New to unRAID...a few questions...


stevep94

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Hi all,

 

I'm just on the verge of setting up my very first server and having done a bit of reading I'm leaning towards using unRAID as the OS - but I just wanted to check a few things first if anyone can help?

 

The machine I'm hoping to run it on will the following specs: Dell 410 Server with a single quad core Xeon L5630 CPU and 32GB of ECC RAM - first things first, how will this run unRAID??

 

In addition, can anyone advise me on the following:

 

  1. Primary use will be to run the machine as a NAS, Plex server and Torrent  machine, although I'm hoping the specs will allow me to branch out into VM's in the future when I get more familiar with the system - does this sound doable with these specs?
  2. I have 2 x 2TB WD Red drives sat in a Synology NAS at the moment and so I was hoping to be able to slot these into the unRAID system along with a third disk (2TB or larger) for a parity drive as well as a 256GB SSD to use as a cache drive - again, does this sound like the best way to arrange things?
  3. Is there any way to retain the data on my existing drives or will I have to reformat them? (They are set up using Synology's "Hybrid-RAID" configuration at the moment!)

 

Sorry if these are stupid questions but I want to make sure any potential new server will do what I'm looking for it to do!

 

Thanks...

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1.  Very do-able

 

2.  Sounds perfect

 

3.  No, you'll need to format the disks, and sounds like you'll need to copy directly from the Synology to the Unraid box as I doubt those Hybrid-RAID disks are readable in anything other than the Synology tbh.

 

No such thing as a stupid question, all sound pretty good questions to me.

 

Welcome, I've no doubt Unraid will suit you well.

Edited by CHBMB
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23 minutes ago, stevep94 said:

how will this run unRAID

It will run unRAID and a few Dockers very well.  The L5630 is a 4420 Passmark CPU that gets that score by having 4 somewhat slow cores that are hyper-threaded.  So this is an older, slower chip that multitasks pretty well.  Fortunately, unRAID doesn't need a lot of horsepower.  FYI, 32GB of RAM is overkill but there's nothing wrong with that.

 

This setup should handle unRAID and some torrenting, plus a few Plex streams - but only one or two if transcoding is required.  With all that memory and a decent number of threads (and I'm assuming VT-x support) you should be able to play with some light-weight VMs.  VT-d support is unlikely and that's not a lot of horsepower so you'll be limited with what you do with VMs, though.

 

39 minutes ago, stevep94 said:

I have 2 x 2TB WD Red drives sat in a Synology NAS at the moment and so I was hoping to be able to slot these into the unRAID system along with a third disk (2TB or larger) for a parity drive as well as a 256GB SSD to use as a cache drive - again, does this sound like the best way to arrange things?

Yep, sound good - but see below.

 

40 minutes ago, stevep94 said:

Is there any way to retain the data on my existing drives or will I have to reformat them? (They are set up using Synology's "Hybrid-RAID" configuration at the moment!)

No, but here's an idea.  You can "mount" the Synology from your unRAID box over the network.  Put a new disk in the unRAID box, copy the data over, and then bring over the Synology disks (they'll be formatted when you add them to unRAID).  Reference the Community Applications plugin and the Unassigned Devices plugin to make this happen.

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First of all, thanks for the super-quick replies!

 

34 minutes ago, tdallen said:

No, but here's an idea.  You can "mount" the Synology from your unRAID box over the network.  Put a new disk in the unRAID box, copy the data over, and then bring over the Synology disks (they'll be formatted when you add them to unRAID).  Reference the Community Applications plugin and the Unassigned Devices plugin to make this happen.

 

Good to know there is a way to do this - although, if I buy another 2TB drive and then am able to mount and copy from the Synology, this will be being done without the security of a parity drive - is this safe enough? (assuming I'm understanding the function of a parity drive correctly essentially as a "fault-checker" in terms of writing the data to the new drive??)

 

8 minutes ago, tdallen said:

Well cool, that gives the OP the option of trying some hardware pass-through.  Given the age of that setup, though, I still suspect that it will more appropriate for light weight VMs or as a learning platform.

 

I'm certainly not going to run before I can walk - I've got no experience with any of this so it's predominantly to learn with initially - which brings me to another question, what is hardware pass-through exactly??

 

Thanks again for the help!

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Doesn't look too bad for unRaid. 4 2.13Ghz.cores, hyperthreading, vt-x,/vt-d. The downside of this processor is likely heat and energy efficiency. The motherboards may also have limited features - for example maybe no sata-3, maybe no PCIe 3.0, certainly no NVMe. But I expect you can get a lot of function running. Setting up a Windows VM with video passthrough should be possible with a little luck. I wouldn't expect high frame rates on current games on it, but I think "normal" VMing (meaning daily driver with light gaming) would work well, esp with a good amount of ram. I run s Haswell that is roughly twice as fast, and I rarely push the CPU anywhere near 100%. Now if you're transcoding 10bit 4K HEVC for your 3 year old iPhone, or mining for bitcoin, that's probably not in the cards.

 

I can't believe how cheap that CPU is! Decent motherboards are probably hard to come by. But this could be an excellent value for a very viable unRaid box IMO.

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3 hours ago, stevep94 said:

what is hardware pass-through exactly??

In traditional virtualization the hardware is virtualized and made available in the VM as a software implementation.  That's very flexible but slow.  Hardware pass-through passes a physical piece of hardware directly into the VM - say a video card or blu ray drive.  This is the capability that makes the unRAID desktop replacement or gaming VM possible. Great stuff but it requires an enthusiast level of interest.

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Right, I think I'm in business - picked up a 2nd hand Dell T410 server this afternoon that has the Xeon L5630 CPU, 32GB ECC RAM and actually includes a RAID controller too! (as well as the guy I bought it from has thrown in a more powerful, albeit less energy efficient CPU, a Xeon E5640 - which I'm guessing I can just use to replace the L5630 if speed becomes an issue?)

 

Now before I get ahead of myself could anyone give me a bit of info as follows:

  1. The power lead for the machine has a 13 amp fuse in it but the guy I bought the machine from said I should probably put a 5 amp fuse in there - does this sound right or does it depend on what components I am going to be running??
  2. He has included a RAID controller that has a battery backup - is this needed for running unRAID?
  3. I intend to transplant my two 2TB WD Red's to give me 4TB of storage space but appreciate that I need a 3rd drive to serve as the parity drive - but initially I wanted to get the server up and running on just a single drive so I can copy the contents of my Synology NAS over the network - because of this I'm assuming it's a waste to get anything over 2TB (a 3TB drive is only £25 more) because the parity drive has to be at least as big as the largest storage drive - am I right in saying you can't/shouldn't copy data from one drive within the array to another??)
  4. Is there any reason to use anything more than a 4GB or 8GB flash drive for the unRAID OS to boot from?

That's all I can think of at the moment - all help is appreciated!

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Your characterization of the E5640 sounds right - a little more powerful and less energy efficient. 

 

I don't understand the recommendation for a 5 amp fuse - I'd look at the factory specs and run whatever Dell recommends. 

 

A hardware RAID controller may or may not be useful.  First, you generally don't use a hardware RAID controller with unRAID in RAID mode.  Instead, it is useful if it can be flashed into IT or JBOD mode, passing individual disks through to unRAID.  unRAID is a software RAID implementation that needs access to the individual disks.  Some hardware RAID controllers can be used this way, some can't - depends on the model.  There are rare cases where you'd actually use a hardware RAID controller in RAID mode, but I'd recommend saving that discussion for another day.  By the way - you definitely should run unRAID on a UPS.

 

You are correct that the parity drive needs to be as large as, or larger than, the biggest data disk.  You're also correct that 2TB drives aren't a great buy right now... You can copy from one disk share to another disk share, though, if you want to do a two part migration.  There are some rules about this - check back if you go that route.  There's no reason to use a big flash drive, 4GB or 8GB is fine.

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1 hour ago, tdallen said:

A hardware RAID controller may or may not be useful.  First, you generally don't use a hardware RAID controller with unRAID in RAID mode.  Instead, it is useful if it can be flashed into IT or JBOD mode, passing individual disks through to unRAID.  unRAID is a software RAID implementation that needs access to the individual disks.  Some hardware RAID controllers can be used this way, some can't - depends on the model.  There are rare cases where you'd actually use a hardware RAID controller in RAID mode, but I'd recommend saving that discussion for another day.  By the way - you definitely should run unRAID on a UPS.

 

The motherboard looks to have 6 SATA ports (labelled A to F) - given my relative inexperience is there much of a benefit in working the RAID controller into the mix? (the model is a Dell 33002 if that helps??)

 

Regards a UPS - I could do without the added expense at the moment - although the Dell machine itself does have two PSU's - one of which I believe is intended as a backup power supply! (I appreciate this won't help if there is a power cut, but better than nothing??)

 

*edit*

 

I can't seem to find out what the recommended fuse in the plug should be - the only reference I've even see is a page on a website that says it applies to the Dell T410 saying "The Poweredge T410 power supply has automatic input voltage detection"!?!?

Edited by stevep94
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36 minutes ago, stevep94 said:

the Dell machine itself does have two PSU's - one of which I believe is intended as a backup power supply! (I appreciate this won't help if there is a power cut, but better than nothing??)

Maybe better than nothing, but not especially relevant.

 

If you have a power cut, unRAID will not be able to flush the disk buffers, and it will not be able to update the flash to mark that it was safely shutdown. Then, on the next power up, it will assume that parity may be compromised and will begin a parity check.

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I don't want to disagree that a UPS is very helpful in a place you lose power often, but for me, who loses power an average of maybe once a year, it just isn't economic. I bought one and accidentally "lost power" twice just getting it set up! And it protected me only once before the batteries needed replacing, a cost nearly as high as a new ups. And I never used it again. My experience with data corruption after power outages has been (knock on wood), excellent. Never lost any data. I do have a good surge protector. And I don't tweak certain settings. I have to endure the occasional parity check, but I can live with that at most twice a year. And I weave those into the monthly parity check cycle.

 

So don't lose too much sleep lacking one, unless you are subject to lots more power outages.

 

This is 100% my personal opinion, many will disagree! 

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I agree an UPS is a little ways down the list of things to insure your server stays in good health. Your frequent recommendation of backplanes for your disk connections is a better recommendation than getting an UPS, for example.

 

And I'm sure there are some people that have an UPS, but aren't doing other things that would be more important, such as setting up Notifications on their server.

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LOL just stumbled on this thread and love some of the unusual questions posed! New challenge, I like it!

2 hours ago, stevep94 said:

he power lead for the machine has a 13 amp fuse

 

Honestly don't understand the purpose or question, makes me think you're outside the US or in some situation outside the 99% of the rest of us. who typically have 15 amp or 20 amp breakers (fuses are obsolete tech) so perhaps you're in a older home, built before the 1960's? More details please.

 

2 hours ago, stevep94 said:

RAID controller that has a battery backup

 

@tdallen already answered this best. /agree!

 

2 hours ago, stevep94 said:

I intend to transplant my two 2TB WD Red's to give me 4TB of storage space but appreciate that I need a 3rd drive to serve as the parity drive

 

correct! honestly in your situation, I'd just recommend a 8TB EasyStore (again if you live near BestBuy, if not, get any USB drive large enough) and make a manual backup. That manual backup on a USB drive that you can store off-site will give far more protection than a parity drive given the small capacity of your array and the little gained by added parity.

 

2 hours ago, tdallen said:

By the way - you definitely should run unRAID on a UPS

 

This is really what attracted me to this thread cause I don't see this recommended enough so I was happy to see @tdallen suggest it. For the first 4 years I used unRAID I did so without a UPS. Power outages where I live, very infrequent, much like what @bjp999 describes maybe 2-3 times a year.  I've never lost data over a power outage. It's a hard recommendation to make, I appriecate it because I've long wanted to explore it more on these forums, just never knew how. Plus it's a UPS, it's a hard recommendation cause it's boring to talk about. It's like talking about life insurance, seriously  what a conversation killer!

 

My largest homelab purchase in 2016 was a UPS system, $800+ in a UPS and extra battery packs to give me some ungodly 8 hours of run-time for my entire 42U rack in my basement: PoE WiFi, cable modem, router, PoE switch, PoE IP cameras and unRAID. Why do I do this?

 

Cause restarting this entire system of devices and the VMs and Docker containers within became too burdensome whether I caused the outage or it was unplanned. The sequential order.. cable modem... router. PoE switch... etc... ugh painful. Parity checks for a unplanned shutdown, UGH!, they only getting longer with greater capacities. I'd spend that $800+ again, it's been awesome not having to care or be impacted by this as I was before.

 

Is it right for you? It's hard to say, its very specific to the application, most unRAID's in pure form as serving as a NAS, don't require it IMHO, I don't htink your setup requires it again IMHO. But it's a too little discussed topic for those reasons. No one's going to get a like or praise for recommending it. but @tdallen thanks for bringing this up. 

 

 

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16 minutes ago, Lev said:

Honestly don't understand the purpose or question, makes me think you're outside the US or in some situation outside the 99% of the rest of us. who typically have 15 amp or 20 amp breakers (fuses are obsolete tech) so perhaps you're in a older home, built before the 1960's? More details pleiase.

 

Possibly somewhere like the UK where all plugs contain a fuse (usually 1A, 3A, 5A or 13A, appropriate for the device using the plug) as well as the whole electric circuit having a breaker in the distribution unit.

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Thanks again for the replies guys!


To answer a few queries, yes I am in the UK - the fuse in the plug I'm using is a 13 amp fuse - simply not sure whether it need to be this high?? (can't seem to find much in the way of info on the Dell website and T410 manual!)

 

Anyway, a further update is that I've managed to get my server up an running by following the video tutorials and I was just about to set up the array when I noticed that although the SSD I intend to use as a cache drive was showing up, the hard drive I've got in there isn't!?!? (I've just put a small 160GB HDD in there to play about with before I'm ready to put the proper drives in there!)

 

Anyway, it occurred to me that I'm not entirely sure I've got the HDD plugged in correctly (and this may be the stupidest question yet!) - there is a strand of cables that come from the mechanism that is attached to the PSU - these are labelled "HDD0" to "HDD5" and the connectors cover the power connector along with the SATA part of the hard drive - and at the end of the 2 "strands" there is a larger connector that was slotted in to the RAID controller card (I took it out thinking I didn't need it and could just connect the drives without!).... I know this is probably a ridiculous question but I assume this needs plugging in somewhere??

 

I'm used to desktop builds where you have a power cable from your PSU and then a SATA cable that goes into the motherboard - I presume server connections are different given that the connectors cover both the power and data connections?

 

I can't see anywhere on the motherboard for the larger connection on the end to go so does this mean I need to put the RAID card back in and use that somehow??

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49 minutes ago, Lev said:

Honestly don't understand the purpose or question, makes me think you're outside the US or in some situation outside the 99% of the rest of us. who typically have 15 amp or 20 amp breakers (fuses are obsolete tech) so perhaps you're in a older home, built before the 1960's? More details please.

 

In the UK all our appliances are fused and our plugs all have three pins, earth, neutral and live (although in some the earth plug isn't active and is made of plastic, such as double insulated appliances)  In general domestic fuses are either 3A, 5A or 13A

 

No idea what the correct fuse is for the server though.....

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2 minutes ago, stevep94 said:

Thanks again for the replies guys!


To answer a few queries, yes I am in the UK - the fuse in the plug I'm using is a 13 amp fuse - simply not sure whether it need to be this high?? (can't seem to find much in the way of info on the Dell website and T410 manual!)

 

Anyway, a further update is that I've managed to get my server up an running by following the video tutorials and I was just about to set up the array when I noticed that although the SSD I intend to use as a cache drive was showing up, the hard drive I've got in there isn't!?!? (I've just put a small 160GB HDD in there to play about with before I'm ready to put the proper drives in there!)

 

Anyway, it occurred to me that I'm not entirely sure I've got the HDD plugged in correctly (and this may be the stupidest question yet!) - there is a strand of cables that come from the mechanism that is attached to the PSU - these are labelled "HDD0" to "HDD5" and the connectors cover the power connector along with the SATA part of the hard drive - and at the end of the 2 "strands" there is a larger connector that was slotted in to the RAID controller card (I took it out thinking I didn't need it and could just connect the drives without!).... I know this is probably a ridiculous question but I assume this needs plugging in somewhere??

 

I'm used to desktop builds where you have a power cable from your PSU and then a SATA cable that goes into the motherboard - I presume server connections are different given that the connectors cover both the power and data connections?

 

I can't see anywhere on the motherboard for the larger connection on the end to go so does this mean I need to put the RAID card back in and use that somehow??

 

Photos may be helpful.... 

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Sorry, I know I'm not explaining things overly well!

 

Here are a few pics - one of the connector at the end of the HDD connector strand coming from the PSU, one of the RAID card I pulled out and one of my small HDD plugged in with the connector plugging in to both the power and data connections.

 

 I really hope this is clear - basically I thought by plugging one of the connectors into the HDD it would magically appear - but on thinking about it, they aren't connected to the motherboard - so maybe I have to put the RAID card back in? (I've never got involved with RAID before so have literally no idea about it!)

20170920_223656.jpg

20170920_223641.jpg

20170920_223605.jpg

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Quick update on this - I put the RAID card back in and now the system finds the HDD no problem and I've created the array - of course now my issue is that when I start adding other drives, will the RAID card mess things up somehow??

 

Sorry, this has turned into more of a hardware advice thread as oppose to relating to the unRAID software!

Edited by stevep94
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Right, I've got unRAID working OK but I'm still not sure that I've got the HDD and SSD installed/configured correctly - to this end I've taken a few photos that will hopefully explain what I've done!

 

This first pic is the RAID controller card that I originally took out of the machine - having no experience of a hardware RAID device, I assumed I could just connect the HDD's to the motherboard without: (am I right in saying that the connection is a "SAS" connection - if so does this matter?)

 

20170921_195534.thumb.jpg.c1cfc4f38f58b9ec63bce944a99c09e4.jpg

 

Next is a pic of the SSD placement (not fixed in yet as I'm just playing around with this!) - this is powered with what I would call a "traditional" power connector (as you would have in a desktop PC) and connected to the motherboard with a SATA lead, plugged into "SATA A" on the motherboard

 

20170921_195545.thumb.jpg.8824c599ece3c2ebf78c844250d2fc11.jpg

 

Next is the  connected 160GB HDD (in the top bay) - the connector that you can hopefully see below attaches to both the power and data connectors on the back of the drive (I've turned the next connector in the chain upwards so you can see the two elements) - this cable comes from the PSU (actually there are two but I'm only using one) and ends with the connection to the RAID card as seen above in the first pic.

 

20170921_200825.thumb.jpg.9dc4572d3d6a87c643a39600ac6f4ec9.jpg

 

Lastly here is a pic of the board as a whole so hopefully someone will be able to tell me whether I've wired this up right or dangerously wrong!!!

 

20170921_195613.thumb.jpg.e9762123ccdca6f5dd96ac078502f03a.jpg

 

As mentioned at the start of the post, with the wiring as you can see above I've managed to boot into unRAID, set up my array (albeit with just the one drive) and set my SSD as a cache drive - what I'm worried about is with the RAID card in the mix, will things go pear-shaped when I try to put more than one HDD in there? (I've got 2 x 4TB WD Red's inbound that should be with me tomorrow!)

 

Many, many thanks for anyone willing to give me a hand with this - I feel like if I can get the hardware set up properly then I can crack on and learn about the features of unRAID at my own pace!

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Those are SAS disks connect to an old SAS controller, it's certainly limited to 2TB size disks, you'll want to connect your 4TB disks on the onboard SATA connector, which may or may not correctly detect >2TB disks, if it doesn't you can always buy am HBA, like an LSI 9211-8i or similar.

Edited by johnnie.black
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