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Looking to Build Your Very First unRAID Server?
#16
well, unRAID Basic allows you to have a 3 HDD array,,,
so i'd go with 3,,,
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#17
eskro Wrote:well, unRAID Basic allows you to have a 3 HDD array,,,
so i'd go with 3,,,
So you would buy 3 HDD at time?
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#18
well yeah, like i said, unRAID basic covers 3 drives.

then after that, u can buy 1 drive at a time,,,
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#19
eskro Wrote:well yeah, like i said, unRAID basic covers 3 drives.

then after that, u can buy 1 drive at a time,,,
Thanks mate! Smile
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#20
right on
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#21
One quick question about unRAID. Do all of the HDDs have to be empty to start with? For instance, I have (4) 2TB HDDs now and I'm planning on jumping up to six soon. If I started a 6 HDD unRAID rig, would I have to have 6 empty HDDs?
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#22
drives have to be wiped clean by unraid before being added to the array
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#23
Though, I'm guessing I could build an unRAID box, transfer my data to my new drives, then wipe the old drives clean and then add them to the array. Correct?

Right now I have all WD 2TB green drives. Is there any compelling reason to go with unRAID when I already have matching drives and I'm not planning on using different drives in the future?
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#24
scotepi Wrote:I just did a little math to figure out the most economical and to put all the information in one list.

Where did you get the cost numbers? They appear to be different then in eskro's build threads.

edit: nevermind... you included unraid license.

I plan to use snapraid so I didn't include that in my calculations which makes the 10hdd build the most economical per drive.

Cool! Good info for the unraid builders though.
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#25
A happy 1st unRAID rig owner here w/ free donor pc from friend and 11 old HDs kicking ~6TB space. Laugh

If someone is interested to get an unRAID PRO license (support up to 21+1 HDs) for $74.5 please drop me a msg - I jumped the gun and bought 2 keys for $149 the other day and now face one unhappy wife...Sad good that I only submitted 1 USB GUID so far. So if you want to get a pro key for $74.5 ($119 officially, SAVE $44.5!!), pls let me know. Cheers!
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#26
I'm in the same boat, i have 3 drives with about 5TB of stuff. So my first purchase is going to be 3 drives giving me 4TB of space, I can move stuff to free up a drive and then add a old to it and just keep moving data over.
Living Room Media Center/Server: Win7x64, ~6TB of space, SABnzbd+, SickBeard, MySQL, 32" LCD Vizio Internet TV, XBMC Nightly as of probably a month ago.

Bed Room Media Center: Mac OS X 10.6, 24" iMac Core2Duo
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#27
I'm buying/making my first media server very soon. I didnt even hear of unRaid before reading this thread and watching the videos. It definitely makes sense to choose it over the freeNas I was gonna pick. I think I will try the 3x version first and see how I get on. Just a few questions if you dont mind:

1- Is the parity drive essential- i mean if i have a backup of all my media can i just have 3xharddisks?

2- This is a dumb question im sure but why are server hardrives so... fragile.. I mean i got a cheap 500gb tiny, harddrive in my laptop that has fallen, been kicked, shut off mid-file-transfer, bumped.. etc and it still works perfect and I dont think I lost a single bit of data. But a nice bulky, cool air drenched, in-a-case-that-wont-move-1mm-in-its-lifetime seems to need to be backed up in case?Shocked I can more understand a RAID setup with 3 drives been written to simultanously but isnt an Unraid not just access one per go like a regular pc?
I know there is a good reason but I cant get it?

3- Finally this is the clincher for me, I need a bit torrent client at all costs - is it possible to get one running on an unraid server?

thanks for links/videos very helpfulSmile
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#28
@stiggs: To answer number 3: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.ph...#UnTorrent
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#29
Geran Wrote:@stiggs: To answer number 3: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.ph...#UnTorrent

thanks man,

but i read that before and was kind concerned by point #4:
"Download: Link in this post. Withdrawn July 20th 2010 - no plans for future version. "

anyways in the mean time i found out that tranmission can be done on it (i hopeBig Grin)
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#30
I've been struggling with questions of rebuilding my media server. I was previously using WHS v1 w/ DriveExtender, which obviously is not a viable option going forward.

After going back and forth between different options I eventually settled on 2k8 with FlexRaid and FlexRaid-View for drive 'pooling' so everything is presented in single directories. The system is a centurion variant case with 15x 5.25" bays, and currently has 2 of the "5-in-3" HDD trays with about 10TB of available storage right now on 5 drives (nearly filled). This is working great for my setup and I really don't have any reason to change it. I can add drives as I go and they are protected with a single Parity drive. Even if parity breaks for some reason the failure of a single drive only loses data on that drive.

However, I'm considering building a new "nas" device with a fuller featureset. I also have an VMWare ESX 4.1 server currently with local storage (8x15k SAS drives) that I would prefer to get on shared storage so I can add a second box for clustering.

For this reason, I'm looking at options for a single NAS for my whole house that would serve 3 purposes
1) Fileserver for media
2) Datastore for VMWare cluster (probably either iSCSI or NFS)
3) Potentially using it for higher-performance storage on my desktop (photoshop/lightroom)

Options I was looking at were
-FreeNAS w/ ZFS - I did some testing in my lab and there were some serious show-stopping bugs with the software that made me uncomfortable. It wouldn't even acknowledge a failed drive until i rebooted the system, and similarly wouldn't see a replacement without a reboot. It wouldn't send out email notifications about either one. It appears the GUI is very basic and anything you really need to get done requires the shell. I'd prefer to avoid using cron jobs and custom scripts to perform what I consider required tasks
-OpenFiler - Has the featureset I want, including NFS and iSCSI, but it's basically dead at this point and doesn't have much development going forward. It also looks like I'd have to create additional arrays to augment capacity instead of growing an existing array like (I think) I could do with ZFS.
-UnRaid - don't really see advantages of this over the other options, especially if I want to create a higher-performance tiered storage for photo editing

I would not be running any media related daemons on the NAS itself, and would probably offload those to a VM for downloads, etc.

Any thoughts? Probably would get a norco 20-24drive case and start with ~8-10 2TB+ HDDs. I would also probably put in my 15k SAS drives for a higher performance storage tier

Really just kind of lost with a lot of potential options and want to know if anyone here has faced similar questions...

*Edit* damn that was long - Cliff notes: what platform should I use for Media fileserv + vmware datastore + mapped windows volume for photo editing?
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Looking to Build Your Very First unRAID Server?18