UnRAID question

[CiXel]

Just a heads up, there a since been a 'cache' drive implemented which allows you to define a separate cache 'write' drive that bypasses the parity check and improves write time.

[Marbles_00]

Yeah that was available in the 4.3-beta 4 stage. I didn't know this until recently. Is it available in the free version, and how do you set it up? I assume you wouldn't require a large drive for that. Would a small gig IDE drive work good for this purpose? I guess I'm going to do some searching.

*EDIT*
Found the faq:
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.p ... ache_Drive

[scottw]

Yeah basically you want a drive big enough to hold whatever you will be copying at one time. I believe it transfers all the data at night to the array..I think you can specify the time. I do know that your data is not "protected" until it is transferred to the array but does make the copying to the unraid server alot faster. I have not tried this yet but plan to in the future.

My unraid server has been going strong for a little while now and I upgraded to the Pro license and am loving it. I have 11 250gb drives so plenty of space for everything I need.

[Marbles_00]

Right on Scott. Pretty funny, I've seen your posts over on the UnRAID forums...I'm like "Hey, I know that guy from somewhere else". Good to see your up and running. You should start your own google site and document your projects man. Be neat to see what you've been able to accomplish.

I'm almost there. Just saving up for some drives. Everything else is ready, and I've been playing around with it with some old IDE drives for the past little while. There's a Seagate 750G drive for sale at the local computer shop for $99.99 cdn, so I'm looking at those now. Don't know if I'll ever get up to the Pro version, but I will eventually be looking at the Plus version in the furture...but I just want to see how it all starts off. I also have to run an AC feed to the final location. I've already done the LAN, and since it was DIY built, I decided to run some integrity tests (continous PING) and speed test using NetStat. Pretty solid. Then it will be time for the next project...upgrade to GigLAN.

[scottw]

You should start your own google site and document your projects man. Be neat to see what you've been able to accomplish.

Not a bad idea...maybe I will. Let me know if you need any help with your setup...it would be nice to give to people who have helped me in the past

[Marbles_00]

Let me know if you need any help with your setup...it would be nice to give to people who have helped me in the past

Sure, you can donate to the "Marbles" charity Yeah I know...all of a sudden I have a tune in my head....goes something like..."Dreamer...nothing but a Dreamer..."

[Marbles_00]

Scott, have you upped your network to GigLAN? I've done some speed tests and integrity tests and placed some charts on my google site (UnRAID section in the log), just wondering how this compares to others? It is 10/100 LAN right now, not GLAN. And the drives in the UnRAID I know are the bottleneck as I'm testing with older IDE drives, so there is a caching issue I think.

[scottw]

I am still at 10/100 with SATA drives and have had no problems at all. I have streamed at least 2 movies at a time before with no hiccups, my movies are ripped and and converted with Handbrake at a bitrate of around 2000.

So, so far I have not seen too much of a bottleneck on my part but copying up to the unraid server is slow but I can handle that.

[scottw]

Hey Marbles,

I just looked at your google page on Unraid...looks like everything is going good

What do your drive temp's look like??

[Marbles_00]

Unfortunately those drives are so old, that I don't think they supported SMART technology. Not sure when SMART started, but as said, I'm testing with a 6.4G parity, and a 3.2G data. If I'm wrong, how do you "turn on" SMART support for those drives. I think the 6.4 is a Maxtor, and the 3.2 is a Quantum. Man I'm so looking forward to actually getting some proper drives for the system.

[scottw]

Duh...I didn't even think of the drives not being "SMART". I do remember a post about someone having to turn on SMART on the drives but I guess that would only be available if the drive had it. Let me see if I can find it.

[scottw]

Wow that was fast

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#Why_is_a_temp_not_showing_for_a_drive.3F

[Marbles_00]

Yeah I found that link as well, I'm going to have to look more into it tonight.

[BaddaBing]

For those of you that are looking for a FREE, Windows based alternative to UnRAID take a look at FlexRAID.

FlexRAID™ a.k.a Flexible RAID a.k.a RAID F™

FlexRAID protects data and not disks. In fact, FlexRAID has no concept of disk as it can be made to work with all data sources and targets residing anywhere on your local computer, network, or the net. This paridigm shift is quite powerful. This means you can recover from both disk failures and data lost (or data access lost) due to certain user errors and viruses!

For such needs, the high cost and high risk of traditional RAID solutions is simply not justified.
High risk? Well, yes. With stripped RAIDs (like RAID 5, 10, 0+1, 50, etc.), you lose ALL of your data if anything happens to the RAID volume beyond its fault tolerance.
With FlexRAID, the only thing you lose beyond its fault tolerance are the faulted data sources.
That means, if you have 5 disks and only one parity (tolerance of one), and you lose two disks (one fault beyond tolerance), the data on the remaining 3 disks is fully readable/writable.

FlexRAID gets even more interesting in that it supports multiple parity configurations (multiple fault tolerance). Only you decide how much fault tolerance you need.
In theory, you can have an infinite number of parity (fault tolerance) configurations.
In practice, however, you should not have more tolerance than you have source disks.
That is, if you have 5 disks, it won't make sense to have more than 5 parity configurations.
At a one-to-one source/parity ratio, you are essentially mirroring the data.

FlexRAID supports an infinite number of sources for one parity configuration.
That means you can have one million hard drives in your system and only need one additional hard drive for parity.

Because, FlexRAID works on the data, source data disks and/or the parity disks need not to have the same size.
For instance, if you have 10x disks of any size(s) in your system, but the largest data size (actual written data) on any one of the disks is 100GB, you can use a 100GB hard disk (or multiple smaller disks amounting to 100GB) as the parity target.
Consequently, most user will use their old cheap disks as parity targets and reserve the larger drives to host the data.
Of course, the parity target disk can be larger than the source data disk, but that would be just wasting space.

You can learn more here: http://www.openegg.org

[Marbles_00]

Buddabing, have you switch to a FlexRAID system now? Or are you still using UnRAID?