unRAID questions?

1. You rebuild it from the data drives.

2. Yes

3. No. The data drives are independent of the OS drive.

4. They show up as disk shares in Network Neighborhood, by default.

5. Yes, using user defined share names.

6. What about it?

7. No, but reading this same information on the front page of LIME-technology would have.

To clarify - in the current release, each disk drive automatically shows up as its own a Windows-style share, eg \\\ ower\\disk1, \\\ ower\\disk2. You control whether they're read-only, read-write, hidden or not. There's an optional feature called "User Shares", which aggregates the top-level directories across all your drives - eg, \\\ ower\\MUSIC would be the contents of \\\ ower\\disk1\\MUSIC + \\\ ower\\disk2\\MUSIC + \\\ ower\\disk3\\MUSIC, etc.

Unfortunately, this feature is pretty limited in the current release. First, these aggregated "user shares" are read-only - updating content must be done using one of the physical disk shares. Second, once you change content on a disk, you have to manually "re-scan" the user shares for those changes to be visible. User Shares are really only useful at this point for fairly static data - like a DVD collection that only changes every week or two.

Then you lose parity protection until it's replaced, and parity rebuilt.


At present time only works with IDE (aka, PATA) and SATA drives. SATA drives can be external if you want, via eSATA.


No.


Each individual hard drive shows up as it's own share under My Network Places. It's also possible to create "User shares" that, again, show up as individual shares. There are some tricks to get all your storage under one share if that's what you want.


Yes.


Yes. The latest release, called 4.2-beta4 supports full read/write of such shares with various options for controlling which disks a share is permitted to span, as well as a couple different ways to allocate storage from individual disks. The "final" 4.2 release is due out this week.


A nice free nas solution.


If your wedding pictures are stored on an unRAID array with N hard drives, and 2 of those drives go up in smoke at the same time, you stand a (N-2)/N chance of being a better man - but if they were on a traditional RAID-5, you would be staying up all night scanning a bunch of prints.

Thought I saw on the limetech site that USB is supported? I'm not going to argue since you obviously know better than I, but I swore I saw it on one of the info pages or in the forum.

So wait a minute here......

Unraid DOES NOT show up as a single gigantic disc to network pc's? Each drive shows up as its own share?

Then no external USB or Firewire HDD support?


you'd be a "smarter" man by using off site storage like carbonite

but right now from this thread, it is looking more and more like I made the right choice with WHS.

- Josh

If the wedding pictures were of a friend's marriage, he stands a pretty good chance of being the BEST man.

Windows Home Server... You can use any drive, Pata, Sata, USB, Firewire, ect... any size drive, and makes it one gigantic disc, and uses the same parity drive concept as Unraid does.

- Josh

yea its in RTM here, and then its already been released in UK and Aussie land. Should be out soon.

- Josh

eh? same parity drive concept as unraid? Thats the first i've heard of WHS doing this...
What WHS does is basic mirroring/duplicating folders you specify, no parity drive, just duplicates on another drive....not even close to what unraid does....
unless i missed something about WHS...care to provide link?

using wink 2k3 server standard, runs smoothly, only had to reboot/turn off when installing new hardware.

Those backplanes, as well as many other, are mostly all the same, and i got the Athena power ones b/c they were the cheapest and had decent reviews. They work really well and stay cool, my drives are in the 32c to 37c range.

Well, yes, hotswap and also ability to add more drives (i have 5 right now) w/o having to open up the case each time and worry about wires etc, basically set it up one time and forget it.
The other good thing is that only 2 sata power connectors (or 2 molex connectors, or 1 sata 1 molex) are required to be plugged into the back to power the 5 drives....which reduces the wires inside which makes it easier to work inside which makes it cooler inside :P

I've been told that WHS does raid now too, which it did not do or at least was not clear when I was first invited into the beta. I didn't bother with the beta when I read that it was based on mirroring the data and not efficient use of storage like raid.

Maybe they changed along the way. I know I wasn't pleased with mirroring and probably a lot of other people weren't either. Or maybe they listed it wrong from the get go.

I doubt it can actually raid across other connections like USB. Maybe it does, I haven't followed it. If it is using USB in raid then your total performance is limited by the slowest drive, so that's some really poor raid performance but maybe, just maybe it's enough for home use.

Troy

WHS never did and never will support RAID, officially. The Disk Extender concept clashes with RAID fundamentally. That being said, can you "make" it use RAID? Yes. I'm actually doodling, trying to see if that would make any practical sense.

Even though WHS doesn't support RAID officially, the combination of WHS and RAID is rather intriguing. I don't know how many of you are that familiar with WHS, but the way it works is that it partitions the O/S drive into a system partition and data partition. Any disks beyond the O/S drive are used exclusively for data. When you copy stuff to WHS, it actually writes to the data partition on the O/S drive "first" and then uses a delayed write to write the data to the rest of the disks.

Now, imagine you have 20 data disks and an O/S drive (I'm using my setup as an e.g.). I could easily setup RAID 5 volumes for every 5 disks, so that to WHS they would appear as 4 data drives. When I write to WHS, I get the performance of writing to a single drive (without the overhead of writing to a RAID array), and when the data gets moved to one of the arrays because of delayed write, it is striped, and I get the redundancy of RAID. Since it's a delayed write, I wouldn't notice any performance degradation (in theory, as I haven't tried this yet).

The key is that for this to function, you should use RAID volumes ONLY as data drives, not any additional individual drives since with WHS, you never know which drive the data is gonna end up at. The other limitation is that since you are creating RAID 5 volumes, the disks in THAT volume have to be the same size. In theory you should certainly be able to setup a RAID array of five 250GB drives, as well as an array of five 1TB drives, and WHS would see it as 2 data drives of 1TB and 4TB respectively. In such a scenario it wouldn't matter which "data drive" WHS writes to, since both are RAID.

I have to try it..

WHS duplicates the data which means you are paying a 50% penalty on your disk capacity - for every 1GB you add, you need 1GB to duplicate - you always pay a 50% penalty no matter how many drives you add.

unRAID scales down that penalty from the minimum configuration of 3 disks ( 33% max penalty ) to the maximum configuration of 14 disks ( 7% min penalty )

I have a 12 disk unRAID with an HP m8100y w/ 2 Cablecards and an XBOX360. I can stream different HD movies to the PC and XBOX360 concurrently without problems.

yup: http://www.buy.com/prod/1pk-win-home...205631289.html

- Josh

I've said it before - WHS and unRaid BOTH have their place in a home media environment. WHS is great at backups and running SageTV. It sux for storage efficiency. UnRaid is great at storage efficiency/protection but isn't capable of running something like SageTV on it. I store all the stuff I want to 'archive' to unRaid, and let backups and TV shows reside on WHS until I decide what to keep permanently - then off to unRaid it goes.

FWIW, as has been mentioned WHS NEVER has had any type of Raid.

-PGPfan

microsoft still says the same about mce, that it can only be purchased with a pc. We know that's not true, you can get it from many vendors but they are supposed to bundle it with hardware still. Even if it's just a mouse...

Troy

Even if you do raid on WHS don't you still get a 50% loss, so of your two raids you loose the space of one plus more including overhead for each array? Is that right?

Troy

As I said, people are not too familiar with WHS..


WHS will only do duplication if you TELL IT TO. Otherwise it just acts like a JBOD array and just concatenates all your disks and presents them as one big pool. Every single functionality in WHS (like DE, Media sharing, backups, plugins etc) is completely decoupled from, whether a share is set for duplication or not.

When you set a folder to be "duplicated" WHS will store an identical copy on a completely different disk, assuming you have atleast 2 data drives (apart from the O/S drive).

Complete list of WHS add-ins: http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/windows...erver-add-ins/

I just noticed that there is a sageTV add-in, that alone I think would be huge, the utorrent add-in is another big one.

- Josh

I only know what I do about WHS from what I read when I was first thinking about joining the beta. Everyone said it was based on mirroring and that it would back up users other pc's with no setup really needed and keep multiple copies of that data for redundancy.

That's precisely why I never bothered to use my beta code... And I haven't followed that thread since. I have enough to work on.

I didn't want to waste my limited resources for something which was made to sound so "crappy". I don't need the hand holding backups eating my precious limited disk space, nor do I need double copies of that data making it even worse.

Now that it sounds more useful I may give it a shot at some point, but I still don't have time or resources to devote to it now.

thanks Kapone. I suppose my beta invitation is no longer going to do me any good now, if it's for sale and past beta.

Troy