Starting out, few questions

[Sabot]

I am just starting out with Unraid and Linux. I decided before investing in additional hardware, I just use what was on hand. I am using my old TS 140 which sports a E3-1225v3 at 3.2GHz. 8GB of server memory and a number of drives: 

 

Parity: 3TB Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001-9YN166

Parity 2: 1TB SAMSUNG SpinPoint F3 HD103SJ

Disk 1: 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B1

Disk 2: 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1

Cache: 128GB SAMSUNG SSD 830 Series S0WENYAC201316

Flash: 32GB ScanDisk UltraFit

 

During setup, I went with the default arrangement of the drive array as shown above. I understand my drives are not the preferred drives for this project, it's what I had on hand sitting around. I don't even recall why I would have purchased a WD Green but I have it. This is for home use or better to say a special project of mine. I am interested in learning about how Unraid can work for my light storage needs. I have been using a single bay (2TB WD Red WD20EFRX) Synology NAS for years. Basically for digital receipts and mostly old archive items that I most likely need to be deleted for they are so old!  Most of the space is for a few ISO's and family photos. I am using less than a one TB at this time. All of the drive's SMART are showing long life for these drives. 

 

I am thinking:

 

1) I like to remove the drive in Parity 2 and make it available i.e. Disk 3? If this makes sense, how do I go about it?

2) Remove the WDC Green from the array and put that in the Synology DS120. 

3) Move the WDC Red to the array. Issues or benefits with putting it into the mix? Should I leave it in the DS120?

4) In the coming months, I am thinking of changing out the drives to WD Reds. My thoughts would be to move the WD Red 2TB that I currently have to the Parity and purchasing 3 WD Red 1TB drives. Thoughts? 

5) My children are in college and I would like to have a simple backup method that they can do via the net to the NAS. One Dell and one Apple laptops. Is this possible?

 

I am totally open to suggestions. 

 

Thank you for taking your time to read this!!!!

 

Have a wonderful day!

Michael

 

[Frank1940]

Answer to question 1: Stop the array.  Set the parity2 disk to 'no device.  Restart the array.  You will have to check a box to allow it to do this.   Done.

 

Answer to question 2:  See the instructions here:

  http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#Remove_One_or_More_Data_Disks

 

I suggest you take a deep breath and think all of the disk reconfiguration  through a bit.  There is no real advantage to going to WD Reds with unRAID.  Keep your current parity drive. It is fine.  Now, I would not be buying any new drive that is not a large as your parity drive.  Reason, if you do, you will probably eventually be replacing a working drive just because it is too small.  When you do that you have just pitch away the cost of the first purchase and rebuy that drive's capacity in that second purchase.  (I don't believe that drives less the 4TB are going to get cheaper in the next five years.  In fact, they may get more expensive...)   If cost at this time is an issue, buy one 3TB drive and buy another one when that drive is nearly full.  Right now 2TB are approximately $83 each, 3TB is $115 and a 4B is $121.  You can do the math and see what the cost is per TB. 

 

For question 4, you will need to provide a bit more information.  Where is your children going to be when they do this backup? in your home, where they have access to your LAN, or away at school...

[trurl]

57 minutes ago, Sabot said:

My thoughts would be to move the WD Red 2TB that I currently have to the Parity and purchasing 3 WD Red 1TB drives. Thoughts? 

 

If you don't need much storage yet, then I would suggest you consider having fewer and larger drives than you are considering. Fewer drives mean fewer problems, and larger drives are often cheaper per TB than smaller drives. You can add drives as needed later.

[tdallen]

1 hour ago, Sabot said:

My thoughts would be to move the WD Red 2TB that I currently have to the Parity and purchasing 3 WD Red 1TB drives. Thoughts?

You'd have to give me a 1TB drive for free and pay me to put it into my server.  Life's too short and quality 3TB drives can be had for $100.

[Sabot]

1 hour ago, Frank1940 said:

Answer to question 1: Stop the array.  Set the parity2 disk to 'no device.  Restart the array.  You will have to check a box to allow it to do this.   Done.

 

Answer to question 2:  See the instructions here:

  http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#Remove_One_or_More_Data_Disks

 

I suggest you take a deep breath and think all of the disk reconfiguration  through a bit.  There is no real advantage to going to WD Reds with unRAID.  Keep your current parity drive. It is fine.  Now, I would not be buying any new drive that is not a large as your parity drive.  Reason, if you do, you will probably eventually be replacing a working drive just because it is too small.  When you do that you have just pitch away the cost of the first purchase and rebuy that drive's capacity in that second purchase.  (I don't believe that drives less the 4TB are going to get cheaper in the next five years.  In fact, they may get more expensive...)   If cost at this time is an issue, buy one 3TB drive and buy another one when that drive is nearly full.  Right now 2TB are approximately $83 each, 3TB is $115 and a 4B is $121.  You can do the math and see what the cost is per TB. 

 

For question 4, you will need to provide a bit more information.  Where is your children going to be when they do this backup? in your home, where they have access to your LAN, or away at school...

 

 

 

Silly question, I have the Samsung now as an unassigned device. Trying to figure out how to add it to the array.

 

Remotely, away at school. Something that is simple for them to do on their own. 

 

Edited April 26, 2017 by Sabot

[Sabot]

Here is a snapshot of the Main screen. On the unassigned drive, I moved the slider to the right for the Auto Mount and Share. Will it take time to have this drive mount to Disk 3 position or is there something else that I am missing? 

 

Thank you so much for your assistance!!!!

 

Michael

[trurl]

9 minutes ago, Sabot said:

Here is a snapshot of the Main screen. On the unassigned drive, I moved the slider to the right for the Auto Mount and Share. Will it take time to have this drive mount to Disk 3 position or is there something else that I am missing? 

 

Thank you so much for your assistance!!!!

 

Michael

Mounting the disk Unassigned will not add it to the array. You must stop the array and assign it to disk3. Then when you start the array unRAID will clear and format it.

[SnickySnacks]

I haven't tried this as we back up to the CrashPlan servers, but...

 

For the backup, I might suggest that using the CrashPlan docker is probably the easiest since you should be able to have the clients just backup directly to your server and it should function the same as backing up to the CrashPlan servers, except free. The backups are still encrypted and all that on the NAS.

 

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_To_Another_Computer_You_Own

 

They don't mention it, but presumably you'd want to go to Settings –> General –> Configure, and switch the Default backup archive location to something that makes sense for your array.

Edited April 26, 2017 by SnickySnacks

[Sabot]

Awesome! Thank you all so much for your quick and precise instructions!!

 

I will hold off purchasing any more HDD's. I have another 4TB in my gaming computer and another 4TB for my security cameras which I am thinking of moving to the NAS. Which HHD's would you recommend me moving to the other computers? 

 

If I add various sizes of disks to the array, will I be able to use their full storage? Example:

- Parity: 3TB (Could I keep the 3TB even if I use two 4TB as disks in the array?)

- Disk 1: 4TB

- Disk 2: 4TB

- Disk 3: 2TB (Red)

Total: 4 disks  

Storage size: 10TB

 

I could move the 1TB's to my gaming and security boxes. I don't store much on them anyways. 

I have been reading some have concerns using an SSD as a cache drive. Should I be concerned?

 

Edited April 26, 2017 by Sabot

[trurl]

52 minutes ago, Sabot said:

Awesome! Thank you all so much for your quick and precise instructions!!

 

I will hold off purchasing any more HDD's. I have another 4TB in my gaming computer and another 4TB for my security cameras which I am thinking of moving to the NAS. Which HHD's would you recommend me moving to the other computers? 

 

If I add various sizes of disks to the array, will I be able to use their full storage? Example:

- Parity: 3TB (Could I keep the 3TB even if I use two 4TB as disks in the array?)

- Disk 1: 4TB

- Disk 2: 4TB

- Disk 3: 2TB (Red)

Total: 4 disks  

Storage size: 10TB

 

I could move the 1TB's to my gaming and security boxes. I don't store much on them anyways. 

I have been reading some have concerns using an SSD as a cache drive. Should I be concerned?

 

No single drive in the array can be larger than any of the parity drives.

[Frank1940]

55 minutes ago, Sabot said:

If I add various sizes of disks to the array, will I be able to use their full storage? Example:

- Parity: 3TB (Could I keep the 3TB even if I use two 4TB as disks in the array?)

- Disk 1: 4TB

- Disk 2: 4TB

- Disk 3: 2TB (Red)

Total: 4 disks  

Storage size: 10TB

 

As @trurl said, the parity drives must be larger than any of the data drives.  HOWEVER, you can use one of the 4TB as the parity disk and then put the 3TB (old parity) disk to replace of the smaller disks. you can find the procedure here: 

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#Replace_a_Single_Disk_with_a_Bigger_One 

 

Look for the line that begins:  " A special case exists when the new bigger disk is also bigger than the existing parity disk." 

[Sabot]

Question with regards to the parity drive, should the best 4TB be used? Or does read/write speed does not matter?

 

Here's an example, I purchase a new HDD to replace the parity drive in the future. Say I go for a WD Gold WD4002FYYZ 4TB. Would there be any benefit one, to even consider that drive and two would my array benefit if the WD Gold being the parity drive?

[trurl]

6 minutes ago, Sabot said:

Question with regards to the parity drive, should the best 4TB be used? Or does read/write speed does not matter?

 

Here's an example, I purchase a new HDD to replace the parity drive in the future. Say I go for a WD Gold WD4002FYYZ 4TB. Would there be any benefit one, to even consider that drive and two would my array benefit if the WD Gold being the parity drive?

Reads are unaffected by parity speed. Writes to the array write 2 disks at the same time, the single data disk for the file and parity. Writes proceed at the speed of the slower of the 2 disks. So there is no advantage of a parity disk that is faster than your data disks.

[Frank1940]

There is no great advantage to having a super fast parity drive as the speed of most operations is determined by the speed of the slowest drive involved in that operation.  In fact, if you 'watch' the speeds on a parity check, you will find that it slows down as the smaller drives reach their inner tracks and then speeds back up when the check has moved beyond the capacity of those drives.  Obviously, when you are setting up your system, if you have two 4TB drives with different speeds, you would most likely pick the faster one for the parity drive.  But I would NOT swap out a parity drive just because I got a faster drive at some later point.  (I would say that 90% of the unRAID users don't go looking for fast drives, they want reliable ones at a reasonable cost!) 

 

One more quick comment.  Larger drives tend to faster than smaller drives because the data density is higher. 

[Sabot]

Here is my final setup. 

 

Next question, a UPS. Never had one for the home but it appears I will need one for this box running Unraid. A quick search on Newegg, came across one that I feel comfortable with pricing and features: APC BR1000G (Found it on B&H for $107.12 shipped) I am assuming if I want to use the PowerChute Personal Edition software, I will need to install a Windows VM? I have never done a VM before, but if this is the case then I might just do so. My ThinkServer is not a powerhouse, so until writing this I never intended to do any VM's. 

 

I can't thank you for all your assistance!!!

Have a wonderful weekend!

[bonienl]

unRAID has built-in support for UPS systems, specifically APC. No need to run a Windows VM.

 

[Frank1940]

2 hours ago, Sabot said:

Next question, a UPS. Never had one for the home but it appears I will need one for this box running Unraid. A quick search on Newegg, came across one that I feel comfortable with pricing and features: APC BR1000G (Found it on B&H for $107.12 shipped)

You will have to go to 'Settings'   >>>   'UPS settings'     and set the ' Start APC UPS daemon: ' to "yes".  As I recall, most of time the settings will be correct to get recent UPS models running.  However, it is best to 'fine tune' things to your environment.  You want to make sure that 'Time on Battery' is setup for your situation.  I know that in my case that if the power is out for fifteen seconds, it will be out for a minimum of two hours and no UPS is going to last that long.  (Especially after the battery is a year or so old.)   A second consideration is that you have it set to run for thirty minutes and the power comes back after twenty-five minutes,  and then goes back out ten minutes later, will the UPS have enough reserve to run for another thirty minutes?  

 

I personally have all of my computers and servers set to shutdown after thirty seconds on battery!  And in more than twenty years, I have never had the power come back in less than an hour after a UPS initiated shutdown.  (When I lived out in the country, we use to have twenty second outages on a sunny summer afternoon when there wasn't a thunderstorm with 250 miles.  I suspected that the power line crews were knocking down local circuits so they would not have to make a service connection to a 'live' high voltage line!)