So with some funds and most importantly “Spousal Approval” I set about building myself a new media server that was easily expandable and still provided me with a high level of data protection based on unRaid. It only takes one drive crash and those priceless photos of your family growing up are lost… sometimes forever… it’s just way too risky. With life spans of only typically 3-4 years it doesn’t take long before you end up with a collection of assorted drives with you ever expanding downloads and no means of safeguarding your digital collection.
Unraid setup cache drive Pc#
While unRaid is based on Slackware Linux and may put Wintel peeps off, it is surprisingly flexible in what it can run on especially the fact that is installed and runs from a usb flash drive! I found both Systm’s Ep 108 and Robbie Ferguson’s feature (hell, it was a whole program!) on invaluable and it swayed me towards unRaid.Įver since the main hard drive in my PC crashed I’ve become increasingly aware of how much stock we place in the humble hard drive as a repository for all our information. Also, unlike conventional RAID arrays where all the drives are constantly spinning unRaid can power down drives that are not in use saving power. In the course of my research I’d looked at conventional RAID systems but there are drawbacks such as expensive Hardware RAID cards, having to buy identical hard drives and the biggest of all was that most RAID systems will recover from one drive failure but if you lose two then you’ve lost everything! Now with ZFS/2 on OpenSolaris you can survive up to two drive failures but the arrays are not easily (and more importantly – cheaply) expandable.Īn alternative solution presented itself in the form of unRaid by Lime Technology, its greatest strength over conventional RAID solutions (including OpenFiler and FreeNAS) is that it doesn’t require proprietary (expensive) hardware cards, it can use a mix of drives (both IDE & SATA) from different manufacturers while still offering complete protection against a drive failure by means of a parity drive. And you know what the scary thing about all this was… there was no redundancy… simply because I couldn’t afford it! In the past I had a server running Windows 2003 hosting an assortment of hard drives, before it gave up the ghost I had something like five internal hard drives (IDE) and three external USB drives. NetApp FAS 270 was at the time of purchase was somewhere in the region of £10k with half the bays fully loaded and that’s way too rich for most of our budgets!
Unraid setup cache drive professional#
I already had around 1.5Tb of media and another 1Tb of data I needed to hang onto so I needed a better solution…Īs an IT professional I’m used to dealing with high end storage systems on a daily basis, so why not at home.? Well first things first, the kind of storage systems I’ve used e.g. I’ve invested far too much of my time over the last year in building up my collection so I don’t want to risk losing it all. One of the contractors I’d worked with told me that he would religiously copy the entire contents of his media library to a second set of discs for safety. But this time I didn’t want to fall victim to the slap another USB drive on the back option.
Unraid setup cache drive movie#
Since I built my HTPC last year my movie collection has been growing at a steady rate and with HD content weighing in at between 4-8Gb per movie I knew I would eventually run out of space.
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