New User - A few questions

[FraxTech]

So I'm about 5 days into my 30 trial run with unRaid and I'm really finding it fascinating and hoping to switch my home server to it if I can figure out a few keys things...

 

First, my current home "server" is just an old i5-3570k (not currently overclocked) system, 4-core/4-threads, 16GB RAM.  I'm wondering if this will be enough to run a Plex server (in a docker as I understand, but I haven't investigated this yet)and 1 Windows 7 VM that is only used for video transcoding and backing up other systems?  I don't really care too much about speed, I usually set the transcoding to run at night, but I don't want it to take days.  Right now (using it as just a straight Win7 system), it takes about 45 minutes to transcode each hour of video, which is fine.  If not, I do have a small budget for an upgrade in hardware, but nothing too crazy.

 

Second, I tried last night to create a disk that was larger than my largest hard drive to be passed to the Win7 VM, but when I started the VM, the drive didn't show up?  Is it possible to create a virtual disk that is larger than the largest physical hard drive (i.e. I have 10x2TB Hard drives (2 parity, 8 storage) and I want to create one 5TB drive on the Win7 VM, is this possible?).

 

I'm sure I'll have more questions as I continue to play with unRaid, but these are the ones that are vexing me now.  Thanks for any help you can give!!

[tdallen]

Hello and welcome.

 

The i5-3570 should be fine for unRAID and Plex.  It will be able to serve up several streams and handle 2-3 streams that are transcoded.  You'll want to give yourself the ability to play around a bit with the Windows 7 VM before settling on a configuration.  Many folks who have VMs running at the same time like to pin the VMs to certain cores.  In your case that might not be best since you only have 4 cores and plan for the VM to be busy in the off hours - leaving the cores shared may be the better approach.

 

Unfortunately you can't create a vdisk greater than the size of the largest physical disk.  The vdisk needs to live somewhere and unRAID doesn't support a single file that spans physical disks.  The better approach is to keep the vdisk small and pass a user share into the VM, giving the VM the ability to access the array for storage.

[FraxTech]

23 minutes ago, tdallen said:

Hello and welcome.

 

The i5-3570 should be fine for unRAID and Plex.  It will be able to serve up several streams and handle 2-3 streams that are transcoded.  You'll want to give yourself the ability to play around a bit with the Windows 7 VM before settling on a configuration.  Many folks who have VMs running at the same time like to pin the VMs to certain cores.  In your case that might not be best since you only have 4 cores and plan for the VM to be busy in the off hours - leaving the cores shared may be the better approach.

 

Unfortunately you can't create a vdisk greater than the size of the largest physical disk.  The vdisk needs to live somewhere and unRAID doesn't support a single file that spans physical disks.  The better approach is to keep the vdisk small and pass a user share into the VM, giving the VM the ability to access the array for storage.

 

Thanks, tdallen, that is good info.  Very helpful!

 

I'll try to look into passing a user share into the VM because very large disk sizes are something that I need to have.  The current backup file for one of my systems is sitting at 4.2TB and right now I'm running a RAID 5 on the i5 machine which allows me to have 1 "drive" that is about 10TB (only 6 of my drives are currently being used). 

 

Edit:

So I'm trying to find out how to do this, but while I'm looking, I guess I should make sure having a user share larger than any single disk in the "array" is possible, i.e. what I was stating above?

 

 

Edited October 4, 2017 by FraxTech
To add an additional question.

[itimpi]

1 hour ago, FraxTech said:

So I'm trying to find out how to do this, but while I'm looking, I guess I should make sure having a user share larger than any single disk in the "array" is possible, i.e. what I was stating above?

A user share can be larger than a single disk, but no single file in that share can be larger than a singe disk. This is a side effect of the fact that with unRAID each physical disk is actually a discrete file system (potentially mountable outside the array) and thus no single file can span drives.    The maximum size of the user share is the sum total of the drives that can participate in the share (which could be all the drives in the array).