Unraid

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Genom
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Unraid

Post by Genom »

So, just saw the video from LinusTechTips about the 7 gamers, 1 CPU video, and it seems unraid has come a long way since the last time I looked at it. Does anybody run V6 of it? I am probably going to pick up some drives and toss them into the old Z800 and try it out, but it looks like I could setup a really nice all in one server and consolidate 3-4 random machines I have at home right now in 1 box.
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Post by psypher »

Genom wrote:So, just saw the video from LinusTechTips about the 7 gamers, 1 CPU video, and it seems unraid has come a long way since the last time I looked at it. Does anybody run V6 of it? I am probably going to pick up some drives and toss them into the old Z800 and try it out, but it looks like I could setup a really nice all in one server and consolidate 3-4 random machines I have at home right now in 1 box.
I run Unraid. I'm pretty sure the main reason they went with Unraid was due to how simple it is to get it up and running as compared to a standard Linux install. They could have done the same with another Linux distro. With that said, yes it has come a long way. Much more than a simple NAS. With it's Docker support and VM Host support, you can do a lot with it.
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Post by Genom »

Thats the thing I liked. I know I can :p :p :p :p with Linux for a couple weeks and get the same result, but this seems neatly packaged and pretty straightforward.
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Post by FlyingPenguin »

I'm still way back on version 4.7 on my 8TB box. If it works, don't fix it, so I've never upgraded. Also that box runs on a piddly Turion II Neo 1.5GHz CPU, so not sure I want to bog it down with a newer version. More than fast enough for 4.7.

Been running it on an HP Proliant N40L mini-server since I bought it from B-man1 here back in 2012. It's on it's 2nd set of drives. Originally it was populated with 4x1TB drives but when 2TB drives became available for a reasonable price, I replaced them.

Rock stable. I also like the fact that even if something went terribly wrong, you can connect the individual drives to a USB interface and just copy the files.

Sooner or later I need to build a custom beast that can support more than 4 drives.
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Genom
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Post by Genom »

I have that old beastly Z800 that just needs drives, and since the 4TB's are cheap, it's a simple thing to try out anyways. I like the containers a lot. Since the wife has gotten used to the Roku, I dont need the HTPC anymore, and the other comp is more powerful, has a bigger case, and makes less noise.. And plenty of horsepower to run some VM's as well.

May even have a couple old 256GB SSD's to setup as a cache pool.
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Post by psypher »

FlyingPenguin wrote:I'm still way back on version 4.7 on my 8TB box. If it works, don't fix it, so I've never upgraded. Also that box runs on a piddly Turion II Neo 1.5GHz CPU, so not sure I want to bog it down with a newer version. More than fast enough for 4.7.

Been running it on an HP Proliant N40L mini-server since I bought it from B-man1 here back in 2012. It's on it's 2nd set of drives. Originally it was populated with 4x1TB drives but when 2TB drives became available for a reasonable price, I replaced them.

Rock stable. I also like the fact that even if something went terribly wrong, you can connect the individual drives to a USB interface and just copy the files.

Sooner or later I need to build a custom beast that can support more than 4 drives.
I don't think it would bog it down, it's still pretty light, but the web interface is so much better in version 6.
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Genom
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Re: Unraid

Post by Genom »

Thread from the dead!

My old share/NAS is getting long in the tooth and I decided to fuck it, and build a new NAS box. Got a Ryzen 1600 since it's got lots of cores that Plex loves,, some 4TB drives, and a couple SSD's for cache. Trying to decide on Unraid or Freenas as both are capable of running VM's and such, since I want the box to host Sonarr, SABnzbd+ and Plex. My only caveat with regards to Unraid is outdated info and wondering how it's write speed is. I intended 1 SSD as cache, and another one as a VM host disk to put the dockers and whatever VM's I decide to run on it. Some shares would probably bypass the cache drive to get a little more security on the files transfered like photos and such. Whats the speed like today with that? I've seen videos showing only 50MB/s writes to uncached shares thats kind of disapointing. I get the whole parity process involved with the pooling scheme they run. Is this what I can expect?

Unraid looks nice and simple to setup, Freenas seems to have a more secure and faster, if more finicky, filesystem. Anybody play with both recently that has an opinion?
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Re: Unraid

Post by FlyingPenguin »

I know write speeds are miserable on my old 4.7 UnRaid box. That's my only complaint.

Still running strong but when I move to the new house I'm probably going to buy a 4 bay Synology, but I need to do some research. I just need a straight NAS for media files. I have Win7 Pro box I use as a file server.
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Re: Unraid

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FlyingPenguin wrote:I know write speeds are miserable on my old 4.7 UnRaid box. That's my only complaint.

Still running strong but when I move to the new house I'm probably going to buy a 4 bay Synology, but I need to do some research. I just need a straight NAS for media files. I have Win7 Pro box I use as a file server.
I top out at about 120-130 MBs or so on mine (without cache). It's not really designed for fast writes as its more for serving up media while not having to have all the disks spinning. If you want to have fast writes with it, then your option would be to utilize an SSD cache drive. You'd be writing to it and then a scheduled mover takes care of moving it to the main array. There's not backup of the cache, so if you'd want that backed up as well, then a pair of SSDs in RAID1 would take care of that. I'm never really in a hurry to write fast. I just start copying and it finishes when it finishes. Some stuff gets dropped in the cache drive because I use it for completed downloads which get picked up and sorted. But larger files, 20GB+ I write to the share directly.

Full disclosure, I have a beefier than entry level unraid setup.

Supermicro X11SSM-F
Xeon E3-1230 v6
With 3x LSI LOGIC SAS 9207-8i
About half my drives are 4TB HGST NAS drives and the other half are older Seagates.

There's other similar software like FreeNAS. You could also give StarWind Virtual SAN a spin, they have a free version.
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Re: Unraid

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Oh mine's much slower. Dunno if it's because it's v4.7 or because the weak hardware. I get 60 Mbit reads but writes are a terrible 15 Mbit. Not that it really matters - when I write something to it I drag and drop and walk away.

Heck that thing has been running reliably since 2012 and never lost a drive. But yeah, time to upgrade.
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Re: Unraid

Post by Genom »

Psypher, are you running more than 1Gb ethernet? I got a decent CPU/MB combo for what it will do, but only have a single Gb link at the moment. All my devices are single link as well so no real use to bonding links and such for me, but my Win based share now just about maxes the pipe at 100MB/s (that a single link will only go about 113MB/s)

Has the 6.3 changed the way the parity system works enough that you dont get massive slowdowns?

This is why I figured I was finding outdated benchmarks.
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Re: Unraid

Post by psypher »

FlyingPenguin wrote:Oh mine's much slower. Dunno if it's because it's v4.7 or because the weak hardware. I get 60 Mbit reads but writes are a terrible 15 Mbit. Not that it really matters - when I write something to it I drag and drop and walk away.

Heck that thing has been running reliably since 2012 and never lost a drive. But yeah, time to upgrade.
Oh dam, yeah that's old. I'm running 6.3.5. A lot has changed since 4.x.
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Re: Unraid

Post by Genom »

Well, to answer myself, files up to 4GB go full line speed without the cache, but once it hits 4GB, it slows way down to 35MB. This is keeping in mind it's a brand new array, and parity rebuild is running on it now.

Frankly, this is fine with me. I will likely do a big dump of my 60GB of family photos and a few GB of important docs, but other wise, everything else can run through the cache drives. I was going to leave 1 unassigned, but the plugin is flaky with the latest RC it seems, and this is the recommended version for Ryzen CPU's, so yeah. Just use the default mirrored cache drive and not worry about it.

Considering all this extra crap coming from a few random HD's in a windows box shared over the network, I think I'll manage :D

Now the fun part of migrating my plex, sonarr and sab crap over.
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Re: Unraid

Post by Genom »

In further news, Ryzen may have not been the best choice. Still havent been able to hit 24 hour uptime due to system lockups. I am on a RC version since I need to run 6.4 for teh Ryzen compatible kernel, but it's not been great so far.

Ugh, I really hope I dont have to exchange the MB/CPU
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Re: Unraid

Post by psypher »

Genom wrote:In further news, Ryzen may have not been the best choice. Still havent been able to hit 24 hour uptime due to system lockups. I am on a RC version since I need to run 6.4 for teh Ryzen compatible kernel, but it's not been great so far.

Ugh, I really hope I dont have to exchange the MB/CPU
Yeah, Ryzen support may take a bit. Who knows how long that will be.
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