. Both unraid and RAID 5 allows for one disk to completely fail, be replaced, and you do not lose anything. So either unraid or a RAID card will give you the same cover.

HOWEVER, neither unraid nor RAID is a backup system, it is a method of redundancy. You can have RAID 5 working wonderfully but if your house burns down with the PC inside then you have lost everything. RAID and BACKUP are different things.

RAID explained: https://www.booleanworld.com/raid-levels-explained/

Thanks for that, that clears up a few bits also, If my house burns down with my pc and mircoserver inside, I don't think anything would make a diffrence unless I have a private cloud :cry:

also Armageus did say

Armageus said:
Raid 5 spreads the data across multiple drives, and also stripes some redundant parity information across the drives, so in the event of a single drive failure, the missing drive's data can be calculated from what remains + the parity data. In terms of space - this means you only "waste" 1 drive's worth of space to provide recovery information for all your drives.
The disadvantages are that it's complicated, and if a drive fails, then although the drive can be replaced and rebuilt, because of the complexity of this (it takes a while), and the extra reading/writing can often cause one of the remaining disks to fail.

Unraid is similar to Raid 5 in that it uses parity to protect data. The difference being that the parity data isn't striped - it's just stored on the single largest drive in your system. All the other drives are essentially independent (e.g. they can be lifted and read in another machine independently). Again Unraid is only "wasting" one drive of space for recovery information for all your drives.
Compared to RAID5, Rebuilds are slightly less risky, as even if an other drive fails during a Rebuild, you only lose data on that drive, whereas on Raid5 because the data is striped, the whole array is lost.

Armageus said:
The only limitation with Unraid is that because each drive is independent, you are only ever reading/writing to a single drive and so are limited to the speed of that drive (unlike Raid5 which will read a stipe across 3 or more drives, potentially trebling read speed) - this can however be offset with an SSD cache if needed (but for things like media storage it's a none issue)
Unraid also allows you to mix drive sizes to maximise space (as long as the parity drive is larger than all other drives), something no other RAID mode can do

Armageus · 29 Nov 2023 at 23:31

Gabby said:
Both unraid and RAID 5 allows for one disk to completely fail, be replaced, and you do not lose anything. So either unraid or a RAID card will give you the same cover.

The difference is that if a 2nd drive fails in an actual RAID5 array you lose all data on the array (as data is striped across the discs). In unraid data on any remaining discs is still readable (as Unraid is essentially just "indexing" what's on each separate disc and using another disc to store this "index")

As above though - Raid/Unraid are just ways to improve the availability of your data. If it's important it should be backed up (e.g to the "cloud" or to a separate usb drive).

For media files Unraid makes a lot of sense - they take up a lot of room (so you want to maximise the space you have), aren't critically important if lost (unlike say family photos), but it's inconvenient to have to rerip or redownload.

Unraid therefore pools whatever drives you have to consolidate space, and offers a degree of data protection with only a single additional drive (compared to mirroring that essentially requires double the number of drives for the same space).

2013 · 29 Nov 2023 at 23:42

Armageus said:
The difference is that if a 2nd drive fails in an actual RAID5 array you lose all data on the array (as data is striped across the discs). In unraid data on any remaining discs is still readable (as Unraid is essentially just "indexing" what's on each separate disc and using another disc to store this "index")

As above though - Raid/Unraid are just ways to improve the availability of your data. If it's important it should be backed up (e.g to the "cloud" or to a separate usb drive).

For media files Unraid makes a lot of sense - they take up a lot of room (so you want to maximise the space you have), aren't critically important if lost (unlike say family photos), but it's inconvenient to have to rerip or redownload.

Unraid therefore pools whatever drives you have to consolidate space, and offers a degree of data protection with only a single additional drive (compared to mirroring that essentially requires double the number of drives for the same space).

Thanks again, I'm still a little hesitant towards unraid as its not something ive used or comfortable with , is anything else possible ?

in raid 5 is the data spread evenly across all 3 drives or is drive 1 & 2 used as the storage and 3 as the backup ?

So I would have a total of 9TB and if one drive I can replace, is there a high chance of failure when restoring ?
also if 2 drives fail im out of luck ?

2013 · 30 Nov 2023 at 00:49

Comparison Table

Feature	UnRAID	RAID 5
Total Usable Capacity	6TB	6TB
Parity Drive Size	3TB (dynamic)	3TB
Performance	Slightly lower due to overhead of managing different drive sizes	Slightly higher due to hardware-based data protection
Flexibility	More flexible, can use drives of different sizes	Less flexible, requires drives of the same size
Scalability	More scalable, can easily add more drives	Less scalable, expanding with different drive sizes can be complex
Complexity	Slightly more complex setup	Simpler setup

Recommendation

The choice between UnRAID and RAID 5 depends on your specific needs and priorities. If you prioritize storage utilization and flexibility, UnRAID is a suitable option. However, if simplicity and performance are your primary concerns, RAID 5 might be a better choice.

Additional Considerations

Data Protection: Both UnRAID and RAID 5 provide data protection against drive failures. However, UnRAID's parity drive can be regenerated even if two drives fail, while RAID 5 can only tolerate one drive failure.
Performance: RAID 5 typically offers slightly better performance than UnRAID, especially for read operations. However, the difference in performance is often minimal for most home and small business needs.
Cost: UnRAID is a software-based solution, while RAID 5 typically requires a hardware-based RAID controller. This can make UnRAID a more cost-effective option, especially if you already have a compatible server.

When considering the use of three 3TB drives and one 1TB drive in a storage configuration, both UnRAID and RAID 5 offer viable options with distinct advantages and limitations.

UnRAID

UnRAID's flexibility in drive size management allows you to utilize all four drives, resulting in a total usable capacity of 7TB. The 1TB drive serves as the parity drive, protecting data from loss in case one of the 3TB drives fails. UnRAID dynamically allocates parity space based on data needs, ensuring efficient storage utilization.

RAID 5

In a RAID 5 configuration, the usable capacity is determined by the smallest drive, which is the 1TB drive. This means that the total usable capacity would be limited to 3TB. However, RAID 5 offers slightly better performance due to hardware-based data protection.

Comparison Table

Feature	UnRAID	RAID 5
Total Usable Capacity	7TB	3TB
Parity Drive Size	1TB (dynamic)	1TB
Performance	Slightly lower due to overhead of managing different drive sizes	Slightly higher due to hardware-based data protection
Flexibility	More flexible, can use drives of different sizes	Less flexible, requires drives of the same size
Scalability	More scalable, can easily add more drives	Less scalable, expanding with different drive sizes can be complex
Complexity	Slightly more complex setup	Simpler setup

It seam Raid5 can only use the same size drives also a little harder to expand the storage

BigT · 30 Nov 2023 at 06:53

Gabby said:
RAID 5 - 4x3TB drives would give you 9TB usable space

My apologies, you’re quite right. I was focussed too much on the word mirroring mentioned so only had RAID 1 in my head.

Bluecube · 30 Nov 2023 at 07:02

2013 said:
UnRAID's flexibility in drive size management allows you to utilize all four drives, resulting in a total usable capacity of 7TB. The 1TB drive serves as the parity drive, protecting data from loss in case one of the 3TB drives fails. UnRAID dynamically allocates parity space based on data needs, ensuring efficient storage utilization.

That’s not right. The parity drive needs to be at least the same size as the largest drive in the array.

Zefan · 30 Nov 2023 at 08:15

Unraid is definitely preferable imo for this use case. No brainer imo, the chances of you having to do much cli is slim as the day to day admin/config is through web console. Why not get a trial license and have a bash?

skyripper · 30 Nov 2023 at 09:00

Use a separate drive for boot. Install Truenas Core, setup a ZFS of the data disks, add a samba share, copy up your media, add a Plex docker (already bundled in TrueNas)

Armageus · 30 Nov 2023 at 09:29

skyripper said:
Use a separate drive for boot. Install Truenas Core, setup a ZFS of the data disks, add a samba share, copy up your media, add a Plex docker (already bundled in TrueNas)

Definitely not - the OP is struggling with the concepts of RAID5 and Unraid. ZFS is far worse by comparison.

skyripper · 30 Nov 2023 at 10:08

You're right, hadn't had much sleep when I posted. Ignore me

Armageus · 30 Nov 2023 at 10:45

2013 said:
in raid 5 is the data spread evenly across all 3 drives or is drive 1 & 2 used as the storage and 3 as the backup ?

The below picture from Wikipedia shows how data is laid out on a 4 Disk RAID5.
Data is striped across all the disks - in simple terms if a file is in the orange stripe, it's data is spread across Disk0, Disk1 and Disk2. Parity (Recovery) information about that stripe is then stored on Disk3.
To read a file from the orange stripe, then all disks are needed to read the entire stripe.
If Disk2 failed for example then the file in the orange stripe can still be read as it uses the data from disk0 and disk1, and then uses the parity data "Ap" combined with the data from disk0 and disk1 to regenerate the missing data.
If 2 disks fail, e.g. Disk 2 and Disk 3, then all data is unrecoverable, as in the case of the orange stripe you only have 2 remaining pieces of data (A1, A2), A3 is lost and the parity (recovery) information is also lost.

I've created a diagram to try and show how Unraid lays data out with 4 disks.
Data is stored on Disk0,1,2 as normal - files are stored in their entirety on a single disk. Disk 3 is used as a dedicated parity drive.
To read a file e.g. the Red "word.doc", then the only disk needed is disk 1.
If Disk 2 failed in this Unraid example, then files on disk 0 and disk 1 can be read as normal (with no performance loss). Files that were on Disk 2 can still be read, as it will compare the parity data on disk 3 against what is on disk0 and disk1, to reconstruct the missing data.
If 2 disks fail on Unraid e.g. Disk 2 and 3, you would lose the data on Disk3, and lose the parity information, but files on Disk 0 and Disk 1 would still be fully accessible.

Zefan · 30 Nov 2023 at 10:52

Armageus said:
The Lord's work

Oof this is some high IO stuff man. RAID 11/10. Arrayed and parity-pilled. Would stripe.

Cyber-Mav · 30 Nov 2023 at 22:21

Just use a windows pc with shared network drives. Since its just media dont need raid either just keep a backup of the important stuff.

2013 · 30 Nov 2023 at 23:40

Has anyone used TrueNAS, CasaOS or OpenMediaVault they are free and seam similar to Unraid,
Would it be too much for me ?

Cyber-Mav said:
Just use a windows pc with shared network drives. Since its just media dont need raid either just keep a backup of the important stuff.

That maybe my choice, I just wanted to get the most out of the NAS this time with some help for you guys.

So far you have not let me down, replying to my silly questions and helping me understand.

2013 · 1 Dec 2023 at 01:24

Armageus said:
The below picture from Wikipedia shows how data is laid out on a 4 Disk RAID5.
Data is striped across all the disks - in simple terms if a file is in the orange stripe, it's data is spread across Disk0, Disk1 and Disk2. Parity (Recovery) information about that stripe is then stored on Disk3.
To read a file from the orange stripe, then all disks are needed to read the entire stripe.
If Disk2 failed for example then the file in the orange stripe can still be read as it uses the data from disk0 and disk1, and then uses the parity data "Ap" combined with the data from disk0 and disk1 to regenerate the missing data.
If 2 disks fail, e.g. Disk 2 and Disk 3, then all data is unrecoverable, as in the case of the orange stripe you only have 2 remaining pieces of data (A1, A2), A3 is lost and the parity (recovery) information is also lost.

I've created a diagram to try and show how Unraid lays data out with 4 disks.
Data is stored on Disk0,1,2 as normal - files are stored in their entirety on a single disk. Disk 3 is used as a dedicated parity drive.
To read a file e.g. the Red "word.doc", then the only disk needed is disk 1.
If Disk 2 failed in this Unraid example, then files on disk 0 and disk 1 can be read as normal (with no performance loss). Files that were on Disk 2 can still be read, as it will compare the parity data on disk 3 against what is on disk0 and disk1, to reconstruct the missing data.
If 2 disks fail on Unraid e.g. Disk 2 and 3, you would lose the data on Disk3, and lose the parity information, but files on Disk 0 and Disk 1 would still be fully accessible.

Thanks, that clears up a few things for me.

I don't really feel like spending as much for new linux OS at this time. So it will need to be a free option or something I own.

Are any of other NAS OS similar to Unraid,
If I've missed something again, please let me know, it can sometime take me a little longer to understand things and running on fumes at night which does not help.

Any suggestion on what OS to use?

spile · 1 Dec 2023 at 06:24

I moved from Windows Server to a Qnap NAS and it was a big improvement. Smaller, quieter, less power hungry and more flexible. It’s been doing its job for 7 years.

Cyber-Mav · 1 Dec 2023 at 07:21

i no longer use raid since hard drives are larger than 1tb. was very common to see raid when drives were small in capacity and slow.
my gen7 microserver has windows server on it and few drives shoved in it. i dont use plex etc since its transcoding and looses quality. every network device i have can playback files in native format, anything up to h.265. not everything is av1 yet.

Earth[Tera].bin · 1 Dec 2023 at 07:46

I picked up a cheap DELL tower recently in their sale, lots of ram and some decent gpus with the idea of setting up a little homeworker.

I tried a lot of various options, unraid, TrueNAS scale, core etc and ended up with Proxmox, maybe not the most efficient setup and I'm sure it could be picked apart but it ended up working well for me personally.

LXC for pi-hole backup
Dockers for deluge, Sabnzbd and Jellyfin ( nvidia transcoding )
Dockers use shared network storage
VM Win11 ( intel 630 )
VM for MacOS ( intel 630 )
VMs various linux distros

Big point was getting PCI(e) passthroughs working, which was really easy with proxmox, whereas I found it hit and miss with the others.

Armageus · 1 Dec 2023 at 08:51

2013 said:
I don't really feel like spending as much for new linux OS at this time. So it will need to be a free option or something I own.

Are any of other NAS OS similar to Unraid,

There are other options that will get close, but none are as easy or as well supported.

Snapraid is a free option that will do "sort of" data parity on Windows https://www.snapraid.it/ but it requires a lot of configuration and isn't necessarily automatic
Stablebit Drivepool will help pool drives under Windows and can do file duplication/balancing https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Features but again it's a paid for option
Windows Storage Spaces in Windows 10/11/Server will do Parity storage spaces, but I'd be hesitant to recommend it for any data you care about - like much of Windows 10/11 lately, it isn't well tested, and updates frequently change behaviour or cause issues

Note that while Unraid is the recommended option for ease of use and the benefits of the Unraid parity format, for Media RAID5 on any NAS operating system (Truenas/OpenmediaVault/Proxmox etc) is normally still a good enough option (it still maximises space whilst maintaining some degree of redundancy)

Not having any RAID/redundancy is also a valid option - ultimately it depends how big your media collection is, and how much you value your time if you were to have to re-rip/re-download it.

Cyber-Mav said:
i no longer use raid since hard drives are larger than 1tb. was very common to see raid when drives were small in capacity and slow.

That's only relevant for RAID0 (Striping with no data protection), regardless of drive sizes RAID1/10 is still very much common, and RAID5/6 still has a couple of use cases.

Cyber-Mav said:
my gen7 microserver has windows server on it and few drives shoved in it. i dont use plex etc since its transcoding and looses quality. every network device i have can playback files in native format, anything up to h.265. not everything is av1 yet.

Plex (or Emby/Jellyfin only transcode if the client doesn't support a format or something is set up wrong - e.g. you've manually restricted bandwidth somewhere).
If you aren't using Plex etc, then surely you are missing out on metadata (e.g. movie descriptions etc) and it must be a very basic experience

Cyber-Mav · 1 Dec 2023 at 11:01

Armageus said:
Plex (or Emby/Jellyfin only transcode if the client doesn't support a format or something is set up wrong - e.g. you've manually restricted bandwidth somewhere).
If you aren't using Plex etc, then surely you are missing out on metadata (e.g. movie descriptions etc) and it must be a very basic experience

i use kodi on the 2 nvidia shield tv's i have, that gives all the metadata pics etc for the media i got. with windows shares it good for me since the server has drives with system images and games on it too so for me its a lot more convenient.

hopefully there is cheapo 50tb ssd in the future, will replace the whole thing with one of those hp or dell mini micro desktop machines.