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Looking to Build Your Very First unRAID Server?
I just heard about unRaid through this post for the first time and it seems perfect to me. Currently I have a Windows Home Server 2011 with an Intel Core i3-2100 and 5x 2TB + 500GB System HDD. I use the Intel Matrix Raid 5 from the Motherboard and while it worked for a couple of years, I don't like being dependent on the Intel driver and it's inflexible to increase in size. My array is nearly full and I would have to replace all HDDs at once which is quite expensive.

So I read up about unRaid through this post and it seems perfect for me. Of course I will lose some write performance (currently I can copy files at around 90MB/s to the WHS) but I get the flexibility to upgrade one HDD at a time if I understood correctly.

Does anyone have any concerns though about any features I might lose when replacing WHS? I only used it as storage for Backups and media files for XBMC anyway now. But I still want to be sure not to miss anything before rebuilding my PC.
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I guess you just have to get rid of that hardware raid.
Beside unraid, linux mdadm (software raid) allows you to add, remove or change disks.

If you don't want to pay for unraid, have a look f.e. at http://www.openmediavault.org/.

If you like to use disks of different sizes unraid is perhaps the most compfortable solution.

And i think you won't have any speed issues with a properly configured system.

FreeNAS or Nas4Free used with ZFS won't let you add single disks.
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I'm fine with paying for unraid. I have looked at FreeNAS for a while but the biggest issue I have is power consumption. I need my NAS only when I need it, meaning for like 23 hours a day it should be in standby. FreeNAS does not even remotely offer anything like that. It's based on FreeBSD so there is no S3 Sleep, a feature that has been asked for for years. And 99% of the other NAS solutions also offer no easy way to automatically put your NAS to sleep. On Windows Server I have a program called Lights-Out. It monitors the network, cpu utilization, logged in users, running processes, whatever you want. And if nothing is happening the server goes to sleep only to be waken up automatically when I boot XBMC.

Apparently unraid has a plugin for that, but I haven't found anything about it in the documentation nor the wiki. Somewhere on their official forums should be more info about it, I just have to find it.
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Hmm, you could also consider flexraid and set this up in your current whs.
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(2014-01-13, 14:36)falc410 Wrote: I'm fine with paying for unraid. I have looked at FreeNAS for a while but the biggest issue I have is power consumption. I need my NAS only when I need it, meaning for like 23 hours a day it should be in standby. FreeNAS does not even remotely offer anything like that. It's based on FreeBSD so there is no S3 Sleep, a feature that has been asked for for years. And 99% of the other NAS solutions also offer no easy way to automatically put your NAS to sleep. On Windows Server I have a program called Lights-Out. It monitors the network, cpu utilization, logged in users, running processes, whatever you want. And if nothing is happening the server goes to sleep only to be waken up automatically when I boot XBMC.

Apparently unraid has a plugin for that, but I haven't found anything about it in the documentation nor the wiki. Somewhere on their official forums should be more info about it, I just have to find it.

In Unraid you can set the amount of time before your drives spin down and in XBMC there is a n addon called wake-on-lan that will wake the Unraid server up.
I have been running Unraid successfully for about 2 years without any problems.

Quote: Hmm, you could also consider flexraid and set this up in your current whs.
I think you are off topic here, since the heading of the thread is "Looking to Build Your Very First unRAID Server?"
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I'm not talking about drive spin down but the whole server should go to sleep when no client is active. Wake on LAN currently works for me already with xbmc.
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(2014-01-13, 20:16)falc410 Wrote: I'm not talking about drive spin down but the whole server should go to sleep when no client is active. Wake on LAN currently works for me already with xbmc.
Modified sleep/ suspend script.
Code:
#!/bin/bash
# Table of all possible drives when all drive slots are fully populated, with usb boot flash "/dev/sda" excluded
drives="/dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf /dev/sdg /dev/sdh /dev/sdi /dev/sdj /dev/sdk /dev/sdl /dev/sdm /dev/sdn /dev/sdo"
# Timeout in minutes
timeout=60
count=$timeout
while [ 1 ]
do
hdparm -C $drives | grep -q active
if [ $? -eq 1 ]
then
  count=$[$count-1]
else
  count=$timeout
fi
if [ $count -le 0 ]
then
  # Do pre-sleep activities
  sleep 5
  # Flush hdd filebuffers
  sync
  # Go to sleep
  echo -n mem > /sys/power/state
  # Do post-sleep activities
  # Flush hdd filebuffers
  sync
  # Force NIC into gigabit mode
  # (might be needed forgets about gigabit when it wakes up)
  ethtool -s eth0 speed 1000
  # Force a DHCP renewal (shouldn't be used for static-ip boxes)
  #/sbin/dhcpcd -n
  sleep 5
  count=$timeout
fi
# Wait a minute
echo COUNT $count
sleep 60
done

If you would like to try a new plug in Dynamix by bergware with S3 Sleep
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Thanks for the link.

I have another question about unRaid. I read on their documentation that I the top level folders will automatically be exported. So assume I have 3 drives:
/disk1/Movies
/disk2/Movies
/disk3/Movies

Then I will have a single export /Movies that shows the contents of all 3 disks. But what happens when I copy a movie to that folder? Will unRaid randomly select a disk to write to?
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(2014-01-14, 13:15)falc410 Wrote: Thanks for the link.

I have another question about unRaid. I read on their documentation that I the top level folders will automatically be exported. So assume I have 3 drives:
/disk1/Movies
/disk2/Movies
/disk3/Movies

Then I will have a single export /Movies that shows the contents of all 3 disks. But what happens when I copy a movie to that folder? Will unRaid randomly select a disk to write to?

That depends on how you have the shared folder "Movies" set up and how you configure the free space on the disks.
Here is a good explanation of the split levels of shared folders.
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Woah that looks quite complicated. Let's assume I have a folder called Movies and all Movies go there (each into its own Subfolder). As I understand it, all Movies would go to the same HDD, unless I use Split Level 0 and High Water Allocation Method - than unRaid decides automatically on which HDD to put each movie. Will it split a movie subfolder than across multiple discs? Or should I have chosen a different split level?
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It is not as complicated as you think.
I have my movies on split level 2 and my tv shows on split level 3. What this does is creates a share on all disks with movies and tv shows.

Ex... Movie folder name is "Girls Gone Wild (2014)" inside that folder is "girls gone wild.2014.x264.DTS.1080.bluray.mkv". along with fanart.jpg, poster.jpg,nfo and actor folder. With split level 2 all these files remain on one disk. The movie could be on disk1 or 2 or 3 but all files will be in the same folder as the movie folder name. So taking the largest movie file I think I may transfer to unRaid I set my allocation of free space to 40 gigs. 40 gigs will be left on each disk, but unRaid will see that as full.

The great thing with unRaid is you can customize it for however you like. I do not show my disks when I access my shares through the windows network, all I see are my share folders "Movies, TV Shows, Pictures, Music, Games, and Misc." but when I access unRaid through the web GUI, I can see each disk and what it is holding, if I choose to do so. But you can set it up for lets say disk1 is only for movies and disk2 is for pictures and disk3 for games, in the web GUI you can set these parameters so when you drag over a game to the "Games' folder it is only on disk3.

Why not download the free uRaid server and play around with it?
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Thanks for the explanation. I can't test it yet since I'm waiting on hardware. Was unable to test it in a virtual machine.
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(2014-01-15, 09:50)paulwalker Wrote: This is very nice information, it will be great help for me to build my next server.
Glad you find it helpful. When you get to building your server post some pics of the build.
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Finally had some time to test. One of the things I already about unraid is the totally out of date documentation. Everything is out of date, the wiki, the unofficial wiki, the forums, everything. The devs should really spend more time on it.

I was scared of slow write speeds since the wiki or forums talk about 20-30 MB/s with Parity drive but I tested with an without parity drive and it didn't even made a difference. In both cases I had 60-70 MB/s. That's something I can live with. So apparently a cache drive is really not needed.

I don't understand why the server has no running ssh client but a telnet server and no password to the root account from the start.

Also good news for anyone who needs Time Machine - works right out of the box in the current version (tested 5.0.4) - so again forget the forums and the wikis! No need to install those old scripts / plugins that don't work.

The only weird thing I haven't figured out yet is that the Dynamix additional plugins are gone after a reboot. The WebUI is still there (and really needed when you look at the original one) but the other plugins have to be re-installed everytime. Again no documentation from the dev of dynamix available as to why that is.

So I started with two drives without parity and later added a parity drive. The parity had to be calculated and even though my drive was almost empty it had to calculate the parity also for the empty parts. So for 500 GB it started at 60MB/s and later on went down to 40MB/s and almost took 3 hours - I wonder how long it will take for a bunch of 4TB drives.

Anyway, I copied some files to disk1, shutdown the server, pulled the disk out and restarted. The array came online and I could still access all the data that was on the drive that I was currently holding in my hand. Impressive Smile

As for the S3 Sleep plugin, you can configure it (again no documentation wth) to monitor the disk drives - if there is no activity suspend. Also you can ping a host apparently (maybe even multiple?) or watch logged in users. I haven't had time to fully test it due to some issues with the S3 sleep, but that might be related to my old hardware. There is an email notification plugin too, so that seem's covered as well.

Now I only need to test if the airvideo server and the other plugins I need can be integrated into dynamix.
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Here is a screen shot on my transfer speeds
As far as a cache drive goes, I use mine for all the plugins. So my plex server is running on the cache, MySQL and others I have installed.

I use Putty to set my server up and telenet into it.

For plugins to start when the server starts, they need to be in a folder under the "boot/config/plugins and the.plg is placed there.Once the .plg is place there putty into server and cd to the folder and install blahblahblah.plg.

I run a parity check once a month and for 16 drives in the array, it usually takes about 24-28 hours. average speed is about 45 MBs and the average temp is about 32c

You seem to have a good grasp on what you are doing and yes the docs could be better but their forum very helpful in answering questions.
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