UnRaid RAID Installation

[PhilB]

I finally got around to building network RAID array for movies based on Unraid. I have to admit I found Unraid via Baddabing's postings about his experience with it. It was actually very easy to get running and now I have enough storage to last me a little while and can expand easily. It is also silent when not in use .

The primary benefit I saw was that I wanted my drives to spin down when I was not using them (configurable), which for movies is most of the time. I still store all music on the media server not the raid array which is in a seperate box. I also wanted to reduce noise.

Here is the component list I used:

ASUS A8N-VM CSM Mothboard with AMD Athlon 3200+ (any motherboard that will boot from usb will work)
Zalman CNPS7700-Cu CPU Cooler (very quiet)
3U Rack mount chassis designed for 8 3.5" disk trays
128mb USB Key
4 750gig
Unraid Pro (there is is free version that will give you 3 drives) I bought the pro for $69 than gives me 7 total.
http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/

No Monitor, mouse or keyboard is required after installation. The Array management is done via a browser. Here are some looks at that. Very simple to setup an operate. I can access the Array via mapping a network drive or FTP.

1 drawback is that the largest drive is reserved as a parity drive. That is on the roadmap to fix at some point.

[wesblack]

Nice !, time to buy more Maxtor stock.




Wes Black \ Calrad

[defrag]

Interesting post PhilB, it's been something I've had on my list of "things to do" also after reading Baddabings post. Keep us informed of your experiences.

I'd be interested to know how hot your drives get though, I noticed with a block of 4 300gb maxtors that they needed some air movement on them, otherwise they tend to cook.

[PhilB]

The nice thing about the Unraid UI is it gives you drive temps in one place and with the drive spin down, the drives tend to stay cool. I am using a rather large Supermico chassis that has plenty of airflow and rewired some silent fans to replace the really loud Supermicro ones.

After copying 300 gig back onto the array, no drive got over 38C.

Lots of varying opinion on Google about how hot drives should get but if they are spun down, they will be cool and hopefully last longer.

Wes: don't buy that stock yet.....I bought these drive on Ebay from a reputable dealer, no Maxtor.

PB

[S Pittaway]

if you ignore the legality of it...

i think the best approach is to find someone local to where you live who is into the whole htpc thing, from there its not to difficault to arrange for proper "offsite backups" and raid can be ignored completly.

bear in mind none of the raids will help if some component goes pop and takes out the machine.

[sdumas]

I am also using Unraid. It has been working great for me for the past 18 months. The drives can get hot, but they are spinned down most of the time.

The beauty of it is that you can have up to 16 drives (depending on the version) and only 1 parity drive (which is why it needs to be the biggest). You can lose any one drive at any time and Unraid will rebuild the drive automatically. You can also lose the parity drive and the same thing will happen. You can also mix and match drives, so not all the drives need to be the same, you can mix IDE and SATA drives.

This is far much better than a typical RAID5 config where all the drives needs to be the same and you need to have 1 parity drive for every 3 regular drives. In this case it's up to 16 drives and only 1 parity.

I love this thing, it's cheap and fast enough for my needs.

[rhinoman]

I'm an unraid user as well, I have two machines that sit there largly fully of movies and my music collection.

As others have mentioned, the raid protection is a useful safety to the enevitable drive failures and the fact that the drives spin down makes them less likly to failure. I'd previously has some raid 5 arrays and was forever losing drives/

The other feature I like is the ability to mix and match drive sizes and upgrade a smaller drive to a bigger one in the future a drive at a time as required.

[cmhardwick]

I also use unRAID. I recently had a drive fail after a vacation (machine had been off and drive was dead on restart). Luckily, I had just purchased some additional drives to expand my system, so, out with the bad drive, in with the new. Rebuild and expanded in one action (as the new drive was larger). Also, another great feature, it's fast enough to still show a movie off of the failed drive as it's rebuilding the drive (recreating the movie from parity and the other drives).

Great product, and I was also directed there from Badabing's postings

[lpg]

Can UnRaid work with multidrive cards Like AMCC? I have a Raid 5 setup with 12 300gb drives. I am thinking about switching to UnRaid but do not want to buy a new card.

[PhilB]

I learned everything I needed in the forum which is pretty active.

http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

Not sure about your specific card but that is where I would start.

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

hmmmm based on what i quickly read... B3ars just have to call out the BS on this one.

Is there any performance gain on this solution and if so what is it based on?? how would they gain anything in performance if they dont stripe??

Isnt this just a JBOD spiced up with the back up?

Dont know about u guys but for bear RAPID is the keyword, whole point of the RAID is the speed gain.

[S Pittaway]

nope, un-raid is about data protection.

if you strip it and 2 disks fail you lose everything. with un-raid you only loase the data data on the disks that fail...

abit like no raid but you can survive a disk fail.

[sdumas]

Exactomundo!

The only appeal (and it's a big one) is the data protection. You can lose any one drives at any time and it will be rebuilt automatically. If you do lose more than one drive at a time, then you will lose the data from those drives, but only for those drives.

No speed enhancements, just protection.

[cmhardwick]

LPG, many multi-drive cards work, but they need to be able to support the drives individually, not JUST in a hardware raid setup. I use Promise TX4 sata cards in my setup (with the onboard sata as well of course). There is also a wiki that has been setup with "known good" hardware listings, etc.

[lpg]

The AMCC card allows for individual disk setup. Did you need to install the linux drivers for your card to get this to work?

Thanks Larry