Anyone want to split a license for Unraid?

[cbass98]

So I don't need 2 licenses for Unraid, but splitting the 2 pack is cheaper than buying 1 by itself. PM me if you are interested. Thanks.

Admins, I know this should go under the FS/WTB forums or even the OS forums, but I think it's more relevant here since I think most people here have heard of Unraid whereas the others may not have.

[ALL4AMD]

bump for you

what does this program do?

[nitrobass24]

Its a NAS OS

http://lime-technology.com/

Played with the free version for a while, its cool and got decent features, but I like WHS more and its the same price.

[cbass98]

Does WHS allow you to expand your array by adding additional drives later on without rebuilding your array? The reason why I'm going with Unraid is for that main reason. I thought WHS was just RAID5 and JBOD.

[nitrobass24]

WHS uses its own proprietary RAID-like system, just as unraid does, it will prevent against a single drive failure. supports unlimited expansion without rebuilding and is designed for heterogenous arrays.
You can see my array in my sig.
It also allows you to connect external drives and add them to the array without rebuilding.
Will perform nightly backups of your pc's and sets up TS Gateway and allows you to access your array and connected pcs when away from the home.
Best windows product ever.

[unhappy_mage]

I thought WHS did mirroring only, last time I looked. Have they added a parity mode?

[cbass98]

Yeah, I just spent the last 2 hours reading about it. It does look like WHS does more of a mirror RAID versus a RAID5-esque type of RAID like unRAID. Therefore, if I have 8-1TB drives, with WHS, I could only use up to 4TB, whereas with unRAID, I'd have 7TB of space.

[dandragonrage]

RAID-6 (or something functionally the same) would be a much better bet with 8 drives.

You could use FreeBSD7 (or something based on it) and use ZFS. You can't yet expand RAID-Z volumes with more drives (rumored to be coming in a new ZFS version) but you can add a second RAID-Z array to the pool, meaning you'd want to add 3-5 drives at a time.

[cbass98]

Well, I know RAID-6 allows 2 simultaneous drives going down, but once again, that's 1 less TB of space. I plan on getting 6 drives now and then 6 more later. I don't want to create a second array. I want to add the new 6 when I get them, and have the array automatically expand. Plus, with unraid, even if 2 drives simultenously go down on me, I don't lose the data on all 12 drives. I'd just lose data off one of those drives (the other drive that went down would be the parity drive).

[prostuff1]

I have been messing around with unRaid (using the free version right now) lately also and I have come to like it quite a bit. I had a few snags at the beginning but that turned out to be problems with my hardware and not the unRaid OS.

The one feature i like about the unRaid system over something like a true Raid 5 is the way it stores the files. Like you mentioned if i lose more then one drive and can not restore i at least do not lose the data on the other drives.

[pre1014]

Bump for you.

[leezard]

Yeah, I just spent the last 2 hours reading about it. It does look like WHS does more of a mirror RAID versus a RAID5-esque type of RAID like unRAID. Therefore, if I have 8-1TB drives, with WHS, I could only use up to 4TB, whereas with unRAID, I'd have 7TB of space.

Thats not correct as far as I know. I have 5 drives in my WHS (2 320GB, 1 300GB, 2 250GB) and one 500Gb external thats not added to the pool that I keep backups on. The 5 drives added show 1.3TB of space avail. I have 319GB of files in shared folders, 258GB in PC backups (4 PC's), 34GB for system and free space of 730GB

I have duplication disabled on all folders and use a 3rd party program to back up what I want to the external drive. you can choose which folders you want to have duplication on, so yes if you have every folder with duplication enabled it would require twice the space.

[LurkerLito]

unraid sounds interesting, but what happens if the USB flash drive you have the license tied to goes bad? Do you have to buy a new license? I couldn't find that answer on their website.

[cbass98]

I can't imagine them being A-holes about it. Hopefully, they'll "move" your license to a new USB drive. Then again, I've never dealt with their customer service, so just speculating at this point.

Leezard, it sounds like you just have a JBOD array instead of a RAID array, so if one of your drives goes bad, whatever data is on that drive is gone.

[OldPueblo]

As far as I know WHS doesn't use RAID at all. Instead it merely auto-duplicates whatever data you specify you want redundant to a seperate physical drive. You say "I want everything I put in this folder to be redundant" and it takes care of it automatically as if you were using RAID1 (mirroring). This gives you the same protection as mirroring but without wasting entire drives. Throw in the fact that it also consolidates duplicated data to save even more space, and you see how awesome a system it is.

http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2007/02/15/the-death-of-the-drive-letter.aspx

[Donny Bahama]

I've been interested in unRaid for some time now (but money is tight so I've been unable to buy it.) The cool thing about it - which hasn't yet been discussed here - is that it allows drives of various sizes in the "array". Let me elaborate...

In a conventional RAID5 array consisting of 6 x 500GB drives and 2 x 1TB drive, the array will treat the 1TB drives as 500GB drives (because all drives in a RAID5 array are supposed to be the same size.) So you automatically lose 1TB (that's in addition to the 500GB you'll lose to redundancy!)

In a more extreme example, let's say you have 4 x 300GB drives, 2 x 500GB drives, 1 x 750GB drive and 1 x 1TB drive and you use them to build a standard RAID5 array... The array is going to treat this as 8 x 300 GB drives. You lose 1.55TB! Plus you lose another 300GB for parity, leaving you with a 2.1TB array. In JBOD mode, you'd have 3.95TB - almost double! (But JBOD has zero redundancy, of course.)

That same setup in unRaid uses the largest (1 TB) drive as the parity drive, but uses all the other drives to full capacity for a 2.95TB array. Now, as you add more drives (or replace the 300GB drives with 1TB drives) the new drives are used to full capacity as well. AND you still have the no-problem-if-one-drive-fails redundancy of RAID 5. But unRaid even one-ups that, outperforming a RAID5 array in a 2 drive failure scenario (but this has already been discussed here.)

AFAIK, nothing else does what unRaid can do (but I'd love to hear about it if there's an open source alternative!) WHS doesn't even come close. Netgear's X-RAID is basic RAID5 with hot-add and on-the-fly array resizing. FreeNAS and other open source projects have similar limitations. I don't know how Lime Tech did what they did, but it's pretty damn cool.

[Archer75]

Leezard, it sounds like you just have a JBOD array instead of a RAID array, so if one of your drives goes bad, whatever data is on that drive is gone.

Unless if duplication is enabled. Then you lose nothing. Duplication is done on a share by share basis.

unraid sounds interesting, but what happens if the USB flash drive you have the license tied to goes bad? Do you have to buy a new license? I couldn't find that answer on their website.

If you contact the developer people say he will likely give you another license. But I have never seen anything official in writing and it makes me alittle nervous.



In a conventional RAID5 array consisting of 6 x 500GB drives and 2 x 1TB drive, the array will treat the 1TB drives as 500GB drives (because all drives in a RAID5 array are supposed to be the same size.) So you automatically lose 1TB (that's in addition to the 500GB you'll lose to redundancy!)


Not true. Format the 1tb drives into 2 500gb paritions. And the OS now sees it as 10 500gb drives and you get to use all the space.


I've been interested in unRaid for some time now (but money is tight so I've been unable to buy it.) The cool thing about it - which hasn't yet been discussed here - is that it allows drives of various sizes in the "array". Let me elaborate...


AFAIK, nothing else does what unRaid can do (but I'd love to hear about it if there's an open source alternative!) WHS doesn't even come close. Netgear's X-RAID is basic RAID5 with hot-add and on-the-fly array resizing. FreeNAS and other open source projects have similar limitations. I don't know how Lime Tech did what they did, but it's pretty damn cool.

WHS allows you to use drives of any size you wish. They don't even have to be internals. You can add externals to the pool. Any size drive and you get to use all of the space on it. Drives can easily be added and removed.

Unraid doesn't create one single storage pool. Instead you'll have data, let's say videos, on drive 1, drive 2, drive 3, etc. but to get it to appear as a single share for easier management across your network you have to have those shares linked.

The only thing WHS doesn't do is parity. It uses something like mirroring and it can be done on a share by share basis. I don't mirror everything, just the stuff that can't be replaced.
Plus it has the option to backup the entire server to another source, such as an external. Does unraid allow that?
And then there's the apps that I can run on it which gives me alot of freedom. And I can log into it with just a web browser from anywhere in the world.
It also backs up all my windows machines so I can do a bare metal restore and be right back to where I was very quickly. Used that feature just yesterday. My HTPC was acting up after I did some tweaking and I was unable to get it back to where it should be. And getting these configured perfectly takes time. So I just restored a backup from WHS that I knew was good and it was up and playing movies again in under an hour.
Yes, parity is more efficent than mirroring but WHS gives you so much more that the tradeoff is worth it.

[OldPueblo]

WHS allows you to use drives of any size you wish. They don't even have to be internals. You can add externals to the pool.

Unraid doesn't create one single storage pool. Instead you'll have data, let's say videos, on drive 1, drive 2, drive 3, etc. but to get it to appear as a single share for easier management across your network you can sort of have those shares linked.

The only thing WHS doesn't do is parity. It is indeed mirroring. I don't mirror everything, just the stuff that can't be replaced. Plus it has the option to backup the entire server to another source, such as an external. And then there's the apps that I can run on it which gives me alot of freedom. And I can log into it with just a web browser from anywhere in the world.
Yes, parity is more efficent than mirroring but WHS gives you so much more that the tradeoff is worth it.

However you can pick and choose what you want mirrored (as you said) instead of mirroring everything and throwing away a whole disk or devoting an entire disk to nothing but parity like standard RAID does. This technically gives you the least wasted space of them all I'd think since you aren't mirroring worthless stuff like Windows, Program Files, temporary files, etc. How your space is utilized is completely up to you, with the added flexibility to add and remove drives of any size at will. THEN you add in the de-duplication that reduces all duplicates down to one copy, saving even more space. It's really a hard combination to beat.

Sorry to turn this into a WHS debate, but it's good info and a great solution since you get not only the above, but the remote ability, PC imaging, the list goes on and on. :)

[Donny Bahama]

Not true. Format the 1tb drives into 2 500gb paritions. And the OS now sees it as 10 500gb drives and you get to use all the space.That's the first time I've ever heard that. Are you absolutely certain? If it's true, that's very cool!The only thing WHS doesn't do is parity. It uses something like mirroring and it can be done on a share by share basis. I don't mirror everything, just the stuff that can't be replaced.I do see some benefits to that.Plus it has the option to backup the entire server to another source, such as an external. Does unraid allow that?Sure. You just install whatever backup app you want to use!And then there's the apps that I can run on it which gives me alot of freedom.I don't believe Linux is at a huge disadvantage there.And I can log into it with just a web browser from anywhere in the world.Pretty standard fare in *nix, assuming the proper ports are opened up on the firewall.It also backs up all my windows machines so I can do a bare metal restore and be right back to where I was very quickly. Used that feature just yesterday. My HTPC was acting up after I did some tweaking and I was unable to get it back to where it should be. And getting these configured perfectly takes time. So I just restored a backup from WHS that I knew was good and it was up and playing movies again in under an hour.That is AWESOME. OK, I'm off to go check out WHS... ;)

[Archer75]

Yes, linux can do alot of this stuff. But my concern with unraid not giving you alot of freedom is because it's installed on a USB stick. I don't know if you can install additional apps on to that unraid USB or not.

[Donny Bahama]

Yes, linux can do alot of this stuff. But my concern with unraid not giving you alot of freedom is because it's installed on a USB stick.The USB stick is just an option. You can install it to hard disk.

[cbass98]

Finally got around to installing the basic version of Unraid. Copying data from my Terastation to it right now, and this looks like it's going to take days to complete. Anyway, so far, I like Unraid. The webGUI is very easy to use. I'm going to test the speed out before I commit to buying the product. My only gripe so far with the software is the split level and allocation methods. A user here noted that the data is stored on disk1, disk2, etc, and so there is a learning curve there as to how you want your data stored onto your hard drives. It's very powerful, but for someone who is used to RAID5, you kinda want simplicity. Then again, because of that "feature," then all the hds on the array don't need to be spun up when accessing data whereas in a RAID5, since the data is written across all drives, all the drives are always on. Hopefully I picked the correct split level...