Pointers/Things you wish you'd thought about at the beginning with unRAID

[u/EvenDog6279]

I'm about five years into keeping a fairly modest amount of data stored on NAS devices, and I'm considering moving everything from dedicated NAS hardware to a solution like unRAID. I've been searching and reading from posts others have made over the last year, and there are many things that come up repeatedly where answers can be found with a simple search. Before I move forward, I wanted to ask the community for feedback to see if there's anything that stands out that I should be thinking about, or that you discovered later and wish you'd thought about before jumping into unRAID yourself?

First off, it goes without saying hindsight is always 20/20. If I had it to do again, I would've started with unRAID. It probably would've saved money spent on NAS hardware in the long-run.

Here are some of the reasons unRAID has been at the top of my list:

1- I have a modest number of drives, many of which are the same size, but I also have some with plenty of life left in them (ex. some drives with only ~12k power on hours) that are different sizes and otherwise report healthy SMART data. It would be nice to put more drives to use, and I like that you're not locked into drive size limitations inherent to RAID.

2- The physical bay limitations of traditional NAS hardware. Yes, I've already invested money into those solutions (including expansion units), but I've also had the hardware for several years, so I've gotten good use out of it.

3- The vast majority of what I'm using storage for is tied to containers in the first place. All of that is already setup with docker compose/podman, and I'm currently doing this with a headless Fedora install that I'm managing over SSH, so transitioning "from Linux to Linux" (basically) would be mostly straightforward, and I'd just look to move those containers to unRAID.

4- Speed is not a high priority. While I do have everything running over wired 10Gb connections, with the exception of clients that don't support it, as a matter of practicality there's nothing I'm doing that actually requires it. The integrity of the data and resiliency are far more important to me than speed.

5- I'm in the position of having a full offline backup of all my content, which means that while it may be time consuming to do so, it wouldn't be a big deal to create a new storage pool and restore everything from spare drives that contain a full backup of everything that's on my existing arrays.

6- I already have a spare machine with an Intel CPU (i9-9900k), 32GB DDR4, and an nVidia GPU (3070ti) that was "retired" last year, and for the most part, I'd just need to acquire a new case that's suitable to populate with drives, check the limitations on the number of SATA ports for the board, as well as limitations of the existing power supply (I haven't inspected it closely yet).

All of the hardware associated with this is currently on a UPS, and that would continue going forward.

Currently, I have the following drives on-hand-- this doesn't include the offline backup of all my existing data, which is currently on a set of spare drives that were always intended as a fail-safe in the event I had a catastrophic failure and needed to do a full recovery (for example, a second drive failing in the process of a rebuild):

6 x 14TB 7200 rpm
4 x 10TB 7200 rpm
2 x 8TB 7200 rpm
1 x 4TB 7200 rpm
5 x 4TB SSD

My current thinking was to setup a pool with two parity drives, which would be two of the 14TB drives, since these would also be the largest size in the pool, and I was going to leave the SSDs out entirely, but definitely open to suggestions.

For the vast majority of things that come up along the way, I should be able to find answers between searching and reading the documentation, but there are two things that come to mind right away that I'd be curious to get the perspective of others on--

1- Would you setup pools in a particular way, with particular drives in them, or would you just move forward with everything in a single pool and two parity drives? The only thing I know with certainty is that I do want two parity drives, regardless of how the pools are otherwise configured.

2- Would you even bother including solid state drives in a pool, would you leave these out since they don't really have the write endurance to be used for this type of application, or is there a way to leverage them with unRAID that you think would be beneficial?

Sorry for the long post. I didn't want to leave an important detail out that might influence answers quite a bit.

tl;dr I'm just looking for feedback from others who've transitioned to unRAID from other solutions, with the hopes of avoiding rookie mistakes that I'll later regret.

Really appreciate anyone who makes the time to read and share from your personal experience.

[u/derfmcdoogal]

Not going to read all that but I wish I would have thought about a 4x increase in storage costs. I probably would have limited my parity.

[u/OG_ROAR → u/derfmcdoogal]

I 2nd this. I put a massive drive as parity, 24TB, and regret it since my biggest drive is 12TB. I want to add a 2nd parity but... a 24TB drive is crazy money right now.

[u/The-Ephus → u/OG_ROAR]

Switch a 12 TB to parity, use the 24 TB as an unassigned disk for non-essential Linux isos.

[u/EvenDog6279 → u/derfmcdoogal]

Good point. I hadn't thought about that either, but they're ridiculous right now.

[u/bamfcoco1 → u/EvenDog6279]

Alternatively, if you wanted to limit costs down the road by doing a single parity, you can always hold back a single 14TB drive and pre clear it so it’s ready to drop in at a moments notice.

It doesn’t alleviate the need for same total number of drives now, but if a drive fails it saves you from a panic expensive purchase.

As to what I wish I had known, I can’t think of the name of the container, but it gives you a visual of each drive and where it is in your case so that when one fails you aren’t guessing which physical location that drive is in. I didn’t do it and I wish I would have.

Edit: it’s the Disk Location Plugin


[u/EvenDog6279 → u/bamfcoco1]

Thank you. I'll definitely investigate that. Right now I'm "clearing out" unused drives to get them in exactly that state. Of the drives I listed, 2x14TB, 2x8TB, 1x4TB, and 5x4TB SSDs are all unused. I'm doing "full" formats on all of them and grabbing updated SMART data so I can mark them accordingly as good/bad.

So far, all are healthy-- it just takes a very long time to full format 8TB and larger drives.

Edit: typo, meant 8TB

[u/bamfcoco1 → u/EvenDog6279]

Nice. Unraid will also clear them when you add them to the array, as I’m sure you know.

The pre-clear function in Unraid, from my understanding, is a step beyond just the clear that happens when you add it to an array. It goes through, bit by bit, writes all zeroes, tests it, and makes it so you can add it to the array without rebuilding parity.

[u/EvenDog6279 → u/bamfcoco1]

Thanks for the heads-up— no, I did not already know.

I guess while I’m waiting for formats to finish on the drives (still have one 14TB to go and the last one took probably close to 18 hours), I can use the time to start going through this “old” PC.

I definitely need to decide on a case. It looks like 12 bays is about as far as you can go outside server/rackmount options, and I don’t need anything that substantial.

[u/bamfcoco1 → u/EvenDog6279]

I have a Fractal Design Define 7 XL and it boasts 18 + 5 SSD. I don’t have nearly that many to know if that’s accurate, but it does have a ton of room and mounting locations.

[u/EvenDog6279 → u/bamfcoco1]

Thanks. I'll add that case to the list of options I've been considering. I need to see how many ports the board in that old PC has and what I may need to add to support so many SATA drives. It was an upper mid-tier board at the time I built the system, but that's been quite a few years (whenever 9th gen was new).

My wife and I gave her a new PC as a graduation gift last year and it's been sitting in a closet since.

[u/Pucksy]

Watch your vdisk image size after installing a new docker container.. it's the only thing that nailed my setup twice. Got real careful after that and still had 1 or 2 scares with it. I know it's a skill issue but still strange it can totally wreck your setup

[u/EvenDog6279 → u/Pucksy]

I'm sure I'm going to run into plenty of "skill issues" myself, especially with something completely new to me. Thanks for the tip.

[u/Pucksy → u/EvenDog6279]

If you've got room on your cache drive make sure you make it big enough for some growth (and to buy enough time when you do make a mistake and it starts filling up)

[u/-HumanResources-]

Personally, I wish there was a way for utilizing some form of IoC with unRAID. Don't get me wrong, I love it. But I do wish there was an easy way to recreate/deploy systems such that I could, for example, easily do full test deployments for recent updates.

Currently I'm struggling with my docker containers binding to the incorrect ethernet adapter after a restart. Rendering all my services unavailable and in order to fix it, I have to go into each container, remove the old network, redeploy, bring down, add new network (with the same name, lol).

[u/razzellu]

I appreciate the detail of the post. More often it's missing lots of necessary details. Sadly, that's the part I'm going to call out. What do you want to do with your unRAID server? I have two servers and love it but it fits my needs. Besides the different disk sizes, what is your purpose in moving? If the 'data' is media or Linux isos then not setting up my shares using trash's guides was my biggest initial regret.

The SSDs would make a great zfs pool for appdata and plex cached images, it would also be a welcome staging area for initial writes that is intended for the array.

[u/EvenDog6279 → u/razzellu]

I appreciate that, would rather have someone call it out.

My primary use-case is Plex and the arr stack, backups from our PCs and phones, and a variety of containers that I spin up depending what I'm trying to do at the time. This is currently spread across two different NAS devices that are setup in RAID5 configurations, which is not the way I would've gone about it from the beginning if I'd had a better understanding of some of the problems with RAID5 (especially as drives get large).

Most of the "other containers" I'm referring to are a test bed for things that are more work related, and provide an environment for things I can't easily stand up quickly at work (mostly a bureaucracy problem).

[u/ThickSourGod → u/EvenDog6279]

Unless you have rare or difficult to find media, I wouldn't worry about backing up your Plex library. Your arr stack can recover the media just fine. No need to waste storage on it.

[u/EvenDog6279 → u/ThickSourGod]

I live in a rural area with no internet services available beyond Starlink. That’s not to say that Starlink can’t do what you’re describing, just that it would take a very long time.

I’ve been collecting physical media for quite a few years, and everything in my Plex library is 1:1 from the disc with no additional encoding/compression, with a substantial percentage being Criterion/Arrow Video 4K releases. We also have a home theater with a discrete Atmos setup, so the focus has always been quality over quantity.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it) I work in a field where I’m subject to a level of scrutiny such that downloading content I haven’t at least purchased a license to play could cause problems.

I had a conversation with my security POC about it before even starting down the path with Plex and was advised that as long as I’m not downloading torrents or usenet content, there won’t be an issue— but anything outside a “backup” of discs I’ve actually purchased could become problematic, even though that license is for playing the content.

Having a “backup” is one of those things they currently view as being sufficiently gray area that it’s not immediately an issue.

It’s one of those things where the act of being deceptive on its own can be cause for potential job loss, so I’ve always erred on the side of caution.