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assassin · 2012-09-13, 20:30

(2012-09-13, 20:26)mr.sparkle Wrote:
(2012-09-13, 16:13)assassin Wrote: if one drive dies all the other drives are instantly accessible with any windows machine --- you just plop it into a hard drive dock or attach it to an empty sata port on your motherboard and you can access all of your data like you would on a normal drive or external drive.
True with unRAID

Was talking about compared to hardware raid which was referenced earlier.

jangjong · (This post was last modified: 2012-09-13, 20:36 by jangjong.)

(2012-09-13, 19:19)assassin Wrote: Except for the fact that unRaid is $70 for up to 6 drives and $120 for up to 21 drives. So for me I would have spent $120.

With FlexRaid I spent $40 for WHS2011 and $60 for FlexRaid (or $40 if you don't want pooling) making it actually a cheaper option.

This is true since FlexRaid is on sale. But the regular price is $99.99. If it wasn't on sale, total would be $140

Also, not every user is looking to build media server that holds more than 6 drives. My co-worker has been trying to scope out a small unraid server with mini-itx board and case. For him, $70 would be all he needs.

so again, it really depends on what the user wants. i dont think either one is significantly better than the other. if it was, then there would only be one product everyone uses

assassin · (This post was last modified: 2012-09-13, 20:41 by assassin.)

That's the regular price of Flexraid despite what the website says. It has been that price for 6 months now.

And while your co-worked might want less than 6 drives now his needs could change in the future as they often do with storage.

prostuff1 · 2012-09-13, 20:48

One benefit that I can think of for unRAID over FlexRAID is that you can still get to ALL of your data even when one drive has failed.

If a drive fails or is kicked out all other drives in the array and the parity drive will work together to virtualize the failed drive. There have been a couple of times i have watched movies, had a drive decide to die, but the movie kept on playing. I only realized after the fact from my email alerts about a drive having been kicked out of the array.

mr.sparkle · 2012-09-13, 21:13

(2012-09-13, 20:48)prostuff1 Wrote: i have watched movies, had a drive decide to die, but the movie kept on playing

I really doubt the parity drive can seamlessly open and present the dead drive's currently open file. There'd probably be a spin-up delay, at the very least.

assassin · 2012-09-13, 21:19

(2012-09-13, 20:48)prostuff1 Wrote: One benefit that I can think of for unRAID over FlexRAID is that you can still get to ALL of your data even when one drive has failed.

If a drive fails or is kicked out all other drives in the array and the parity drive will work together to virtualize the failed drive. There have been a couple of times i have watched movies, had a drive decide to die, but the movie kept on playing. I only realized after the fact from my email alerts about a drive having been kicked out of the array.

I don't understand this statement.

Without restoring from the parity you can't get to the data on your failed drive. With either you can access the data on the other drives though.

mr.sparkle · 2012-09-13, 21:22

(2012-09-13, 21:19)assassin Wrote: Without restoring from the parity you can't get to the data on your failed drive. With either you can access the data on the other drives though.

the parity drive takes over the role of the dead drive, everything works as before but it's no longer protected against another dead drive.

aptalca · (This post was last modified: 2012-09-13, 21:32 by aptalca.)

Actually, on unraid you can still access the files on a dead/disabled drive. It simulates it by calculating from parity and other drives on the fly. Although it is not recommended due to the risk of losing data if another drive fails right then, it is still possible to access the full data.

I myself went with unraid because it is an extremely lightweight os. Very little resource requirement. I preferred not to run a (bloated and relatively resource hungry) win installation for a media server. I have an unraid server running off of a flash drive and it is left in the basement. I no longer go down there :-)

EDIT: mr.sparkle beat me to it

jangjong · 2012-09-13, 21:35

dang. i didnt know unraid could do that. that's interesting lol

learning something new everyday.

teaguecl · 2012-09-13, 22:04

(2012-09-13, 19:50)assassin Wrote:
(2012-09-13, 19:35)teaguecl Wrote: Personally I use Unraid because it's more like a appliance - it stores my media, and nothing more.

Mine does that too.

Both are fine options. But to say that FlexRaid is not as likable because its more flexible and not as appliance like is just silly.

Did I say FlexRaid was "not as likable"? No, you made that up.
Did I say FlexRaid was less flexible? No, in fact I said the opposite by pointing out that you can do other things besides store your media on a Windows FlexRaid.
Did I say FlexRaid was "not as appliance like"? No I did not. I stated that I like to use mine as an appliance, and UnRaid was a good fit.
In fact, I complemented both solutions equally. I don't appreciate being attacked - especially for things I never said. In this thread and others, you've been overly aggressive in criticizing UnRaid. If you're going to do so, at least get your facts straight.

assassin · 2012-09-13, 22:04

Interesting. Honestly I have no idea if FlexRaid can do that as well.

**gabbott** · (This post was last modified: 2012-09-13, 22:15 by gabbott.)

(2012-09-13, 21:32)aptalca Wrote: Actually, on unraid you can still access the files on a dead/disabled drive. It simulates it by calculating from parity and other drives on the fly. Although it is not recommended due to the risk of losing data if another drive fails right then, it is still possible to access the full data.

This "feature" caught me by surprise some time back. On my unraid setup I had a faulty sata connector and one of my drives was down for a little over a day. I noticed it while I was streaming a bluray rip from the drive that wasn't working, this was a bluray rip that I moved to that same drive while the drive was down. It was completely transparent to me and I was initially very confused how that was happening. So you can read and write to a failed drive (well technically you are just reading and writing updated parity info to the parity drive).

mr.sparkle · 2012-09-13, 22:42

(2012-09-13, 22:12)gabbott Wrote: So you can read and write to a failed drive (well technically you are just reading and writing updated parity info to the parity drive).

Don't think so. A failed drive doesn't get touched (and it would even get mounted as read-only on a reboot). Writes for the failed drive go on to the (previous) parity drive. No "updated parity info" is being written. Make no mistake, there is no longer a parity drive.

**gabbott** · (This post was last modified: 2012-09-14, 00:52 by gabbott.)

(2012-09-13, 22:42)mr.sparkle Wrote:
(2012-09-13, 22:12)gabbott Wrote: So you can read and write to a failed drive (well technically you are just reading and writing updated parity info to the parity drive).
Don't think so. A failed drive doesn't get touched (and it would even get mounted as read-only on a reboot). Writes for the failed drive go on to the (previous) parity drive. No "updated parity info" is being written. Make no mistake, there is no longer a parity drive.

There still is a parity drive, when you add back the existing drive or replace it, it gets rebuilt from parity. The parity drive always acts as a parity drive, it never becomes a drive with your data on it, you have to replace the failed data drive, there is never a "previous" parity drive (unless your parity drive dies). If you were to ever write data directly to a parity drive, you'd ruin the parity info that is needed to rebuild the failed drive. True you don't have any type of redundancy if another drive fails but you can certainly read and write to a share on a drive that is missing. The data on the parity drive along with the other remaining drives is how it can recreate the data from a failed drive on the fly if there is a missing drive (it's still acting as a parity drive). It also does the same when writing to it (hence the parity drive would update itself accordingly if you were to write to a drive that is not present) it isn't writing the actual data to the parity drive, it is writing parity info in order to recreate the data. As I said, I saw it first hand and that was indeed the behavior.

One can test this easily, pull the power on a drive while an unraid server is running. Then write something to that drive. Power down the system and reconnect the power to that drive, when unraid comes back up it, rebuild that drive and the data you wrote to it while it was missing will be there on that rebuilt data drive.

Check this post here where one of the senior members over at the unraid forums says it's also the case:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.p...4#msg53424

**Hitcher** · (This post was last modified: 2012-09-14, 00:45 by Hitcher.)

(2012-09-13, 21:32)aptalca Wrote: I myself went with unraid because it is an extremely lightweight os. Very little resource requirement. I preferred not to run a (bloated and relatively resource hungry) win installation for a media server.

That's what made me choose unRAID for my newly purchased HP ProLiant N40L Microserver (£100 cashback deal Wink

) plus I found a $10 discount code (KEY10) for unRAID plus.

I also run their SABnzbd, SickBeard, and CouchPotato v2 packages.