Hi guys, Been a while since i had the funds to do a project like this and there is so much info on the topic I thought id ask for some advice. Sooooooo i need more storage. A lot more, and it quite frankly won't fit on my pc. On my main machine, I run a plex server, and recently the inlaws thought it was such a spectacular idea and they could get rid of all their DVDs...... So I was handed over 300 of them .... most seasons of stuff. So I had a look and I got a good deal on a few 4tb Wd Red drives. So I picked 2 up. Had a look online and saw a few people mention to use unraid, make it easier to add too when needed and has excellent redundancy due to zfs file systems, as well as integrated with docker .....quick google looks like container type things.... and saw that I could use it for so much more with it. Plex, netdata (liking the idea for monitoring), next cloud could be cool to play with. So I have a spare i3 3420t laying in a box, it has intel quick sync so hardware acceleration is supported on plex with a plex plus account. Was gonna pick up a cheap board off ebay, or see if anyone here had one I could purchase in a wanted add maybe with some other stuff. I want to make it as power-efficient as possible but still, be capable of slight heavy lifting. I'm confused with how to make it fast tho for access, my internet is not the greatest, about 40 down and 10 up, but would a network card make it faster for that? internally i assume it would be limited to my wifi and gigabit ethernet ports, and externally 10mb. Looking for suggestions for a small case, I assume ill need to get a gold-rated PSU to be more efficient , and wondering if it would be ok with 8gb of ram.
Red, Red Plus, or Red Pro? Because if they're Red, you'll likely find they don't work in RAID - a lot of the standard Reds are now DM-SMR, which hampers performance to the point that the RAID controller (software or hardware) will see the drive as faulty and kick it out of the array. If you're using RAID, you need Plus or Pro - they're CMR and work fine. If you're not using RAID, you can use the SMR drives - but expect very poor performance!
To add to what Gareth says, the Red drives still carry a premium, and much more so on the Plus and Pro variants. AFAIK, all the Red 8TB and greater capacities are CMR, and I think that's where the prices across brands converge. Personally, at smaller capacities, I'd be looking at Ironwolf drives, despite running Reds for years. As far as network speed goes - if your motherboard has a spare slot for a network upgrade later, you'll be fine - you'd need a faster switch to upgrade your home network anyway, unless you're just hooking up to your PC; in which case, it's a DAS box and you might as well use USB 3.
EZRZ is the earlier CMR version of the WD Blue 4TB - EZAZ would be the new cost-reduced DM-SMR version. It'll work fine, but they're not rated for 24/7 use in a NAS and they promise 300,000 load/unload cycles with no guarantees about mean-time-between-failures or workload rates; the WD40EFAX (which is the WD Red 4TB SMR version, not the more expensive Plus or Pro), by contrast, promises 600,000 load/unload cycles, a million hours, and 180TB/year workload rate. Looks like you've taken a shot of the same drive twice there, though, so I dunno about the Red one!
My bad, i double checked and shows the same in had tune. Next time I'm on the pc ill check the drives. Ones a shucked one and one came from ebay, new right enough but still 600,000 sounds a lot better than 300,000 Which drives would u recommend in general. I was going to buy another 2 at the end of the month, toyed with the idea of an 8tb, but its probably gonna be 2 4tb ones
Depends on your budget. When I was building my new NAS, I picked up a 6TB WD Red Plus and a 6TB Seagate IronWolf to run in a mirror. (I always buy non-matching drives to mirror, 'cos I've seen firmware failures and bathtub curves take out mirrors made of identical drives - even if you're careful enough to buy them from two manufacturing batches.) Before that, I was running two consumer-grade 2TBs shucked from USB caddies. One just died, so I've picked up another 6TB Seagate IronWolf to replace it - there's a 6TB WD... something still in the old server, so when I retire it I'll make a second mirror with that and the new IronWolf. Basically, my advice is: if you're not constrained by budget, buy actual NAS drives. WD Red Plus or base Reds that you've checked and know are CMR rather than DM-SMR, IronWolfs, maybe Toshiba ones if you can find 'em. If you want the maximum storage for your money, pick up USB drives and shuck 'em - but bear in mind that the smaller (sub-8TB) drives are often SMR, so you're better off doing this for larger drives (which is also where you can save the most money, of course!)
Quite honest buddy if i use unraid i need a redundancy drive anyway from what I have read, so I have 2 4tb already, I might just buy 1 more and buy one that's of better quality. Or go with the same, be about 100 ish for a 4tb iron wolf and about 70 ish for a 4tb wd blue drive. The drives will just be there to store mainly, all those dvds will be for the majority of it mainly, and whenever someone watches something it will be read from.There brand new drives, so id assume there lifespan is barely used as is atm and once i see if its used often or if my collection grows massively i can look at sourcing larger and better grade drives. My main thing the now is getting one built, and making sure if a drive was to go that its recoverable, from what you have said i think my drives will work in this kind of set up. Had a look and seen some people use ssds as cache drives too, i have a spare 128gb lying around i may throw in just for kicks
Parity drive. If you're using three disks, an UnRAID array with three drives should survive the loss of any one drive - but only one. With consumer (Blue) disks, it's not unlikely that you'd hit an unrecoverable read error (URE) during rebuild - the odds go up as the size increases - which would mean some data are lost despite still having two good discs. Always remember: RAID (and, indeed, UnRAID) is not a backup!
Is there a specific raid you would choose to use ?. Quick google and look (from what I understand of raid), id be best going with a raid 5 and use 3 disks
Depends. On less critical data I use RAID5. On more important stuff, I use RAID6 - but I rarely build arrays of less than six disks now. And RAID6 is normally only available on proper controller cards, it's not usually a function available in motherboard soft RAID. edit: I also have offline backups. Currently trying to convince my boss that a cloned array for each array is a good idea... it's always a fight between good backups and cost.
This, a hundred times this! I started with 4x2TB consumer drives in around 2010 with Synology DS410j, thinking I need RAID for redundancy. I didn't, I can survive the down-time of ripped library. After some incremental upgrades, I now have a 4TB (EFAX mentioned earlier) and a recent 8TB Red Plus in a 2 bay NAS. The data is periodically backed up to normally off HP Microserver with the old 4TB, and original 4x 2TB. This way, I'm not relying on any RAID controller (single point of failure), I've also got (slightly delayed) data duplication in-case of disk failures. In OP's case. Consider backing up everything to an external HDD periodically?
I run Unraid and its great. Currently have about 14tb worth of storage which is half full. Run a couple of VM's, plex server, unifi controller, VPN, resilio sync to my seedbox and several SMB shares. I currently have a single parity drive and whilst I know that it isnt a true backup, for what I need it works great. currently preclearing 2 x 8gb drives to increase the parity disk and then the array. I love the fact you can just add any old drives of any size together into the array with no issues.
Are you thinking of redundancy on your ripped DVDs because you can, or because you actually want some level of protection? You'll have the discs so the data is safe regardless of what happens, so all you're really looking at is the time spent ripping them. For a pure media server, I don't think you should be worried about just spanning the disks, and if you put anything on it that isn't rips just work out a regular backup plan. And an SSD cache is going to do very little for a media server... even for metadata it's largely unnecessary at that scale. Even if you have a spare sitting around I wouldn't use it, and definitely don't go out and buy one to use it.
Eeeh... not so much. Short-term, sure, but laser rot is a real thing (and happens whether or not you're actually playing the discs.) I'm ripping CDs and DVDs going back to the mid 1990s at the moment, and I've come across a handful where you can actually see physical holes in the data layer: Tweet— Twitter API (@user) date Don't think just 'cos you've got the originals they'll necessarily be playable humpty-tump years down the line. It's not just not a true backup, it's no backup at all. Sure, it'll keep you ticking over if a single disk fails (maybe, not always) - but what happens if you're hit by malware that encrypts your files? They're gone. What happens if a Windows bug starts to corrupt your files? They're gone. What if a bug in the NAS software corrupts your files? They're gone. Failed power supply that blows more than one drive? Gone. Two drives failing at the same time, not beyond the realm of possibility if you've bought matching drives? Gone. Theft of the server? Gone. What if you fat-finger and delete a bunch of the files, and only notice when you go to play 'em six months later? Gone. RAID is not a backup. Ever. Doesn't matter how many disks you have, how many mirrors, it just ain't a backup - true or otherwise. I go for the easy option: RAID1 mirror - a btrfs mirror, in fact. Protects against both the failure of a single drive *and* can recover from silent corruption - such as when one of the two 2TBs in my old server went mammaries-skyward and started returning garbage for 24 sectors. Added bonus: I can use block-level transparent compression to save space and, if I choose, deduplication. The downside, of course, is that I'm paying for 12TBs of storage and only using 6TB. But I also back up - important stuff to a remote server, less important stuff to an offline hard drive I manually update and store in the cellar. Because, sing it with me now, RAID is not a backup.
True, and something to bear in mind of course. But also if there's nothing unique about the data, it's not like when it's gone, it's gone. I guess my point is to bear in mind what scenario you're trying to protect against and evaluate if it's really worth it. So lets say a disk fails, you need to then re-rip. Maybe you find that Season 3 of Seinfeld has gone kaput... was it really worth that £100 HDD to not have to re-purchase it for £3.50 on Amazon? If you even care about it at all? Maybe for the time spend re-ripping, but probably not for the data. Lots of what-ifs there, but that's exactly what you should be doing.
Absolutely. In my case, I'm a bit more paranoid than most: I'm ripping the CDs and DVDs - and also a bunch of magazines, 'cos a lifetime subscription to Interzone takes up more room than you'd think - with a view to getting rid of the originals and freeing up some physical space. So in my case, if the data's gone it's gone for good.
Well all that was a read. Which I'll need to spend more time rereading and googling some of the terms . I was planning on using it as an all in one tbh. Full movie library , not sure if the in-laws plan on keeping the DVDs once ripped or storage in the loft. And no not a hughe pain for shows being lost during failures , most will be cheap enough to rebut if needed. Down time wouldn't be the end of the world although obiously would like to avoid. Personal files, whilst spread (photos on Google photos ), and uni work (one drive), the Nas will be my second back up of these not that I think I'll need it. Just nice to have I guess. Personal projects like apps and video project footable I'm working on, which most will be on my min rig anyhow so again these would.be the backup likely . But I plan to store some other stuff there too, maybe collections of books I own digitally from years of humble.bundle orders, and uni books bought in PDF form (all redownload able) , maybe some install files for Windows isos and things. From my reading so far I'm liking the sound of unraid more and more. Whilst it's not a true backup, I don't think that's fully what I'm looking for by the sounds of it, nor afford the cost of which sounds like a completely separate duplicate machine or set drives to mirror incase of failure. I like the idea of the parity drive , which I recon would serve me the best , whilst there are multiple points of failure I can't imagine the running into them , multiple drive failure , possible but not common , for me anyway, always had multiple drives and never had 2 go at once. And whilst corruption is possible from updates, I always try to do backups / restore points before hand (not bullet proof, but better than doing nothing) As for drives, I'll work with what I have , prob picking up another 4tb drive, I think I might spring for a red pro or an iron wolf for the 600,000 over the cheaper drives, and in futrue replace the other ones with much better drives when more affordable . By the sounds of it there don't seem to be a buiet proof option for something that's protected from everything and ceftianly not within a budget of a few hunder quid anyway. I'm looking at spending another £300 ish And from the used parts I'm sourcing on eBay price wise looks to be very doable for a machine that will do what I need and give me over 7tb of usable space with a parilty disk and expandability when new drives come in down the line
Save your money, get a Red Plus. They're what the stock Reds were, until WD started mixing CMR and DM-SMR and got caught - so left DM-SMR in the Reds and said "hey, if you want a NAS drive that'll actually work, you can now pay extra for the Red Plus! (Just, y'know, ignore the fact that the Red Plus is literally just what the stock Reds used to be...)" Or, yeah, an IronWolf. They're all CMR, and Seagate has said it has no plans to hide DM-SMR in there. (And when Seagate is being the good guy, you know something's screwy.)
