unraid - single storage pool?

[Archer75]

So I read that unraid can now create a single share to make it appear there is a single storage pool instead of so many seperate drives? Is this true?
I have almost 1tb of movies and many drives. It would be a pain in the ass if I had to navigate from my HTPC through each and every drive to find what I want.

And before I set it up, how can I determine how much available storage I will actually have? I know with WHS it's mirroring so I know exactly how much available storage I will have but i'm not sure about unraid.

I have
2x160gb
2x250gb
1x74gb
1x150gb
1x500gb
1x750gb

 

[drizzt81]

http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=13

. unRAID™ is similar to RAID-4 in that for every n hard drives, there are n-1 data drives, and a single fixed parity drive

I would assume that you are likely going to lose the biggest disk.

 

[unhappy_mage]

UnRAID works by dividing the disk into chunks and doing raid 4 (or 5, I forget) across those chunks. So your disks get split up like this:

=                } unused (no parity): 250gb
= =              } mirror: 250gb
= = = =          } raid 5, part 4: 90gb, 4 disk stripe
= = = = = =      } raid 5, part 3: 10gb, 6 disk stripe
= = = = = = =    } raid 5, part 2: 76gb, 7 disk stripe
= = = = = = = =  } raid 5, part 1: 74gb, 8 disk stripe
7 5 2 2 1 1 1
5 0 5 5 6 6 5 7
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4

So the single-disk part is unused, the mirror gives you 250gb, part 4 gives you 90*(4-1)=270gb, part 3 gives you 10*(6-1)=50gb, part 2 gives you 76*(7-1)=456gb, and part 1 gives you 74*(8-1)=518gb for a total of 1544gb from those drives.

However, that said, I'd rather not use unraid on my data. Personal preference: mirrors for everything.

 

[Argentum]

So I read that unraid can now create a single share to make it appear there is a single storage pool instead of so many seperate drives? Is this true?

Yes, that is true; this is done through user shares. You do need one of the paid versions of the software, but you'll need that anyway for more than 3 drives.

I have
2x160gb
2x250gb
1x74gb
1x150gb
1x500gb
1x750gb

You'll get everything except your 750gb drive which will act as parity (1544GB as unhappy_mage calculated).

The OS boots off of a USB key, so your mobo will need to support that. If you have a candidate mobo, try the free version and test that first.

I think unraid and WHS are pretty much the only options if you want a set of heterogeneous disks with some kind of protection. I went with unraid myself since I want all of my data protected to some degree and I didn't want to absorb the cost of mirroring, which I've done in the past. If WHS had offered parity protection across drives, I probably would have chosen that.

Most of the data on my file server is actually media like video and music, which can be recovered one way or another. For critical data (e.g. personal pictures, key data files such as old tax returns, legal documents, etc.), I have additional backups.

 

[Tolyngee]

You might also want to consider Flexraid.

 

[Archer75]

bumping a 1+ year old thread. Nice.

I am no longer considering either. WHS works well for me. I am happy.

 

[Argentum]

bumping a 1+ year old thread. Nice.

I am no longer considering either. WHS works well for me. I am happy.

Sorry... I had stumbled across this in search results, saw the January date and thought it was a week old thread. Amazingly, I haven't written "08" on any checks yet.

Glad to hear WHS is working for you.