unRaid - One Year Later - My Thoughts
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- Опубликовано: 21 окт 2024
- I've been running unRaid for a year now....do I like it?
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What sold me on UNRAID is the fact your hard drives do not have to be the same size. If you have a bunch of mixed hard drives FreeNAS only goes as big as the smallest drive for your pool.
Same here! With unRAID, the ability to reuse drives of different capacities and pool them together is just scratching the surface. I'm going to start working with VMs next.
Yup. Same here. Mixing drives (and be able to reuse old ones or replace them with newer without losing data thanks to parity) was the main factor. Now that's I've been running with it for a while, I'd say that the docker management is just AMAZINGLY easy.
I'm no expert on the matter, but, to my knowledge, ZFS (and FreeNAS in extent) does allow for drives with different capacities in one pool. I think you are mixing up pools and vdevs here.
@@paoloposo You can, but the capacity in the pool will be that of the smaller drive.
"My life is miserable because I had to wait 8 seconds for the movie to start " ?
Hi Jason. Nice video. I use the spin down setting as well, I set mine to 15 minutes. I like the power saving this feature gives. Yes, I also find when first start watching a video, the drive may have to spin up. But its only a few seconds (maybe 4) to wait on say the first episode. Jason you remember vhs cassettes when we were kids, we had to rewind them before we could watch them that was far worse !! lol :)
Try with the cache directories plugin to set it to only include the shares that you want the directory entries kept in RAM. I have mine as my media share and the main share i use mapped to my workstation. The cache directories plugin when set to cache the media share can speed up playback too. If the drives are spun down, normally all drives may have to be spun up to search for a file. However if the entry is cached in RAM then it knows to only spin up the relevant drive thefore saving time. This may cut a couple of seconds off playback playing back a file off a spun down drive :)
I am not completely familiar with a spin down setting or the cache directories plugin. Maybe a quick view about these settings..... :)
I also use 15 minutes for my drives. Another item worth discussing is the turbo-write plugin. For mass transfers it makes a huge difference!
Spaceinvader One My unraid Teacher!
Spaceinvader One is my Unraid Sensei- check out his videos, his tutorials are awesome. Unraid is so flexible is so much more than just storage. Unraid does Containers, VMs and a hell of others things.
thanks ill set mine to 15 minutes and see how that works :)
Individual drives replacement or addition (while staying safe thanks to parity) and more importantly the EXTREMELY easy docker/vm management was what convinced me on unraid. Plus, the community there is just amazingly helpful! (not so much on Freenas, where beginners are often frowned upon)
Backblaze found that starting and stopping drives is much harder on them than just letting them run. They lose the most drives when they have to turn a pod back on after powering it down.
This is true for enterprise drives. Consumer drives (yes NAS drives are consumer drives as well) however are literally made to be turned on and off. (Usually arround 9k times during there lifecycle).
From my experience drives last super long anyway, but spinning them up and down (as long as you dont do it like every 10 minutes) doesn't hurt them at all.
My very first 8 TB WD Red is still running, it has about 600 Power cycles. My oldest Nas drive is a WD Red 3TB, it went through 6300 Power Cycles and more than 1200 Days of operation, also still works. Only drive i've ever lost was a WD Green (died during the first hour of operation) and actually all of my seagate "NAS HDDs" (2x4 TB and a single 3 TB), all with less then 500 Power cycles and well withing warranty, got them replaced by seagate with newer Iron Wolf ones.
So would you set them to never spin down? I’m setting up a unraid server as we speak, and have 2x8tb reds to start off with.
brkbeat junkie . Probably depends on how often it's used and whether power consumption is important to you, although it's not like 2 drives use that much power.
Jamie Ficken . There's a lot more going on with your example then would lend towards anything definitive and useful for comparison to the home market.
7 years & 2 months since I moved from Windows media center w/external raid boxes to unRaid on an inexpensive tower running Plex. 68TB and growing every day. Started with v4.7; now running 6.4.0-rc17b.
Webui of unraid is now multithreaded making the stalls less frequent since the 6.3 version. Large number of people have reported less UI lockup’s since Boniel made it multithread aware.
Dude, your audio is amazing! What audio setup are you using?
Audio quality is great but the audio sync seems a bit off.
It doesn't matter whether it's Unraid, FreeNas, or with whatever sticker it is branded. It depends on how you configure your storage pool. The comparative statements in the video about different systems and their reliability are simply meaningless.
But for someone who confuses a reliability system with a backup solution, this is not unexpected.
You can run single parity across all your drives in FreeNAS, there is no limit on the number of drives in each vdev. People don't recommend it because it is not considered safe (and the same is true for unRAID). The problem is that all of those drives (in practice at least) need to be the same size and you cannot add new drives one at a time after initial setup.
much much much more risky running a 16 drive zf1 file system....basically suicide ;p
Yes, but tbh, I dont care about corruption on "Linux ISOs" which is why I also dont care about ECC RAM.
It's only if you're using ECC RAM
It's clear people need to watch your video on Unraid parity protection Jason. Aethid it's not the same as the parity is on one drive instead of spread out, if you lose a drive you can rebuild from parity, and if you lose parity you can rebuild from a drive. If you lose parity AND a drive you still can access all other drives data. This is very different than the way FreeNas handles parity, if you lose 1 it's similar (rebuild), but if you lose a second all data is lost. Hence my box is Unraid!
Kevin Reene if you can (and yes I mean it) lose data then you don't need Parity at all. Just use JBOD. It will save you a lot of electricity and hardware costs.
I have had the same unraid array for 10 years now, I have expanded the array multiple times, changed multiple faulty drives, swapped motherboards multiple times, migrated from baremetal to esxi and back again, used multiple hard drive controllers. onboard, LSI SAS cards. Sata port multipliers, ide to sata adapters. No other nas solution come close to the hardware flexibility of unraid.
Using VMware ESXi and running Centos minimal server OS. It's extremely fast and reboot of plex server takes 4-5 seconds. ESXi is free if you have up to 2 physical CPU's and 8 VM hosts. This is usually plenty for home servers. Would highly recommend it.
Alexander Zacharuk also ESXi can do linked clones. This could maybe be a way to off load trans coding on to more cores and other servers
Hi Jason, great video. To me it comes down to one simple feature. With unRaid you can add new drives one at a time as your storage needs grow and with FreeNAS, because it's a RAID, you have to install all the drives you want to use at once or then create a new drive pool or RAID later to add new drives.
I have been using unRAID since (checks Amazon order histroy) October 2016, and I have had very few issues. Currently its running off a FX-8320E with 16GB of RAM with a GTX 560TI passed through to a OpenPHT VM to my TV for optimal Plex consumption. Even running pfSense as a VM (had to create my own plugin to have VMs start before Docker containers due to the containers checking for updates on startup of the Docker daemon) with a passed through Intel 2 port NIC.
I am running the latest RC (6.4.0_rc17b at the time of this post) with 0 issues.
Being able to add a single drive whenever you want is amazing. I am not tied to having to buy a large amount of disks to upgrade my array size.
TheJustinist try running with 6.4 RC17b should see improvements in GPU passthrough on the AMD platform. KVM has a bug that didn’t play nice with AMD cpus that is fixed in the newer Linux kernel.
I have not had any issues with GPU passthrough, and I am always on the latest RC (reread my post)
I'm _really_ curious in this. I've been debating either building a NAS or upgrading my "desktop" to unRAID with GPU passthrough. I want to end up with a NAS device and a gaming machine. Have you posted any more about this anywhere? I also have pfsense running on a VMWare ESXi machine separately (and it sounds like similarly to yours) that would be fantastic to role into this same unRaid/NAS/Desktop setup.
Even if the GUI freezes you can just SSH into the machine and manage it from there.
Hey Jason, are you using an SSD cache in your unraid setup or are you just using spinning drives? I hear the performance is increased when using SSD's as a R/W cache as part of the array.
It's more a write cache and doesn't speed up read operations - you will still be limited to the speed of a single spindle for reads that come from a file moved into the array.
Confusing thilumbnail.... My first thought went back to the 90's.😂🤣
I run proxmox on a dual mirror 500gig for the os and vm's and I have 2 single 4 tb drives (for now) for the media files. It has been really great so far. It's super reliable and no matter if I push the cpu to 100% on a single vm, proxmox is still 100% smooth and all other vm's don't get bottlenecked by one vm. I have 1 vm for a windows remote desktop and a Ubuntu for plex and 1 for pfsense. And a container for Sickrage with transmission. Even if I run ffmpeg on windows on max cpu I can still transcode a movie on plex with just a tiny delay of 15 seconds but the GUI is not affected. Unraid is not expensive but proxmox is free 😋
I'm moving to unRAID soon
can you do a video series of how to setup unRAID, plex and a few VMs inside and how to map the HardDrives to the VMs ?
can the array be passed to a VM physically ? like it's not attached via network but rather an internal drive that appears inside like /media/unRAIDarray/folders/...
You should check out Spaceinvader One's channel: all unRAID, all the time... plus Plex and VMs. ruclips.net/channel/UCZDfnUn74N0WeAPvMqTOrtA
I second spaceinvaderone's channel!
Dynamix Cache Directories by Bergware on unRaid will cache into your RAM, Keeps folder information in memory to prevent unnecessary disc spin ups. Very handy.
6:10 get ready to hear how much time it'll take to launch a movie..
a major, major let down..
8 sec!!!!!!!!!!!
If I'm correct, you're being sarcastic so let me explain - in todays world of Netflix/YT, your movie or show starts instantaneously so 8seconds, when you have the device at home feels really slow and disappointing.
Just don't spin down the drives, and that 8seconds goes away pretty quickly.
@@JonathanWagner And so does the drive. I'd take a couple extra years (or more) on the drive's life in exchange for 8 secs of my time every time I watch a movie or do something that isn't quite as important as my everyday work.
How is that a major letdown? that's a FEATURE!
#FirstWorldProblems
unraid lets you mix hard drives!!!!!!!!!
You also have to remember the learning curve involved with both. unraid is fairly straight forward for most things but it's severely lacking in some traditional NAS capabilities (terrible NFS, little rsync capability without CLI scripting, and zero iscsi, 10gig keep dreaming without SSD caching). FreeNAS can do basically everything you could ever want but the learning curve is higher and hardware investment will be higher. No solution is perfect for everyone or every scenario it boils down to what YOU want to do for an end goal. If you're even considering using a separate hyper-visor don't even bother with unraid.
Loving the increase of content lately, really like how you approach things. Careful with those Bestbuy 8TB drives they are addictive. They have caught on and have started to change to white label drives (although not terrible but the red is preferred). I like the second camera switching looks nice. For your set you should put lights on the ground below the shelved to resolve the shadows from under the shelves, would make it look cleaner. Just a suggestion
I need to finally set this up
Great to hear that after one year, you still like unRAID, it's flexibility and if you were to build a new system, you would choose unRAID again. I built my unRAID server in August 2017 and although it's a love hate relationship due to some AMD Ryzen growing pains, I like what unRAID has to offer. What are your thoughts on your hardware selection... dual Xeons, 10GBe, the rack mount chassis as well as the other components that make up Zeus? My system is in a Fractal R5 and I'm thinking about switching to a rack mount chassis, so curious as to your thoughts. Maybe a follow up video regarding Zeus is in order... ; )
So how long until you switch to Freenas? Or are you going to switch your mechs with SSDs? 4k UHD blueray rips can already saturate a spinning disk, and this unraid wont play 1 stream mustless multiples. (OFC that would also require 10g network)
Another great video. I currently have a FreeNas setup with a large 4TB disk array. My question is about the actual power consumption differences between FreeNas and unRaid. Im looking at things from a total cost of ownership perspective as Im trying to save on my electric bill as much as possible while still have reasonable ease of use. I no longer use my FreeNas server as my Plex server because I could not get the NVR features to work consistently. My Plex now runs on a dedicated windows 10 machine because it does other functions within my environment: syslog server for pfSense, off-site backup destination for my entire families PC's, manages my cold storage drives that get swapped once a week etc etc. Im curious about any power savings by having the drives spin down. Spinning down the drives, in my opinion, does not really save the drive because the number of times it spins up and down are logged in the SMART data and spinning up and down is usually considered a stress on the physical hardware of the drive. Have you ever plugged in a meter and compared the KWH when all drives are spinning to when they are spun down? Any insight you can give here would be appreciated.
Thanks for the response. 30 or 40 bucks per year is not really anything as far as savings. Short of having a huge cache drive I could not tolerate the slower performance on the read/write side because there are a few volumes there who will need constant disk access. Perhaps Ill spin up a VM of it and give it a look. Thanks again.
I see swings of over 50watts depending upon how many drives are spun up. I've heard all sorts of stories about powering drives up and down being "bad" and yet my drives last 4+ years if I leave them in. I've got everything from 3-8TB drives in my system now and 1.5-2TB drives I retired running in friend's servers still. I put the in-service date on every drive the day it's installed and most all of them get yanked for larger drives long before they actually fail. One of them has a SMART error on it for old age right now, it's hilarious. Keeping drives cool seems to be most important and spinning them down helps with that too. If TCO is your concern you probably ought to figure out how much more you're paying for in parity storage over unRAID, that's going to be real money unless you run clusters of small cheap drives. Hell just having to buy piles of same size drives to upgrade would suck, I buy my drives when I see a good deal and can't resist or when I actually need one. Swapping drives at will is nice...
The question boils down to this: Are you looking to protect your data or have a large amount of storage? Choose one.
I'm using FreeNAS with six enterprise level 4TB hard drives, of which two are parity drives (RAID-Z2 setup). My primary goal is to protect my personal and business data, and I am able to suffer damage/loss to two hard drives in my setup before I need to start worrying about data loss. This setup provides 18.62TB~ of Zpool storage capacity, of which 10.69TB~ is usable storage. I am happy with that level of storage and data security.
UnRaid's focus is to try and provide a middle ground, and gets rid of the issue of mixed sized drives, but in exchange, you need to accept a dramatically higher loss of data. If that's my choice, I might as well go back to a "normal" RAID1 setup.
Let's consider this simplistic example: if you use UnRaid with two hard drives, one drive will act as the parity drive. If the parity drive dies, you can still see your data by popping the remaining data drive into any PC. If the data drive dies, you cannot just read the data from the remaining parity drive. You are required to put in a new drive, and rebuild the data. If the parity drive dies during this rebuilding process, you will lose all of your data.
I appreciate how polished unRaid is and its user experience is on-point, but we need to respect what it's for and what it does to provide that functionality.
I feel like UnRaid is geared towards, and perfect for, the home media server demographic.
Personally I don't care much about redundancy since everything is easily replaceable. If there's a loss of data then I can just spend a day redownloading what I need.
Redundancy isn't a backup anyway so I feel like it's a waste of time and money trying to make a local RAID array bulletproof when it comes to archiving irreplaceable personal data. You could spend those resources having better offsite backups.
The main benefit to investing in redundancy is if you have something mission critical where having any extended downtime just isn't an option.
For my needs it sounds like UnRaid is a much better option.
kind of misleading in regards to number of parity drives. Really gives the impression that freenas has some kind of limit when it comes to how many drives you can have in a "RAID" before having to make a new "RAID". For clarification, Once built, freenas doesn't let you go back and add more storage or parity drives to the same "RAID" (group of disks protected by parity). You have to create a new "RAID" group (with it's own parity drive/s). So, if you can buy all your drives from the beginning you can create your "RAID" with as many drives as you would like and up to 3 parity drives. Unraid's advantages would be that you can start small and just keep scaling up without incurring this penalty of needing more parity drives when adding more capacity. Definitely look more into them than just this vide, one thing that you miss out on with unraid is the ability to detect and repair silent corruption of your data (bit rot). Freenas will detect and repair it automatically. Each have their advantages and should be looked into thoroughly.
Great vid as always. A few days ago switched from FreeNAS to UnRAID. I've been running a couple years with FreeNAS 9.x on a 6x4TB system. I needed more space and had a couple more 4TB HDD's. Since I couldn't directly expand the existing filesystem (ZFS's main downfall IMO) I went ahead and switched to UnRAID. Love the UI - much more info such as drive temps, and also the VM system (I like UnRAID's KVM more than bhyve). But I've run into a couple issues with UnRAID, more in a few days than in years with FreeNAS.
But even with double parity drives, I do miss ZFS. In addition to movies, I have other very valuable documents (old pics, tax stuff, etc). Of course it's backed up, but I'd rather not deal with restoration, and I just felt safer with ZFS. Since I have the proper server hardware to utilize ZFS optimally (Supermicro MB, Xeon, ECC) and matching HDDs, I might switch back. I'll give it a few days/weeks and see what I think then.
Jason, per your post "Since I have the proper server hardware to utilize ZFS optimally (Supermicro MB, Xeon, ECC) and matching HDDs, I might switch back. I'll give it a few days/weeks and see what I think then." Can you please email me your hardware setup and/or any upgrades you recommend for 2019? I am going to build a FreeNAS for important data and unRAID for all other to compare and contrast. yetipaws at protonmail dot com
Building my first FreeNAS server next month. Outgrew a Synology 5 bay NAS. Since this will be the network's primary storage pool (not just media), I need ZFS / FreeNAS for the reliability. I do want to build a UnRaid box for a gaming server, though. I really want to test the limits of game streaming to clients like a Nvidia Shield set-top while the work is being done from my server rack.
Freenas doesn't waste drives on parity, they perform a critical function. Just not providing you net capacity. Doesn't men they're wasted. Home insurance could seem like wasted money until your house burns down.
I'm using unRaid currently. No brainer. The dockers and vm get used a lot. Openvpn is a must. Very impressed.
Just an FYI, Spinning down the drives does not increase the longevity of the drives, in fact spinning up/down drives actually makes drives wear out sooner.
Spinning down the drives is for power saving purposes. You save a considerable amount of money by not having them running all the time. However, with WD Reds (like the ones in your Easystores) it actually uses at barely more power usage (less than 2 watts) than when they are spun down, so you may want to consider turning off the spin-down feature.
Source: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Minimizing_Hard_Disk_Drive_Failure_and_Data_Loss/Stress_Control
Andrew Sidhu . Ok, I agree. If you don't spinup/down drives for weeks on end would you still have the same opinion?
Jason, great video's keep up the great work. I am currently running FreeNAS and after watching this video I am thinking of switching over to Unraid for the extra disk space and unmatched drive size etc looks so much easier to just add a drive to gain space rather then replace each drive in my pool. My question is how can I switch over and keep all the custom stuff like cover art and meta data without having to go through my entire library and correct everything again? Also can I keep the same server name and how will this affect the users I am currently sharing stuff with both subscribers and non subscribers. Thanks.
Jason, do you run plex and blue iris on the same unraid server in VMs?
I have those same hard drives. So I can just take them out of the case and have a normal internal 3.5 hard drive? I assumed they were bigger
Do you use docker inside unraid to run plex? It just seems annoying not to get features since it is slow to update
I was having this dilemma about a month ago; which OS to use as my host. One comment on my reddit post later and I have been diving into building out my unRAID server ever since. Best decision I made was to go with unRAID, even if my productivity over the last month has been heavily focused on this hobby. :)
Next time don't cut away to show us your little camera. It really distracts from the content.
What is he suppose to do with his old camera?
I assessed unRaid for commercial deployment as it was nominated by someone here who liked the look of it. To cut short it is ok for archival of unimportant data, stuff you would normally let go but might keep for as long as it survives if you can deploy something at zero cost (which effectively it is). But for live data absolutely not. It's not even a question of durability (RAID isn't backup) its the downtime.
Having said that for home use with limited budgets it's a major step up from all your stuff on a single HDD.
Nice vid. I am in the "messing around" phase right now myself. I like it a lot so far.
Do you have the plex file server (metadata, etc) on a ramdisk? If so how large is it?
Good video but I think you should have brought up the redundant cache pool for unraid when first explaining the performance difference between the 2 OSes. People will miss that point if they don't make it to the end or skip ahead. Also the potential problem with your initial vm testing is the unraid OS uses cpu0 by default and so do all vms created unless you change it during setup. Ideally you need to assign different cores/threads to each vm, especially if you're going to max their cpu. Also unraid (linux) uses available memory to cache writes like Freenas so disk performance for VMs can be very high depending on your setup. My reason for going unraid was how well it handled hardware passthrough so I can use a vm on the server as my gaming desktop.
unRaid just works. It costs 50 bucks for the "middle of the road" system. If you want to putz with one of the other systems, spend lots of time maintaining your system, experiment with oddball add ons - then maybe unRaid is not for you. If, on the other hand, you just want a fault tolerant, parity protected mass storage/personal cloud system that runs most of the server apps with little user interaction, give it a shot. There is a no cost trial available.
I've been using unRaid for 3+ years. No issues. And the user community is top shelf. Oh, and it runs on low end hardware. Your mileage may vary. I don't have time to manage a NAS, and with unRaid, I don't have to.
-Unqualified Spectator
This. My computer isn't powerful, or crazy large, or really that modern, but it does EVERYTHING I need it to (self-hosted cloud, VPN, Plex, content gathering, etc.) and I don't touch it. It just works!
(FreeNAS fanboi) If you have FreeNAS/ZFS with a large drive pool (like 20 drives) the usable space is ~85% of the physical space with Z2 (can lose any two drives without losing data).
I will concede though that it’s annoying that to take advantage of this efficiency you have to buy/install all your drives for that pool at the start. The flip side of having a lot of drives up front is that FreeNAS splits the data across them and even my 8 drive pool will transfer at 3-4 gigabits/sec without a cache.
I bought 8 new drives to set up my system. I’ve had it for a year. Next system I build (I’m looking for an excuse) I’ll buy ~20 second hand data centre drives with NVMEs for read and write cache.
Just recently switched over from being a long time freenas guy. I switched because of unraid's ability to be freaky with disk setups breaking all the normal freenas zfs rules. With a cache drive, unraid speed is as good as freenas zfs.
Is the hard lighting you're using intentional ?
8 secnods to spin up a drive, what year do you live in? :D I have a WD Black in my PC and it sometimes takes 5-7 seconds to spin it up in Windows to just open a drive if I left it for lunch or something, cmon, 8 seconds spin up time is... did you really even need to mention it? Ugh, sorry, It just really weird thing to even bring up in my opinion.
About drives being spun down. is there no manual way to spin them all up? that's something you could do if you know you are going to do a lot of data intensive work before starting.
There's a button in the main GUI to do this. There's also a plug-in that will greatly speed up writes if you're moving lots of data that spins the drives up and keeps them moving while doing a shortcut to make the writes faster. Overall the lag isn't usually that bad but it can be noticable.
raid is not a backup!
he also said his parity drive is a backup...
@@dan8t669 Parity is about integrity not backup. One copy doesn't equal one copy and a backup.
nullifier unraid is not raid
Please help me understand this. I use snapraid (which is basically unraid in snapshot form). When a second drive fails while recovering the first drive... Then I lose the second drive and cannot recover the first drive of course. Same for unraid. You need all the other drives + parity to rebuild the failed drive. If another one dies, then you are out of luck on those 1 parity-drive cases. Or what did he mean at 4:00 ?
If you have 3 drives in unraid. 1 is parity, the other two are storage. if a storage drive fails and you go to rebuild it with the parity drive, you risk the parity drive failing too. If it does, then you lose the first storage drive worth of data only. the second storage drive still has all of its data.
VS a ZFS file system....you have three drive with parity spanned across all drives (one drives worth in a zf1 array). So if another drive fails during rebuild, you lose all data on that array...
OK, maybe I got it wrong in the video. Sounded like "parity drive means failed drive and another one failing while rebuild = only one drive lost". but one parity drive = only one may fail before losing data. two parity drives = up to two may fail at the same time, right?
Also you can have dual parity where you have to lose more than 2 drives to lose data. That risk is crazy remote in a home-use scenario. You can also do this with the cache drives!
His use case assumes it's the parity drive that fails as a second drive however in my experience the other drives are being read from during a rebuild too so it's as likely one of them will fail as it is a parity drive. End of the day you could potentially lose data on TWO drives or however many fail at the same time. The key thing is that you won't lose the entire array if you somehow lose your redundancy. One thing I've noticed though is that drive recovery shops advertise what kinds of RAID they can recover, it's a specialty. With unRAID each of the drives runs a standard Linux file system so while losing multiple drives would suck at least you've got an easier time recovering if you've not been keeping backups (and you should back up). FWIW I've been using unRAID a very very long time, since near the beginning. I have literally swapped out every single piece of hardware in my system(s) without issue - including the USB stick for licensing. No data loss. I run parity checks monthly, I don't find errors and my drives don't fail. My server is ventilated well and has more than 15 devices in it - no issues. I run single parity - probably should run two but oh well. The only time I've lost data is when my dumb ass has deleted it, GDrive is my backup for $10 a month. :-)
Ty for your thought's. I want to set up 2 gaming os's on my one motherboard. Any unRAID alternatives to do this ?
I have a 120 TB media server of 8TB x 15. After double parity in ZF2 (FreeNas) it comes to just shy of a 100TB drive. I'm not sure what tricks unRaid has under the hood but FreeNas has been completely solid. I've never had it lock up or had to reboot from a failure. I don't understand the point of paying for software if the content is not mission critical. Also, reliable, free and extendable open source software levels the playing field for all.
You should watch Jason's video on the Unraid array setup. It basically adds the 1's and 0's across all drives (1 + 1 = 0) and then writes the total Sum to the parity drive. The genius part is that if you lose a drive it can add up all of the other drives and figure out whether a 1 or 0 needs to be written to the replacement drive. Basically you only need a single drive of the largest capacity for the entire array. It also allows for dual-parity which adds a second parity drive that replicates the primary parity.
that's the same thing as raidz, but without the bitrot protection
I'd recommend looking into a plugin called "Dynamix Cache Directories", it should help with some of the disk spin up delays while browsing as it stores all the directory names in memory.
Rosco Harris He said he was using it in the video
@Koshy George: Must have missed it, thanks for the correction.
I’m a complete novice and I can tell you with all the help in the world unraid was an absolute pain right in my arse to setup configure etc etc etc
That sucks. I'm also a complete novice. Using hardware from 2005-2010 except for one SSD. I literally plugged in a USB key and booted straight to adding shares. I'm not dismissing that you had issues. Just that your situation might be very unique, or particular to some piece of hardware that just hates linux. I hope you find a solution for an array that you like.
I've never run FreeNAS or unRAID but am currently running something called OpenMediaVault, it may be worth checking out.
Are you going to test the PS4 Plex Media Player? Wanna hear your thoughts.. great vid
Carlos Rojo Cella The ps4 version of plex works great. No playback issues what so ever with any of my videos.
I've been running an original PS4 with the Plex app for over a year. All my components in the environment (storage, Plex server, PS4) are hard wired in the network. Up until about a month or so ago I would say it's been rock solid. HOWEVER, recent updates to the app have made it periodically unstable. Out of all the apps I run on the PS4, only the Plex app has caused crashes and needed to either restart just the app or the PS4 itself.
No other client in the network has had issues (including a PS3), and I've tested other apps that use the same storage without issue. We use the PS4 as the primary streaming box in the living room, so it's been frustrating at times. I've reported issues whenever there was a crash, and I'm hoping a new update comes soon. And the only issue I've had with my PS4 is Plex.
I know I'm a sample size of one, but wanted to let you know my experience.
I dont have a ps4 and dont really want one. so dont think so :(
So you compared a hypothetical use of FreeNAS, but, used used mirrored RAIDZ2 arrays to waste the most amount of drives? (As though that were a required typical use case?)
I agree. I too was confused about the use of 2 pools; it isn't a apples-to-apples comparison and is actually FAR superior. I have a single pool consisting of 4 vdevs of RAIDZ2 for performance, optimization and reliability. A proper comparison would be 1 pool built using 1 vdev comprised of RAIDZ1.
The assorted RAIDZ options within FreeNAS/TrueNAS are truly awesome, from a simple mirrored drive, all the way to striped RAID 6 or 7 pools of 28 total drives, ...mirrored if needed...
With making and using vms make sure you don't use the first core or its matched thread unRAID uses that one for itself and when adding cores match the cores and threads
Can’t this all be done in windows for free with drivepool and snapraid?
After messing around with several potential solutions for a NAS, I decided to go with unRAID partly BECAUSE it is a paid solution. Investing in something has forced me to persevere with it to the point that it now meets all my requirements. I needed that motivation to actually stick with something and make it work for me. I run a Linux VM for torrenting, a XP VM for 32 bit legacy software and a mirror of my pfsense router for failover. Rock solid reliable on an i5 2400 and 16 gb.
There is a way to cache the folder lists, so that when you're browsing a lot of sub folders or files, so you don't have that delay (assuming the drives are all spun up). I think it is a plugin, but I don't have access to my server at the moment to check.
Yes, I believe that it is built in now but it use to be a plugin called cache directories.
7:36 - why does 8 second bother you, I mean are 8 second and works good after, right?
Right? he also could set like spin down after one week in case he watches something on Plex only once a week…
the speed issue has nothing to do with software its the option you picked.
Another option would be to use windows. Windows server has a drive pooler built in and you can set the redundancy as you like. The OEM licenses can be had for less than $100(ebay). There are also multiple pieces of software to pool your drives (drive bender, drive pool) I run my plex on the baremetal. Then I use hyper-v for all the smaller apps to keep them out of my servers filesystem. If you just want a basic NAS then openmediavault is super easy to configure. Might be worth a look.
Jason, you sold me on unraid, I'm buying today and came here to see if you had a referrer link. Linus is a 'how did you hear about' option but not you. Bummer!
I am looking to use FreeNAS with 2 parity drives. I am buying drives one at a time from different vendors to protect myself from a bunch of drives with the same issues.
I want to have a need for a dedicated FreeNAS rig, but, even my storage (Icy Dock front loading) single 4TB storage drive barely shows used at all....a massive .01 TB used?? :)
I have Unraid, just hit 100 days of uptime with automatic updates, notifications, alerts, everything working perfectly. I don't miss a cent.
Also Jason, based on the comments you should do a ZFS file system vs Unraid array setup. People are getting them mixed up and it's pretty funny once you actually understand what the heck is going on :).
Spinning down hdd wears them down faster, however if you do have 20 hard drives you might save 120-200wh of power when they're idling aka. spin down.
Totally depends on the drives. The more "Enterprise" ones like WD Gold etc. seem to fail mostly during spin ups (even tho i have seen some with 20k+ Power Cycles still going strong). WD Reds however dont seem to care much, especially since they are rated for many thousand Power Cycles. The newer Helium drives with heavier spindles also mitigate that with slower spin ups in general compared to similar drives intended for datacenter applications.
Just a quick question, i want to build an unraid server and can i use my ssd with windows from my old computer for my VM
I know it's been a year.. but someone should give you an answer. You can use the SSD. If you are asking if you can plug the SSD in and use the OS that is already installed there, probably not? If you want your drive to be a part of the array the drive has to be zeroed first in order to maintain parity. That usually means the drive gets formatted and cleared before the OS adds it to the array as part of the share. I'm new to unraid but that's the gist of what I have read in getting set up so far. Unless you have another SSD you would want the SSD to be the cache drive anyway.
Is this behind the scenes footage or something?
I have like a 30 second delay until a movie starts, so youre insanely fast
Are you transcoding on a very slow computer?
In this video: babbies first raid.
Fact: freeNAS allows you to make a 10 drive Raid-Z1 pool, with only *ONE* parity drive. In fact, you are free to make pools with as many drives as you want!
Choose either 1, 2 or 3 parity drives, whatever you like. Nothing is stopping you from making a pool with 4 data + 3 parity drives, or 20 data + only 1 parity drive.
iam infact looking to change from windows to freenas or unraid. but not sure which yet. kinda scary tho since how do you manage files and stuff ? i assume they arnt systematic as in windows ? ... also what do you do if your unraid or freenas hardware fails ? any other way to read the content off the drives? or if a drive fails.
You see your array as just one, massive hard drive when shared with windows. Easy to use.
aah. :) what about when hardware fails or drive dies? how can read the drive content?
If you have plexpass and want to use premium music steer clear of Freenas or any BSD distro.. as this isn't supported.. Freenas is great but I'm finding a standard Ubuntu install is giving me better overall performance. and i can use it for other things much easier.. i used freenas 9 and 10 for over a year and no issues it.. just my 2p ;-)
Each drive has xfs-filesystem 'installed'. Basically, if you turn off your nas. take a disk out. Put it in a Linux computer. (either by installing or just running a live cd on your pc.) and you can see the files.
Unraid doesn't fragment files in little pieces. so example. You have a system with 4 disks and no parity disk. If one disk dies. you still have the data on your other disks. You will only loss the data that was on the dead disk.
If you lose all your hardware, except the disks. everything is still fine :)
If you have 1 parity drive, and 3 data disks. you can lose one data disk or one parity disk.
Do you lose 1 data disk AND 1 parity disk. you will lose all the data on the data disk, but the data on the other 2 data disks is fine.
if you lose the parity disk. everything is fine, you still have your data. your array is 'unprotected', so if a data disks fails at that time. you will lose the data on that disk.
Basicly, doenst matter what happens. if the disk is still spinning. you can retrieve all the data without too much of a hassle.
Hope i helped you with this! ;)
you are right. mixed them up. Edited my previous post. Story still stands :)
So your reason for using UnRaid is that you only lose one drive (from a total storage point of view)? ZFS (the file system behind FreeNas) does offer a Z1 array were you give away the capacity of that one drive to achieve basically the same reliability as your UnRaid config, why not use that?
In the video you do mention that you have the risk of a drive while rebuilding the disk array, then loosing all your data but are you not at the same risk when using UnRaid since you only have one disk as backup? And with you being able to add one disk to add more reliability to UnRaid you can do the exact some thing in FreeNas by using a Z2 array....
Ultimately I don't really understand why anyone would choose to use a none ZFS file system for a storage computer such as a NAS...
If you lose your parity drive during rebuild with unraid you only lose data on one drive. If the same thing happens with a massive, zf1 array, you lose the whole array. So while risky, the potential loss is minimal. Also, i like the fact that not all my unraid drives have to be spun up and working at the same time to access a single file...less wear n tear
unRAID does not stripe data across the drives. Each file you write is written to a single drive in its entirety. Therefore if a second drive dies while rebuilding the first you only loose the data on the dead drives. Each unRAID data disk is an individual XFS file system.
A few reasons:
1) You only need one parity drive to recover a single lost drive in your ENTIRE array.
2) If you lose a second drive during the rebuild (assuming you don't have a second parity drive), you only lose the data on that SINGLE drive, not the ENTIRE array because the files themselves are NOT striped.
3) You can mix drive sizes. I can have an array with 8GB+8GB+1GB+3GB+4GB and use ALL of the data on each disk (minus the parity disk). The parity disk needs to be the largest disk, but that's the only limitation. Want to remove the 1GB and replace it with a 4GB? No problem! Easy. Want to just add one more disk? Easy. Can't really do that with ZFS. (Or most RAID implementations)
Unraid uses ZFS. I think you misunderstand file systems vs array setups.
@Kevin Reene
UnRAID does not use ZFS. You are confusing it with FreeNAS.
(See this thread for further clarification: lime-technology.com/forums/topic/56740-freenas-to-unraid/ )
just my 2 cents but the ability to mismatch dives in unraid is worth a stream or two, if in need of more streams it is easier to add a gpu or beefier cpu.
Jason, where is your Unraid + Plex + pfsense tutorial at!?? Jesus, bless us with this video!
wow 5 seconds of delay thats like nothing... i mean like if you are about to watch a movie or series of your NAS i really dont think that anyone would mind just waiting 5. 10 or even 20 seconds if that means that your drives can have a longer life span + power savings, you could in that time go and get a glas of water
I more reason one would choose unRaid over FreeNAS is it's a GNU/Linux distro while FreeNAS id based on FreeBSD, and more people are familiar with working of GNU/Linux than something like FreeBSD
Quasi84 unRaid doesn't stripe data, it just writes data to the disk and uses an XOR operation to calculate a parity bit, there is very little to go wrong there. The data stored on the drives aren't abstracted one bit it's just XFS, you just unplug a drive from unRaid and plug into a any machine access the data.
Since when is FreeNAS lightweight?
I have been running openmediavault for many years without issues. Debian based and free. System is enhanced by plugin's and docker's.
6:11 Setting to spin down drives...I would love to know how to do that. 99% of my drives are not in use most of the time. Idea for a video maybe?
Everyone is going to have different preferences. I filled up my 64 TB FreeNAS server so I built another server and thought I'd try UnRAID. I wish I'd done FreeNAS. FreeNAS is much more performant and a more stable product IMO.
Dude’s hair looks like Pinhead
I care but sounds like "first world problems" (7:24) to me ... But, hey, it works so how often does he watch a movie? Well, 8 seconds to start up a movie -- is better for me than trying to spend 3 to 5 minutes to find the blu-ray (at home), then heat up the xbox / bluray player to watch it.
Ubuntu server has been running with no faults for 2 years now, just had to update and reboot, always thinking about unraid or freenas
my largest complaint is the limit of physical drives for the storage pool...30 isnt enough for my planned future....
lol
You're planning on having more than 280TB of storage.
Multiple Unraid boxes is completely fine and actually quite common on the forums.
Paying for unRaid, with all the other free options out there? not happening.
If you're going to run ZFS you should use ECC memory if you don't want get ECC memory go with unRAID
For caching the folder information i use Dynamix Cache Dirs working fine for me (app for unraid))
The only problem , wel problem, i have with unraid is that the build in FTP server just sucks.... if any 1 has a good sollution feel free to let me know ;)
Do NOT use a SSD for a cache drive if you have a lot video files that you're storing. You're going to burn through the write endurance limit on almost all consumer grade SSDs doing that.
I think waiting 8 seconds to save the environment is not really a big deal.
what if the machine was accidentally shutdown?
Yeah, I’ve encountered that stupid webGUI lockup bug- for me, it came from when I was resizing a drive while a VM was running.. That pushed me away from it- I use proxmox now, and, I like it better, imho.
yeah that was annoying but havent ran into it since. But, I fear if I ever start messin with new vms again, I might...
I run into this from time to time as well. It seems to coincide with high iowait times when preclearing drives. This only affects the webui for me and the rest of the system runs fine. The first time I ran into this issue I did hard reset the box but once tracking it down I just let the job that's running finish or even ssh in and cancel the preclear if I need to do something immediately in the webui. Once the job is complete and the iowait goes back to normal the UI becomes responsive again, no reboot needed.
Byte My Bits The GUI becomes unresponsive everytime I install a Docker, after the Docker is installed the GUI starts working again
I don't remember where I read it but 6.4 should resolve this issue entirely. Something to look forward to =]
Soooo, if you feel fine to loose some of your data: USE Unraid. And if you dont want to loose any of your data: USE FreeNAS...........???
And no I dont support FreeNAS and I dont hate UnRaid. I use Debian-servers top of Proxmox (wich is based on Debian) to do samething what UnRaid and FreeNAS does.
THere is something called directory chaching inside of Windows, it can avoid the Problem described around 8:00. Depends on how you mount your shares tho.
I've been using unRAID for a little over a year, and I love it. I haven't tried FreeNAS.