[TugboatBill]

Think about your total costs before you eliminate unraid. The free version allows 2 data and one parity drive. Using 2TB drives that's approximately 200 BR rips. At $10/per you're looking at $2000 in BR purchases before you have to pay for unraid.

I have a "middle" license which supports 6 drives (5 data) and it cost ~$70. 10TB of data = ~$10K in media purchases + $700 for the drives. The $70 cost for the software is nothing.

BTW - Good luck buying BRs for $10 each. Realistically you'll average nearly $20 US each, which makes the cost for unraid even less of a consideration.

[poofyhairguy]

At $700 for the drives, The $70 cost for the software is nothing.

That is the true calculation that proved to me UnRaid was worth it. Don't count media costs in such evaluations...

[kizer]

Feel like watching Video

http://revision3.com/systm/unraid

[vinistois]

I have just suffered my 2nd failure with unraid.

I'm done!

I'm in this thread looking for other options. Think I'm just going to get an off the shelf NAS box.

Any recommendations?

[ibixat]

I have just suffered my 2nd failure with unraid.

I'm done!

I'm in this thread looking for other options. Think I'm just going to get an off the shelf NAS box.

Any recommendations?

Well i suppose the question that begs to be asked is "What was your 2nd failure with unraid?" Did a drive go bad? If so and you were running with parity then you should have lost nothing without parity you lost just that drive, was it 2 failed drives at the same time, if so then you lost contents of just the failed drives and the others should be intact. If it was drive failures that has nothing to do with unraid itself and unraid makes recovering from drive failures pretty easy.

Was there some other type of failure you encountered with the system? Could you share what that was since this is a discussion about NAS Solutions and just saying "i had a problem with xxx solution" isn't very useful to the discussion without details.

[vinistois]

Honestly most of it has been hardware related.

What I gathered from Unraid was, take your existing hardware & some random hard drives, and unraid will turn it into a solid NAS.

I had a seemingly good motherboard on hand, a low power mini-dtx board with lots of sata ports. Unfortunately, that board had some design flaws which meant it was useless as a storage system. Admist the troubleshooting, I lost all my data. Unraid just didn't provide any kind of feedback into the issue, but since I am new to unix, I probably just didn't know the right syntax to find out.

So I found a good solution, a popular and recommended SAS card. At the same time, I got a better case, and some brand new hard drives. So I was set. Things went well and I eventually moved to the latest beta to run all the new features it offered. Things have been great that way for about 3 months, and I have since near filled a huge array with all manner of data.

Out of the blue, the server is dead. No feedback, no lights, no web interface. Rebooting would bring it back, but was never able to rebuild the array. Reverted to latest stable release, and it booted up, and I was able to start the array. Rebuilding parity caused a crash. Upon reboot, the shares are there, but they are all empty. No data. Possible causes named so far are a bad hard drive, bad ram, or a bad sata interface. Hmmm awesome so now I'll just build a whole other $600 box and try again? no thanks.

I'm a busy guy, I don't have time to master unix, and you really need to if you really want to manage an unraid server. The web interface only takes you so far.

My plan is to get a NAS box, maybe Patriot Javelin S4, and just run sab on my htpc, using the javelin as its target.

[a5ian300zx]

Hi,

I have a Qnap TS-509 Pro (which i have upgraded to 4gb ram) and use my main PC with windows 7 using allegro NFS software (which i have installed a 8 bays hotswap connected to areca 1220 raid controller) 10TB in raid 5 and on the Qnap i have 7.5 TB in raid 5.

Qnap is brilliant, I have had it for over 2 years now and no issue and have it mapped to my PC and the transfer rates a really good over the gigabit network.

I read that unraid was the way to go for media storage the below thread from a different forum will give you an idea.

http://www.mpcclub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27599

a5ian300zx

[ibixat]

Yeah using the beta was kind of taking a risk but it shouldn't have failed as catastrophically as it did, I can understand why you'd be unwilling to continue down that road though. I actually had bad ram in my unraid at first, took me a while to figure it out even though if I had just let memtest run overnight it would have found it the first time, then my network card was not happy with the linux drivers etc. I have it all working great now though.

One thing I am wondering if you tried was booting the machine with a regular linux distro and seeing if you can access your drives, they are regular reiser filesystems on each drive so you should not lose any data if you're able to mount them in another machine to extract the data. If you haven't done that yet you may want to before setting up the new system, may be faster than trying to recover the files another way.

I do appreciate you explaining what happened, it really can help someone out who was thinking of going that route to make sure all their hardware is in good working order and compatible with the unraid software.

[jhsrennie]

I have a Qnap TS-509 Pro ...

We use QNAPs, mainly TS-410s, for server backups and we must have nearly 100 of them scattered round the UK. We find them very reliable and the performance is OK - it's about as good as you'll get without a proper (expensive!) hardware RAID controller.

They run a proper Linux so you can telnet in and install and run software, though the processors aren't enormously powerful so there is a limit on what they'll do.

JR

[a5ian300zx]

We use QNAPs, mainly TS-410s, for server backups and we must have nearly 100 of them scattered round the UK. We find them very reliable and the performance is OK - it's about as good as you'll get without a proper (expensive!) hardware RAID controller.

They run a proper Linux so you can telnet in and install and run software, though the processors aren't enormously powerful so there is a limit on what they'll do.

JR

I know i love mine, the 509 version if you read the Qnap forum some have upgraded the processors to dual core processors, I have just replaced the ram with Kingston high performance ram, but when you open the some 509 pro they have still two additional slots for for further two external sata drives (though i have not tried this).

I can remote switch/WOL my drives and pc from anywhere - brilliant

a5ian300zx

[cfg9000]

On the commercial side of things there's Synology Hybrid RAID, which has worked really well for me. Incredibly power efficient, and you can add/grow disks as you please. Their boxes come set up for numerous other types of servers, such as FTP and iTunes. Definitely a price premium, though.

[Xaranx]

Unraid is awesome, don't listen to the guy who put a beta on his server with no backups, and claims you have to "master unix" in order to use it

I started with Unraid over a year ago, started with the free version, and once it had been running for a couple months and started running out of space I forked out for the full version, it's worth it. I haven't had to do a single thing to it, beyond shutting it down to copy two files, to upgrade the server version. And don't worry about a "limited" version, everything is present and just like a normal unraid setup. Except active directory or some crap most people don't use. The only time I haven't been able to do everything I needed through the web interface was the initial copying of the files, I wanted to do it the fast way so I used some addon to mount the drive within unraid and copy the files over there.

There also plenty of plugins and fun stuff to do if you want to mess around with it and maybe learn something in the process.

[DrPepper]

just a brief question, when running unraid, is it than possible to have other software running on it , like mysql or oscam ?

thanks

[ibixat]

just a brief question, when running unraid, is it than possible to have other software running on it , like mysql or oscam ?

thanks

Yes, I have airvideo, sabnzbd, couch potatoe and sick beard running on mine. I know mysql is available don't know what oscam is.

[struisje]

+1 Unraid

I had a Intel SS4200-e Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo Home Server running WHS.
It ran fine for about 2 years. Then I had a power failure and after that the server wouldn't start up anymore. I removed all the drives and connected them to my pc and all the data was intact.

I decided to switch to unraid (now I had the chance).
Installation wasn't that easy on a headless server with only a PCI-e X1 slot but I found a good adapter and PCI-e X1 video card and was able to install unraid without any problems.

Now running 6 TB for a month without any problems, it's very easy to use and it is faster than WHS on the same machine.