Smurf's monster 40TB unRAID NAS build [Part II]

zantarous

That's a awesome build, been looking at network storage for ages, I really didn't want to buy a two bay nas for £150  as you would just run out of space way to quickly. So there must be a market for ready built low powered full towers where you just add a OS and the number of drives you want.

Dan201

Probably a small market. Most people dont need a mid tower let alone all the slots of a full tower though. I cant see large collections of hd material being main stream until HDDs r much bigger.

MarkE19

I'm only aware of 1 UK seller of prebuilt unRAID servers - unRAID Storage Servers - Items - Custom built Home Theatre PCs from my-HTPC

Or get an HP Microserver for around £150 (if the £100 cashback offer is still on) and add a USB flash drive for unRAID (or whatever OS you want) and add HDD's as required - HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer - £100.. | Ebuyer.com

Mark.

nickhopkins07

Probably a stupid question, but can an unraid setup run squeezeserver? I'm looking at a new NAS solution and a device that can be at the center of my squeezebox network is important.

MarkE19

Yes it can and there are several threads on the unRAID forum about getting it working, such as - Just bought a logitech squeezebox, want to stream music with unraid, help needed

Mark.

Smurfin

electro, to answer your question re: shares, this is how mine is setup:

MovieJukebox is effectively my master share:  Allocation method = High-water, split level = 2.  Included/excluded disks all blank.

I then have numerous other shares such as photos etc, where there's no split level, and I've allocated a single disk to it.  e.g. Music split level = blank, Included Disks = disk1.

When copying music, photos etc, I copy directly to the share, but as these shares are only on a single disk, there's no need to worry about files being split across disks (if indeed that is any concern in the first place).

For movies, my desktop is full of individual mapped disks as well as the Master Share (the Master Share being called MovieJukebox).  When I copy media files such as TV series or BluRays, I generally always write directly to the actual disk rather than the master share.  Does it make any difference?  Not really, I just like to be able to control exactly where my files go.



Hope that makes sense

Smurfin

My server is emitting a constant but quiet clicking noise, which is clearly coming from one of the disks.  It started a couple of days ago and is constant, even after rebooting.  I will look to isolate the disk shortly by spinning down all disks and then spinning them up one at a time so I can identify the culprit, but this sounds like one's on the way out doesn't it?

I ran a parity check yesterday as a bit of a stress test and everything came back fine, but I've ordered another 2TB disk (£100! ) anyway, which I'll quickly get to work preclearing.  I also need to take a screengrab of the content of all of my discs so if I do get a drive failure and then a parity failure, I can at least re-rip the disk I lose.

Fingers crossed it won't come to that though....

Dan201

Ive had a drive click away for quite a while without issue. U can probably exchange it for free.

Midnight Tboy

hi smurfin.

Can I ask....

I have this case, and building something similar.

At the moment, I have the bottom 9 bays used as normal, and intend to put in 1 of the xcase 5 in 3s into the top 3 bays.

I read that you had difficulty bending the clamps, some more than others which is my main concern....can you recall if it was the higher ones or lower ones that were the biggest problem?

HugoFJH

Sorry i havent been able to reply until now


Im pretty certain my Unraid server only spins up two disks when something is requested - 1st the disk the file (usually a movie) is located on, and 2ndly the parity disk (Im guessing this is spun up for everyone in everyday use, I admit I should have checked this is normal activity, but never struck me as unusual either lol)

No other disk has ever spun up unless Im writing to the server at the same time, and this is without any use of split level on my part. Admittedly there has only ever been one user, but I have often tested my network by streaming more than one movie simultaneously, with no irrelevant disks spinning up.


I think this was answered above - maybe I fluked it during unRaid setup, but I dont believe I did anything additional to cause the above behaviour.

While I admit majority of my folders only contain a single file, so this is hardly ever going to effect me personally - I would also point out that majority of the users here are more than likely using any server for media purposes as the primary reason (and taking up majority of space)

I can see why anyone would want to keep series together on the same disc (for mass disc failure reasons if nothing else), but liklihood of this happening imo is remote. single disc failure is catered for by the parity drive - so its irrelevant anyway (apart from easing your mind lol)

Admittedly music is a whole different ball game and would be more likely users requiring this......but good luck finding more htan the occasional person/family to have over 1000 CD /vinyl albums for multiple disks to be a concern lol . (maybe not obviously but I would say at this point its likely with a mixed media server to have different root shares - ie Movies, Photos, Music - all on seperate shares rather than mixed together)

Thats a very good point, which being the single user of my server I hadnt really considered.

While I appreciate your interest in using it for general purpose filing also - these files are going to be (more often than not) of tin file size are they not, so is transfer speed really going to be an issue?

If you are meaning large dumps of software installs etc, I would either investigate just doing licence documentation etc with hard copy cd burns of the actual disc

Otherwise I cant really assist with your NFS queries

Ive had my server for about a year or so, while I have built many windows machines in the past (back to Win NT 4.0 and Win 3/Dos) this was the first server I built of my own. 90% of which is BR movie rips. Mainly streamed to a pch but occasionally to a Win 7 laptop