A first look at NZFS and replacing unRAID with NZFS’s Transparent RAID (tRAID) - Page 3

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:27pm

Your missing what I was saying.

I don't fill a drive locally vs over lan for the difference in speed.

I meant that I like being able to take a drive from one machine to another easily and quickly. With Flexraid- any drive can be removed from the pool and read with any windows machine.

No tools. No downloads. Nothing special. Any hot swap or sata or USB dock... or just install it normal. It does not matter.

This is a huge benefit for me.


As for the part your confused about I will clarify.

When I buy a new drive I don't always add it to my pool as an empty drive. Sometimes I slap it into the hot swap of my desktop first (100% tooless takes a second).

All my media originates on my desktop. My server does not even have drive to rip and I don't download with it.

With flexraid it makes no difference if the drive is full, half full, or empty. I can add it to the pool the same. That's a huge benefit. That is what I was stressing I could do.

But- To clarify further adding an empty 3TB or a full 3TB takes the same time to initialize once you already have a bunch of full drives. It basically takes the speed to read your slowest largest drive.. which can be a while but not excessive.

I initialized 20TB with slow green drives in a single night recently.

As for the 100 vs 125mb thing over lan- I don't care about that. Just sometimes I get a drive and run out of space. I use it in my desktop do my ripping then add it to the pool when I have time

Versatility and ease of use was the benefit I was stressing but I did not explain well enough.

This is huge for me.

I have so many drives and systems and I am constantly doing swapping this or that... for mom, or brother or whatever.

I am like the family IT manager.

Flexraid allows me to move stuff around easily without any fuss.

Having your data be read by any windows machine- with or without flexraid is a bigtime value I think.

I don't want to download something special or go through any added hassle to read whats is on my drives.

Your 100% on that. I never talk bad about something I don't like or isn't my product.

I always agree with customer, and then point out the added value of the other product that makes it a better choice.

Something like " I understand Mr Customer- that is a good product. I have had a lot of other customers feel the same way. But what we usually find out is those who first thought that customer are actually the most satisfied and appreciative of all customers because of X and Y and Z of this product - making it an even better choice. Here let me show you...."


But this isn't sales in that traditional sense. Internet geeks will search out the facts and make their own decisions.

My argument was non of anything matters more than the actual performance, price, value of the product.

I am not sure a software raid solution needs to be "sold" to anyone. People that have a need for it search it out, and the most success usually goes to the product with the best ratio of performance, price, features and benefits.

There is not much selling going on.

Your point is correct but secondary. I agree and disagree at the same time.

The real answer is "Nobody" wants to do that.

Nobody. No one. Not anyone.

I find this quote hilarious since there are quite a few people who repeatedly state things as "fact" on AVS (and elsewhere) that is actually theory and almost always unproven, extremely biased and untested.

I would say that many "Internet geeks" are almost the opposite of scientists and are looking for a quick fix answer instead of actually seeking out the "fact".

Most folks who use some sort of NAS at home are running a pre-built unit based on Linux. The folks who use ZFS will not switch to a proprietary, unproven technology. In those cases, "proven" means years of evidence to back up claims, as well as sufficient documentation that can be verified independently. Everything about the sales pitch here screams of someone who has no business being in sales, and the complete lack of serious technical details tells me this is crap, vaporware product. You don't introduce something like this without giving real technical details. If it's not far enough along for that, then quite frankly it's not ready to be talked about as a commercial product, much less as being superior to other existing products.

Enterprise won't ever touch this. They barely even touch ZFS anymore unless getting an all-inclusive solution from Oracle. Most enterprises are going to use systems from EMC, Dell Compellent, or another large company that can provide real support, proven reliability, scalability, and service. Enterprise, also, is all about IOPS most of the time -- something that software-based RAID systems can't provide nearly as well as dedicated hardware solutions. Based on what I've seen of FlexRaid, you may as well be pitching a dos batch script that copies one drive to another. It's just not even remotely in the same league as a real enterprise solution with potentially millions of dollars a day of data flowing through it.

The way FlexRaid got promoted when it abruptly went to a pay-for solution, and the way in which the support transition happened pretty much turned me off to ever using it. I prefer using proven RAID 6 solutions to RAID 3/4-style setups like FlexRaid -- I need all the performance I can get with multiple VMs, media streams, downloads, backups, and other things running constantly on my servers.

That turn of phrase, "vast minority", makes no sense, it is not even figurative enough to be an oxymoron.

If you want to coin a phrase, perhaps try "miniscule minority" instead. Makes sense, and even has some alliteration going for it.

Excellent points.

I would also add since we are inside a HTPC forum (this is a fact, no need to argue. Just look at the web addresss) that performance when streaming and hosting media just isn't as important as reliability and bang-for-buck value. A 5400RPM hard drive alone, which is 80-90% as fast as a 7200RPM hard drive with less heat and energy usage in most cases, is still plenty fast enough for multiple HD streams many times over.

Hope you feel better now.

I'm always happy and cheerful. Aren't you?

Of course.

To my mind, bang-for-your-buck isn't found in paying for a product that is inferior in many respects compared to freely available products that have superior support. If you have to have everything on a Windows box, you're kind of stuck with FlexRaid, but if you can use a dedicated system (or a VM) for storage, something like OpenMediaVault is much more capable.

There are quite a few people who build these systems for more than just media streaming, even if that is one of the main reasons, so performance warrant being discussed. My main beef here, though, like I said, is with the awful way in which this has been announced/presented.

Good points.

Again, being a HTPC forum there are definite advantages to building a Windows based server other than just media playback.

I'll just leave it at that.

I love this thread ^_^

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:31pm

Me too. There's some really good reading in here. I like it! Maybe some of y'all are turned off but my curiosity is piqued and sh*t I use SyncTool as my "RAID" solution. How's that!

File level mirror basically.

I save money on hard drives by using a parity solution. To each there own.

Very good, now that's a proper oxymoron rather than just a nonsense phrase.

Yep, just don't tell anyone -- I might lose my street cred.

Very interesting thread! As some others I'm not really keen on the marketing approach chosen by the OP but that's just a side note. It would be really interesting to see some kind of demographic on the actual potential customer base for these kinds of products. What are the typical users of these solutions? For instance do the opinions presented in this thread represent the large masses?

I for one like to be very comprehensive and detailed when making the purchase decision and building the initial setup. But after that the thing should just work nicely and preferably work as is for years. I invest a lot time making things working as smoothly and automatically as possible. So things like adding a new drive to the storage system or adding a new Blu-ray movie to my library should be super-simple, hassle-free operations. And as I have four children and a wife in the same household the end-user interface for all solution must be also very simple, I always use my youngest (6 years now) as the "ultimate" test; if she can watch her favourite movie or tv-recording without additional help, I have reached sufficient level in usability. And from my current situation comes that I have very limited time to be spent on tinkering on these things...

When I was choosing the storage solution back in 2009 I had basically zero experience on different alternatives for home storage, I also did not have any Linux experience. Fortunately I had a friend who had positive experience on UnRAID so I took a closer look and really liked the basic approach; no striping of data, HW-independent, multi-size disk support, little or no Linux experience needed on initial setup etc. Of course I did the setup in a thorough way:.
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3958.0

As some have pointed the needs for a home storage solution are "normally" very different from business needs. For me it's sufficient that I can have a maximum of 2-3 50Mbps+ Blu-ray streams provided to my clients. Anything else is basically peanuts (music, tv-series, dvds etc.). I add new movies to my libraries at a maximum rate of 5 per week and as I have an old Blu-ray drive with max read speed of 15MBps it doesn't really matter in the big picture. All the IOPS-sensitive stuff like media indexing libraries / data bases are running on media server on a SSD drives. Running on a 1Gbps network my UnRaid system can easily saturate it when reading (>80-90MBps) and even the write speeds reach 40-50MBps. So compared to actual needs the performance could be even considered an over-kill. I would expect any decent storage solution / NAS to meet these requirements.

However I would never ever recommend UnRaid to an non-enthusiast user. Making it running smoothly over years has been nothing like plug-and-play. For instance when I added the 10th drive and a new SATA-controller card at the same, I ran into a mysterious repeating parity error problem (see here). Eventually it turned out to be a faulty Sil3132 sata card which caused random errors when both channels were heavily loaded. I really had to invest a lot of time and all my 20+ year computer experience to solve the problem. To get the most of the UnRAID you really need to take advantage of the user forums and 3rd party plugins. There are companies (like Greenleaf) making pre-built solutions with UnRaid but even those are not suitable (imho) to average users. An non-enthusiast user needs a solution with usability, robustness, simplicity and support in a level comparable to Nintendo Wii.

I would pay considerable amounts of money if I would get the above mentioned features in a true product. Compared to the total cost of my media home (hw, sw, media) the current cost of UnRaid, FlexRAID etc software is almost ridiculous. However I fear that my needs are such a niche that no large enough company will be interested to develop such a product.

You're not alone in wishing for a simple storage solution backed by someone with more resources than unRaid/Flex/RAID (both one man shows as far as I know). Many had hoped Windows storage spaces would fill that need but it hasn't panned out. The next best hope may be the BTRFS file system for linux.

A media server should essentially be invisible to the end user in that it only appears on their PC as one or more drives that they can access. For media playback, they will probably be mapped so anyone can access it via Media Browser, XBMC, or other similar interface. The server itself is only important to the person that sets it up and maintains it. Your children need to be able to initiate playback of the desired media from their remote location. The configuration of the server itself is irrelevant to their needs or usage. As long as the media is available and they can play it from a Windows PC, MAC, media player, or whatever, the OS or UI on the server is of no consequence to them.

For me, I really couldn't care what kind of interface my server has as long as it allows me to store, transfer, and access my media from any PC in the house as well as set up shared drives so that they appear as a single entity. I've got my unRAID server configured with several shares and have them mapped on each PC that needs to access it. I rarely access the server itself via the web UI except to occasionally check that everything is still working the way it should and all of the drives have green dots next to them indicating that they're online and functional. Aside from that, I basically set it and forget it. I really don't care about using plug-ins or other extraneous features. I only need a server that can store and distribute media when and where I want it. The extra features available with FlexRAID or NZFS sound great, but I don't really need them and probably wouldn't use them anyway. Having a single parity drive provides at least some level of protection so if a single drive fails I have a way to recover the data. I've lost terabytes of data before due to operator error, but I've been able to restore every single file I lost through other means.

UnRAID just works for me, and that's all I can ask. Aside from a HPA issue I had when using a Gigabyte motherboard, unRAID has been rock solid and has performed as well as I could expect or desire. The only issues I've had occurred when I tried switching to FlexRAID, as outlined in the tediously detailed post above. One of the great things about unRAID is that it requires absolutely no OS installation. It's literally the only plug and play server solution available. You get the USB flash drive configured, set up the BIOS to boot from it and you're up and running. You can also swap between various PCs without having to reload the OS, as long as the hardware is supported. Upgrades are just a matter of copying the latest files to the USB drive and rebooting the server. Hardware support in unRAID increased to where it now contains drivers for most hardware you'd need, although I'm sure there are still lots of exceptions. OTOH, if it doesn't currently contain support for hardware you'd like to use, if you let the developers know they will probably add support in a future release. UnRAID probably has the best support community between the various software server apps discussed here.

I would definitely recommend unRAID to anyone that wants a server that is simple and easy to set up and use. The key is to use hardware that has already been tested with unRAID. If you had problems with your unRAID server it's probably because you ventured into untested waters with your configuration. I recently replaced the motherboard and CPU in my server due to the HPA issue I was having. I checked through the unRAID hardware forums for motherboard recommendations that had been used successfully and picked one. My system has performed flawlessly as a result. FWIW, I'm using an Asus F1A55-M LX Plus motherboard and an AMD Trinity A4-3400 CPU with 4GB of RAM. I wanted the Trinity CPU so that I wouldn't need a separate graphics card since the motherboard didn't have an integrated GPU. It boots way faster than my old setup and I couldn't be happier. The latest unRAID version 5.0-rc10 has a great web UI and it's easy to use with lots of configuration options.
Edited by captain_video - 2/16/13 at 6:20am

In my mind even the fact that you will have to go through user forums / wiki to find compatible hardware makes it an enthusiast only solution. In my example I was actually using a previously recommended Sil3132 based SATA controller card (low-cost) and I already had one of the same kind installed. I bought the second one from the same source but it turned out to be a newer version and it for some reason had the data corruption problem (could be related to this particular item or the new version). Eventually I removed both cards from the system and acquired Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 and once I got it to play nicely with the existing RocketRAID card and motherboard, everything has been working nicely.

The point here being that with PCs the compatibility between operating systems, motherboards, controller cards and drives and their related kernel/bios/firmware versions can be a total nightmare. You normally can make the initial build using only the recommended parts and even a proven combination of them but as years pass by and you have a need to expand your system, you will be forced to update the system to support available hardware. And this might cause totally unpredictable problems as nobody has most likely tried that particular combination. Of course you could build a complete system at start but that kind of defeats the point of having an easily expendable solution taking advantage of technology development.

The need for a large home based storage is becoming, at least here in Finland, even more of a niche as several online services like Netflix, HBO etc. have started providing "HD" level content. Unfortunately the AV-quality is far from perfect, normal bitrate ranging from 5 to 15Mbps. For an average consumer previously viewing SD content, that is an improvement and they are mostly satisfied. The same cannot be said for a HTPC enthusiast viewing mostly Blu-ray content. I'm very skeptic of these online services ever reaching the cutting edge of AV fidelity (4k being right on the door) so if you want to be a enthusiast you will always be forced to utilise niche on-premise solutions.

Actually read and write speeds to FlexRAID are at the speed of a single drive (don't know about NZFS yet.) And it kind of depends on which drive in your pool FlexRAID is putting the data on. It's not common that you would pull a drive just to read data from it. Reading below I see that it cold be useful to add a drive with data on it like Mfusick does. And I guess if you have a failing drive, you could pull it to try and isolate the drive to see what data you can recover... but that's the whole point of a parity system s that you don't have bother with trying to pull data from a failing drive. It can be rebuilt.

Servers in general tend to be enthusiast machines as your average PC user likely doesn't own one. UnRAID has a compatible hardware list that is pretty easy to reference. You'll notice that the list contains mostly older hardware. That's because most new hardware works fine with unRAID and there's simply too much to list. If you find a deal on new hardware that isn't listed it's a simple matter of performing a search in the forums to see if there's any info on it. It took me all of about five minutes to determine the new motherboard and CPU I was considering was OK to use with unRAID. I would have probably spent far more time researching hardware for a Windows-based server as drivers can be a real nightmare regardless of what OS you're using. FYI - there is information in the aforementioned hardware compatibility list regarding SATA controllers that would have saved you some headaches regarding your Sil3132 controller had you referenced it in advance. This is what's posted in the hardware list for PCI SATA controllers:

Edited by captain_video - 2/16/13 at 1:16pm

Maybe its just because the nature of an unRAID system versus a normal workstation, but I have a terrible time understanding what hardware is "safe" to use with unRAID. The wiki isn't always up-to-date, and its hard to tell when it is and isn't. There's various forum posts that try to summarize things, but those aren't always up-to-date either. As an example, the SIL3132 cards are still listed in the controller sticky as plug-n-play cards. The AOC-SASLP-MV8 seems to generally be the go-to controller, but the firmware supporting >2.2TB drives sometimes creates problems booting off USB sticks. I really don't know what safe choices are for controller cards- particularly when it comes to 2 port cards.

I have to think at least some of the problems are related to card vendors that don't really test their drivers/firmware much under Linux.

While the OP's atitude is a little off-putting, I'll be watching this to see how it turns out. I would be thrilled to be able to migrate off of unRAID. After everything that's happened (and hasn't happened) during v5 development, I have very little confidence in Tom at this point. The OP probably should have picked on the never-ending string of release candidate. Tom is up to 11, with no particular reason to think the final version is just around the corner.

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:30pm

Like I said, if it's not in the wiki then search for your hardware in the forum and see what others have experienced with it. If you can't find any info on it then I would advise looking into alternative hardware until you find something that's been tested and found to work, unless you want to be the first. There's a disconnect with regards to information on the SATA controller cards. The recommended hardware list in the wiki and the ones listed in the forum sticky don't match. The warning about the Sil3132 cards I posted is in the wiki but not in the forum, which I found to be rather unfortunate.

The firmware issue for the Supermicro controllers is only with regards to the non-beta version of unRAID and earlier versions of 5.0-rc. I believe they fixed the problem with 5.0-rc6 and later. If the firmware for the AOC-SASLP-MV8 controller is upgraded to version 0.21 and you're using the latest unRAID beta, you should have full support for 3TB drives (not sure about 4TB drives at this point). I got this straight from one of the unRAID gurus (developer?) in the forum. You really should be using the latest version of unRAID anyway. It's a vast improvement over the latest "stable" version and I've had no problems with it whatsoever. Assassin's server guide for unRAID uses 5.0-rc and not version 4.7, which is the current stable version.