[Icerat]

Hi

I have allot of data I want to move to a dedicated server and finally decided to take the plunge and build myself an unraid server, running out of room on the main machine, share centre (1TB Mirrored) and various external USB drives. Ideally i want to make the server as quite and cool as I can.

The Sever will store: Family Photos (lots), Kids homework, My Documents, ebooks, CD images, Ripped blu-ray / DVD (720p and 1080p to stream to XBMC) and anything else that can be stored.

I've been looking at the following and would appreciate some advice (haven't got a massive budget, baby on way).

Case: Antec P182 - Owned, Spare case
CPU: AMD Sempron 145 2.8GHz Socket AM3 45W 1MB L2 Cache OEM Processor £25.98
MB: Asus M5A78L-M LX V2 Socket AM3+ onboard VGA 8 channel Audio mATX Motherboard £36.39
Crucial 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1066MHz Memory CL7 1.5V Unbuffered None-ECC £21.06
PSU: Antec 520W High Current Gamer Modular PSU £67.41
USB: Lexar JumpDrive FireFly 4GB USB Flash Drive £4.99

HD: Currently have the following full of data i want to migrate to new server:
466GB Seagate ST3500418AS (SATA)
1863GB SAMSUNG SAMSUNG HD204UI (SATA)
1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (SATA)

Total inc vat: £155.83


Came across (Future x2for more drive space, no idea if there any good):
3 Drive 3.5in Trayless Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane (3x 3.5 for 2x 5.25)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Drive-3-5in-Tray...319&sr=8-3

[GortWillSaveUs]

If you want to save a little money,..you won't need 4GB of Ram,..I say that but I also have 4GB.B
But everything else seems good.

You'll love this system.
One word of advice,...don't upload everything until you test the system for yourself.
In other words,..upload data that doesn't matter if lost.
Simulate a dead drive,...unplug one of the drives, and put in a replacement drive in its place.
Then power on and give yourself a sense of ease as the drive is rebuilt.

Also, make sure you understand the different types of share you can create and why you'd use one of the other.
You wouldn't want movies split across 2 drives for example.

Good luck on the system and the baby!

[Icerat]

Hi Gort
Thanks for the reply, still waiting for my bits to arrive but been doing a bit of reading so i have an idea where to start.

Been trying to get my head around user shares but not having much luck.

Once I get my bits Ill have a 2tb parity with 3x 2tb data, 2 of the 2tb data drive will be moved from my main machine into the server once the data copied off.

Any chance you could dump down User shares for me so that i can get my head around it.

Ideally I want the following shares set up for XBMC
TV Shows
Movies_SD
Movies_HD
Music

And the following just for access from my other machines:
Backups
Other folders

I cant seem to get my head around the level thing, I don't really want bits of my TV shows / Movies scattered across drives, could create all sorts of playback issues (TV Shows are mostly stored in RAR sets).

Was thinking on Disks 1 and 2 having the following

TV_Shows
Show
Season
Episode
show.rar1
show.rar2
etc

Movies_HD
Movie
Movie.mkv (or rar-set)

Disk 3 would be for music and backups etc

To see If I understand this correctly say I map the share TV_Shows and drop a Show to in it in the relevant show / season directory it should get copied in whole to either disk 1 or 2.
What I don't want happening is that the whole shows rars are scattered across disks 1 and 2, Am I understanding this correctly?

Now if I got the above correct (BIG IF) what happens when disks 1 and 2 are nearly full, is it a simple matter of putting a 4th disk in and creating the TV_Shows, Movies_SD and Movies_HD folders and when I drop a show / movie into the relevant share it automatically gets copied to disk 4?

[Mick1152]

You can set up the shares to span across all disks, or exclude some, or specify which specific disks. I currently have two 3TB drives in mine for all my media, Movies, TV shows, Music, Pictures and also my ROM collection. I don't worry about what is going where. I use the high water method so it copies to the first disk until it has less than half free, then it copies to the next disk. Gives me enough spare room to move things around if needed later on and, keeps even the largest files from being split across multiple disks.

I have an additional 2TB drive I've excluded from my media shares and it has a share that is just used for backups from my various systems.

Your method is fine. unRAID is pretty damn flexible to let you do it how you want. in your case, once disks 1 and 2 are nearly full, just add an additional drive. If you have those shares specified to specific drives, then add the new drive to the list of specified drives and you are done. I set mine up so my media shares are allowed to use all drives EXCEPT my backup drive. Then any new drive I add to the array will automatically be available for my media shares to use.

[Icerat]

Hi and thanks for the reply.

Wow didn't expect it to be that easy create the share tell it what drives to use and let it do its thing cool. Especially like the ability to add a new disk and tell a share to use it and it will carry on adding to the new drive.

So Once I have set the user shares TV_Shows, Movies_SD, Movies_HD, Music I take it I just navigate to them on the network and set up folder structure how I like:

TV_Shows
Show
Season
Episode
show.rar1
show.rar2
etc

Movies_HD
Movie
Movie.mkv (or rar-set)

Will have to have a read up on the Allocation methods, but from what I've skim read High water sounds the most logical.

I'm still having trouble getting my head around the whole Split level thing. I have allot of TV Shows with different numbers of seasons / episodes, I don't want the rar's for various episodes spread across the disks ideally I want all the rars on same disk.

Thanks Again
IR

[Mick1152]

Yeah, I personally just have a movies share with all of my movies in there. I don't use individual folders for each movie since all my movies are mkv or avi.

My TV shows share has a folder for each TV show and then all my episodes are in that folder.

If I was going to do it all over again, I'd have probably at least broken up my HD and SD movies into separate folders. Took me a while to figure out some way to export a list of all my movies and their resolution so I could have a list of movies I need to upgrade to HD eventually. Having them in a separate folder would have been so much easier and would have been kinda fun to slowly watch the number of movies in that folder dwindle and disappear completely over time as I upgraded them.

As far as your RAR concerns, I can't be of much help as I really don't understand it. I assume your RAR's contain the actual file for your episode but, why keep them in RAR's? I'm sure there must be some advantage but I don't know what it is. Sorry, I'm a bit of a noob on this topic.

[GortWillSaveUs]

Yeah,...what Mick said,.. ++1

[Icerat]

So what would be the best level to put a slip on, was thinking at the season level on TV_Shows so that all the season stay together.

[GortWillSaveUs]

So what would be the best level to put a slip on, was thinking at the season level on TV_Shows so that all the season stay together.

That sounds about right,..
Although what I do is, know the size of the folder contents I want to copy over,..and copy directly to the mapped drive that has the most free space to accommodate.
I still need to put my grubby hands on things and do them manually.

[Icerat]

That sounds about right,..
Although what I do is, know the size of the folder contents I want to copy over,..and copy directly to the mapped drive that has the most free space to accommodate.
I still need to put my grubby hands on things and do them manually.

Hehe,

Will have to have a play before I get my main drives, I have 2x 1tb drives I could play with until I get the 2x 2tb needed to get me starred at end of the month.

If I can help it I want to just dump and forget lol and let unraid distribute accordingly, but I'm not adverse to getting my hands dirty either, hence why I want to get my unraid server running / set up sweet as.

Whilst I'm playing do I need to have a parity drive set up, as I could also mess around on a couple an old Maxtor 200gb(PATA) and 250gb(SATA) drives I have laying about collecting dust, this saves me pulling out the 2x 1tb drive out my share centre (One of my Mirrored back up locations).

[Mick1152]

Nope, don't need a parity drive while just playing around setting it up, but, obviously, you won't have any protection.

[Icerat]

Hi
That's great to hear

What happens if i mess up my config / install can i just format the flash drive and start again, or can i just delete a config directory and start again?

If i have data on the drives and my flash drive messes up or i screw up unraid is it a simple case just putting unraid back on the flash drive and then pointing it to the drives again and i have access to my data again?

Sorry for all the questions, just noting them down as i think of them, ill probably get the Plus version of Unraid once my data's transferred.

[GortWillSaveUs]

Your license is keyed to that specific flash drive.
You can copy the contents of the flash drive to another location,...this way if you mess the original up,..just copy over the originals.

Again,...not something I remember to do myself.
Do what I say, not what I do.

[Icerat]

Cool will remember to do that, what happens if the flash drive fails then, do you have to buy another license key?

[GortWillSaveUs]

Cool will remember to do that, what happens if the flash drive fails then, do you have to buy another license key?

I see that question coming up once in a while on the Lime Technologies forum.

Their stance is: This is a common question and our 'unofficial' response has always been this: just email me the circumstances of how your Flash died and the GUID of your new Flash & we'll send you a new key.

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See this thread for more details.