Been building this server up for about 5 years, adding hard drives as needed.

Running unraid

E5-2698 v3
64gb ddr4 ecc
X99-E WS
P600 for transcoding
10gbit networking w/ 3gbit fibre WAN
15 HDDs of assorted sizes, totally 148TB, 132TB usable

    • Rob BosEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      [googles] “Unraid is a proprietary” … NOPE

      • lightrushEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Linux software LVMRAID or better yet - ZFS.

        • quafeinumEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          But I don’t want to spend my free time managing yet another server. Slap unraid on it an call it a day.

          • lightrushEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            I was referring to the actual storage system. Unraid’s funny JBOD vs some easy to use industry standard solutions. Not the overall OS with any dancing bears it displays, or doesn’t. ☺️

            If you’re looking at the latter, I have no argument against installing something with easy to use interface etc. like Unraid.

        • HutchEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Do you have any guides for setting this up and optimising it? I’d like my next build to use Debian (like my desktop and servers) instead of Unraid or Synology, both of which are lacking in different ways and ready for retirement.

          • lightrushEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            Guides no, but there’s good documentation. E.g. LVMRAID and ZFS. Here’s some overview of ZFS.

            For storage arrays, I would use ZFS over LVMRAID for a few reasons the most important being data integrity.

            For the system drive, i.e. where the OS is installed, LVMRAID might be simpler to use. There’s probably a wiki somewhere for installing Debian on ZFS but LVMRAID has been a Linux staple for a while and it’s easy to install an OS onto. E.g. via the OS installers. You could install on LVM then after you’re up and running, you can convert that to an LVMRAID with a single command and a second SSD.

            The simplest possible scheme I can think of from setup perspective is to use the Debian installer to put your OS on LVM. Once Debian is running, install a second SSD, the same size or larger, then use LVM’s lvconvert to convert to a RAID1. See “linear to raid1” in the LVMRAID man page (doc). Then for storage, install ZFS and create a zpool of the desired type from the available disks and throw your data on it.

            Read the docs (RTFM), write down a planned list of steps, build the commands needed for each step from the docs (where commands are relevant), then try it on a machine without data.

            Here’s a sample command I’ve used to create one of my zpools:

            sudo zpool create -f -o ashift=12 -o autotrim=on -O acltype=posixacl -O compression=lz4 -O dnodesize=auto -O normalization=formD -O relatime=on -O xattr=sa -O sync=disabled -O mountpoint=/media/storage-volume1 -O encryption=on raidz /dev/disk/by-id/ata-W /dev/disk/by-id/ata-X /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Y /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Z

            It looks complicated but it’s rather straightforward when you read the doc.

            • HutchEnglish
              3·
              2 years ago

              Sound advice. I tend to script everything via Ansible, and it sounds like beyond the initial OS install this is a good candidate for automation. I’m not sure I needed another excuse to go hardware shopping, but yet here we are.

              • lightrushEnglish
                2·
                2 years ago

                You’re the Ansible now. [I’m the captain now.jpg]

                This is all automatable of course. I’m using SaltStack but the storage setup is no longer part of it. It used to be but then I migrated from LVMRAID mirrors to RAIDZ and I didn’t update the code to fix it. ZFS setup is just too easy. It’s one command more or less. I just have the exact command for each machine with the exact drives in them on file.

      • joshhsoj1902English
        2·
        2 years ago

        When it comes to a fileserver, I still prefer Truenas.

        I’ve freenas/Truenas for 10 or so years now and unraid for about 5. For the last year I’ve been working on migrating everything back to Truenas (scale in my case)

        Some of my pain points with unraid:

        • disk read speeds. (Since read is only ever happening from a single disk, it’s much easier to notice bottlenecks)
        • disk replacement. When a disk fails, I find the process of replacing the disk (or decideding to not replace the disk and scatter the data across the remaining disks) fairly tricky and honestly a little scary. I’ve had to do it twice now and it’s the biggest reason I’m now only using unraid to run services but not store any important data.
        • cache disks are meh. Over the years I’ve had 3 or 4 times where the mover just stopped, which resulted in a cache disks filling and not flushing to HDDs, which then corrupted some database or file an application was using. Like on one hand you have to use SSD cache disks to run apps or VMs since there is no way to speed up read speeds on HDDs, but on the other it just doesn’t work well given enough time.

        Some pros:

        • Application/service hosting is still great in unraid. It’s still a pain in the ass getting a VM running on Truenas scale, but with Truenas Scale you can run docker directly.

        • being able to just add single disks at a time in unraid is nice (until you need to replace one…)

        Anyway that’s my off the top of my head reasoning. Truenas is a little more work to use overall, but I’ve found it much more stable

        • lightrushEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Sounds a bit like a clown raid if you ask me. It’s as if it wasn’t designed to be robust under production loads. 🤔