Looking for a NAS like unRAID, but

J

Jagger100

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 31, 2004
Messages
7,710
Looking for system that has a parity disk to help protect against disk failures. But I would like at least some disks to be able to be extracted and mounted in another system. This way I'm not dead in the water if there a failure in the non-disk portion of the NAS.

unRAID comes close. But I would like to do some disk spanning.

So I was imagining 4 disks (maybe 5)
1 would be a parity disk
1 would be a single volume and can be extracted from the NAS and mounted in case the NAS went down
2 (or 3) disks would become a spanned single pool of disk space.

Seems like RAID or RAIDZ systems jump from Mirrors to Parity+Striping. I would like to go to Parity without the striping, I guess.

Any suggestions.
 
Parity without stripping? Doesn't exist.

The only way you are going to be able to pull a single drive from some kind of array and view data on it is if it was used in a RAID 1, or with unRAID. RaidZ or RAID 5 is going to be stripped with parity.

If you have data with different levels of criticalness, I would just put all the data in a RAID 5 (under 8TB total of course) and back up to an external, and back up to a cloud archiving service such as AltDrive or CrashPlan.
 
SnapRAID combined with aufs for pooling, or FlexRAID.

Unless by spanning you mean something different than pooling. Since unRAID can pool your files as well. You need to clarify your OP.
 
JoeComp said:
SnapRAID combined with aufs for pooling, or FlexRAID.

Unless by spanning you mean something different than pooling. Since unRAID can pool your files as well. You need to clarify your OP.
Click to expand...

Spanning meaning I can make 2 or 3 physical drives look like one mount point on the network. The disk volume exists accross the 3 drives.

I didn't think unRAID could do this. I don't want to pool it all because the individual pooled drives can't really be access individually on another system.


---------------

FlexRAID is looking pretty close. I need to find out more about them. Thanks.
 
Last edited:
jpm100 said:
I didn't think unRAID could do this. I don't want to pool it all because the individual pooled drives can't really be access individually on another system.
Click to expand...

Actually, individual drives can be accessed on another system, provided that the other system can read the filesystem used (reiser). The pooling is just a feature used on top of the individual drives.

But SnapRAID and FlexRAID are better than unRAID, since they do not lock you into using them like unRAID does.
 
I think spanning and pooling are getting mixed together. Spanning is like Raid 0, where 1 file will be spread across 2 or more disks. Pooling means 1 drive letter or mount point for 2 or more drives. Personally I'm using FlexRaid right now with 1 parity disk and the pooling feature. At any point I can pull a single hard drive out and read it in any other machine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top