unRAID - anyone used it?

blairw · 12 Aug 2011 at 14:13

Ah right, i have a dock in there that takes a laptop hard drive and a 2tb drive. I need to keep the cache as I leave sabnzbd running all the time and dont want the full array on all the time

Venares · 12 Aug 2011 at 15:00

I do something similar.
I dont want a cache but I do need somewhere for all my downloads and VM's to run from so I use S.N.A.P. to mount an additional drive so its not part of the array.

Skyboat · 12 Aug 2011 at 21:28

Just got round to trying this out in a VM. Fantastic little distro, put it on a memory stick, boot up, browse to GUI. Job done.

It's also incredibly easy to customise with addons whilst still being to upgrade the kernel image by a simple copy and paste

Zarf · 13 Aug 2011 at 01:18

It's interested me, mainly due to the ease of expanding/replacing with different drive capacities, but I like having my storage pooled into a single volume (no wasted space or ugly directory boundaries).

nickcardwell · 13 Aug 2011 at 08:29

ecksmen said:
What sort of write speeds do you chaps get? I've toyed with the idea, am currently doing my own sort of "raid" using vms, lots of disks and robo copy scripts.

Using teracopy, getting anywhere between 30MB/s (small files) up to 69MB/s (big files)

Average about 50MB/s

This is with the cache drive, on gigabit network.

ubern00b · 13 Aug 2011 at 13:04

Zarf said:
It's interested me, mainly due to the ease of expanding/replacing with different drive capacities, but I like having my storage pooled into a single volume (no wasted space or ugly directory boundaries).

unRAID does this via shares.

nickcardwell said:
Using teracopy, getting anywhere between 30MB/s (small files) up to 69MB/s (big files)

Average about 50MB/s

This is with the cache drive, on gigabit network.

Wow. I get 50MB/s without a cache drive pretty consistently. I am moving large files however, the smallest being around 1GB.

If you use unMENU and watch the array write speeds you can see it writing to the data disk and the parity disk at both 50MB/s so if there was no parity I would be seeing 100mB/s writes.

Methanoid · 13 Aug 2011 at 21:48

A question for you UnRAIDers please; about migration; please point out flaws in this idea!!

If I have 6x2Tb drives (5 fairly full and 1 empty), all NTFS format.

Stage 1 - format empty drive as ReiserFS
Stage 2 - move all data off a full NTFS drive to empty ReiserFS drive
Stage 3 - back to stage 1 with freshly emptied NTFS drive (until all data on Reiser formatted drives)
Stage 4 - mount all drives in UnRAID, with final drive (empty) as parity. Boot UnRAID and set it building parity.

I guess I don't have enough empty drives to put drives into an UnRAID array and then copy data as per wiki http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Copy_files_from_a_NTFS_drive

Anyone migrated LOTS of data without doing it all by ethernet?

Zarf · 15 Aug 2011 at 19:28

unRAID does this via shares.

?

AFAIK if you have directories that are too large to fit on a single drive, you still have to split them into multiple folders. ie my movies directory is 5TB, With 1TB drives i'd have to create 5 folders like "movies 0-D", "movies E-I" etc? And of course I'd have to split the boundries in order to allow them room to grow, or else have a load of tedious resuffling to do when one folder outgrows its disc.

Or will it automatically create folder "extensions" into free space on other drives as needed and symlink the contents of all the drives into a single file share?

ubern00b · 15 Aug 2011 at 21:04

Zarf said:
?

AFAIK if you have directories that are too large to fit on a single drive, you still have to split them into multiple folders. ie my movies directory is 5TB, With 1TB drives i'd have to create 5 folders like "movies 0-D", "movies E-I" etc? And of course I'd have to split the boundries in order to allow them room to grow, or else have a load of tedious resuffling to do when one folder outgrows its disc.

Or will it automatically create folder "extensions" into free space on other drives as needed and symlink the contents of all the drives into a single file share?

You create a single root folder called "Movies" which will span all drives and unRAID will automatically "join" root folders that have the same name when you present the data as a "share".

As for "data leveling" unRAID does something called "Split Leveling" which you can read about here.

Methanoid · 24 Oct 2011 at 18:12

FYI people who like Windows might want to look at FlexRAID (and perhaps SnapRAID or DisParity).. Flex has snapshot RAID and storage pooling.... Nice!

Zarf · 24 Oct 2011 at 20:47

ubern00b said:
You create a single root folder called "Movies" which will span all drives and unRAID will automatically "join" root folders that have the same name when you present the data as a "share".

As for "data leveling" unRAID does something called "Split Leveling" which you can read about here.

Oh nice, glad to be proven wrong in this case!

It's something I'll certainly bear in mind now for my future File Server build. Unfortunately the price of hard drives is setting me back a few months.

I'm currently thinking about getting something like a 16 bay Norco case, with a couple of SLC SSD's for write cache I could move my Perc5 in with say 4 cheap+speedy 500GB drives in hardware RAID5 and get enough performance to saturate my 2Gb/s teamed network (if Samba can keep up!) for those apps that need it, whilst my existing 1TB and some new 2TB drives form the core of my media pool.