unRAID - anyone used it?

Looks a bit home-brew to me, i cant see what it offers over an ordinary Linux distro type raid system.

As ever, doing it in hardware is better, ie a RAID-5 controller.
 
The difference from regular Linux software RAID (or hardware RAID5) is that it allows you to add drives of different sizes to the storage pool, or swap a small drive out for a larger one, and still retain the full capacity of each - as long as the designated parity drive is equal to or larger in size than the biggest data drive, the data will be protected. Obviously the more drives you use though, the greater the chance of the parity drive and one or more of the data drives failing simultaneously.

It's a nice idea, but not really very efficient with just three drives in total, and the full version is a bit overpriced for what it is IMHO.
 
AbsenceJam said:
I use FlexRAID and disparity which are similar (different sized drives) but not live.
Click to expand...

I've recently installed SnapRAID. Basically like those two but actually IS updated/supported. Very pleased with results. No need to spin up all 8 HDDs just to read a single file (saves power/heat/hdd life) and since most of my media doesnt change that much day to day it takes only minutes to update.
 
I tried it, but didn't want the cache drive, so the transfer speed was rubbish as it's having to sort of the parity at the same time. With a cache drive the parity is done later in the background as it's transferred from the cache to storage, but at the cost of another drive.

In the end, went with WHS instead.

(If you are interested, search the internet for a discount code, there is one that works as I remember checking it)
 
Unraid discussion board is quite interesting and lots of people use it but I have heard that data copying speeds are quite slow.

WHS 2011 is currently around 60 USD on-line. Price dropped from around 110 USD a week after I bought it :(.

Saying that it is a great little home server OS with lots of functionality, some uninstalled and unsupported but available via roles in the server manager.

Drive pool has gone but there are third party solutions that are being developed. Lights-out looks good as well enabling you to turn the server off at set times and wake-on-lan / power up when another 'specified' device is detected on the network (i.e. media player).

Being able to remote access your shares from the internet and being able to remote desktop to the server and other desktop machines (Win7 Pro required although XP Pro may also work) via a web front end is very nice (rdp requires a SSL cert though it seems from reading up on it). I am currently looking in to installing an email server (cheap or freeware).

I moved from a standard Fedora setup (hardware compatibility issues) and am very happy.

Note: WHS 2011 is limited to a max of 8GB ram though.

One question I would ask you to think about is whether you need raid, or more accurately why you feel you need raid. It all sounds great and in a corporate environment is it a pre-requisite as the data is usually mission critical and downtime costs money. In a home environment, downtime can be much more easily tolerated. Remeber raid redundancy does not equal backup. I have 4x1TB WD Blacks stripped as a single array for all my shared data. I have 2x2TB WD Greens spanned for a backup of all that data. I keep it all in sync via a nightly batch job which also backup up all my personal data to an external USB drive. My personal data is always available and can be moved to another machine if needed. My media files have two copies (live and archive) and should a disk fail in the live set it just takes a few hours to copy the data back to a new array when I get a replacement drive.

Only thing I would like to do now is change the 4x1TB drives to 2x2TB drives or change all the WD blacks / Greens for Scorpio Blacks and Blues due to power savings and heat reduction (have a 20 bay case so space is not an issue).

RB
 
oddjob62 said:
How's that different from using a controller with Raid 5?
Click to expand...

[Evangelism Mode=on]

unRAID uses a variation on RAID 4, basically a dedicated parity drive. It's true, write speeds can be a little low, but with most home NAS solutions it's not a major issue. The advantage you get is that each data disk is a completely standard ReiserFS file system. With a conventional RAID system if the controller goes pop you're left sweating until you can source an identical controller (or hope that a new model is backwards compatible). With unRAID you could just attach any of the data disks to any Linux distibution that has ReiserFS support and mount them as a normal disk. You also get easy capacity expansion and the data drives don't have to be the same size. The only restriction is that the parity drive has to be at least as big as the biggest data drive you have installed.

Unused drives get spun down automatically and since files aren't striped across all disks if I start playing a movie or MP3 then only the drive containing that file is spun up; not all the disks.

I've had my unRAID system up and running for about six months and it does everything I need, but since the basic version is free anyone can give it a spin.

Have a read of this AVForums thread if you need some inspiration

[Evangelism Mode=off]
 
Yep run it myself as well,
With the hp proliant microserver, (up to 6 disks you can cram into it)

Within a week of using the free version and know basics of linux, i went and bought the plus version. Having put some data on it, unplugged hard drives, plugging more in letting it rebuild etc..

Have been running it for the last 3 months (24/7) , its been switched off once (to add extra 1gb memory (not that it needed it, but it was cheap!).

Running it with the cache drive with 3 other drives(4TB of useable storage)

Addon's added included ps3 media server (streams videos/music/pics) to ps3.

So my main machine has a 60GB SSD, with docs/pics/music/videos all redirected to the unraid server) it works very well.
Have it also setup to sync to cloud storage (docs/pics/music/some videos) for backup purposes.

Also to note Beta 5.08 now supports 3TB drives
Also free upgrades unlike WHS
 
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.
 
I am running a 12TB (10TB usable) unRAID HP Microserver and its the exact solution I have always been after. It depends on what you want out of it. unRAID works best for arrays that have data that doesn't change much so for me that's perfect for storing my media. Its slow (50mB/s) to copy data to the array as it works out parity on the fly but once the data is there I get full read speeds of 100mB/s.

As I said, depends what you want out of a storage solution but for me I am more than happy.
 
How have you crammed in 10TB useable into your microserver mate? I am on 5.4TB, and can move to 7.2 with another 2TB drive, but that leaves me all out of space!

On topic - I LOVE unraid, i use it every single day and its streams content to my xbmc setups and main pc. I leave it running SABNZBD 24/7 with only the cache drive spun up. Class bit of kit.
 
Been running unRAID for best part of a year and love it.
I even have VirtualBox running on there with a few VM's :D
 
I've been using unraid for almost 3 years now. For a home NAS, storing video/audio/pictures I can't fault it :) Have ps3media server/Virtualbox and SABNZBD running as well
 
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