whs or unraid?

[watts5ive]

Ive had unraid for over a year now, it has been flawless. I am new to sage, about 2 months. One of the reasons for choosing unraid over whs at the time was the whs backup method. In order to backup a 40 gb blu-ray it takes 80 gb to back up, its just an exact copy taking up space (mirror). They may have changed this but when I decided to go with unraid they were still a 1 to 1 copy. I have used unraid with sagetv and it works great, never had a problem yet and I am using the hd-pvr. I get around 30 MB blu-ray rips across the network. Thats from HTPC, through gigabit swtich to unraid box, no cache drive.
Have norco 20 bay box, core 2 duo, 2 gigs of crucial, 12 drives. It just works

[davephan]

Originally Posted by watts5ive

Ive had unraid for over a year now, it has been flawless. I am new to sage, about 2 months. One of the reasons for choosing unraid over whs at the time was the whs backup method. In order to backup a 40 gb blu-ray it takes 80 gb to back up, its just an exact copy taking up space (mirror). They may have changed this but when I decided to go with unraid they were still a 1 to 1 copy. I have used unraid with sagetv and it works great, never had a problem yet and I am using the hd-pvr. I get around 30 MB blu-ray rips across the network. Thats from HTPC, through gigabit swtich to unraid box, no cache drive.
Have norco 20 bay box, core 2 duo, 2 gigs of crucial, 12 drives. It just works

I am thinking of adding more storage space. I looked at unraid a bit and tried booting up to the USB flash drive with the free unraid 3 drive version. I was prompted for a username and password. It wasn't clear what the default username and password is for unraid. This could be a problem if the unraid box is rebooted automatically, it might 'hang' waiting for a log in. I rebooted back into Windows XP after the initial test with unraid and lost both network cards, which did concern me. I powered down the computer and rebooted back into Windows XP and the network cards worked again.

I'm a little concerned about unraid access speed. The unraid web site does say it is slower than RAID 1 or RAID 5. I've read posts where recordings are done on other drives and later copied to the unraid server. Is the read access slower too? I don't know if this could be a problem causing video stuttering.

WHS as I understand it is not very efficient, like RAID 1, consuming 50% of the disk space for redundancy. I understand that unraid only uses one drive for parity, like RAID 5, even with 20 drives. I don't know if unraid could have a hot spare drive like RAID 5. Is it possible to run the unraid parity drive on RAID 1 for more redundancy?

I've also looked at the Norco 20 bay box. Some of the reviews are a bit troubling about the connections to the drives. One review mentioned that the drives are so tight that you cannot get a playing card between the drives. Do you have a heating problem with the drives? I understand the fans that come with the unit sound like a rocket afterburner. I've read a post where the fans were replaced with quieter fans, but I don't know if there is enough air passing around the drives so that they don't run hot.

My main concern with WHS is the inability to recover its own operating system drive. This serious flaw is supposed to be fixed in the Vail release, which I understand could happen before Christmas. If WHS Vail can recover back to a point in time, it may be a viable one server SageTV solution. However, my concern is Microsoft is then being trusted for backup and recovery. I've tested Microsoft backup and recovery software in the past. The backups seemed to be good, but the recoveries failed, which made the backup/recovery software useless. Perhaps the WHS Vail backup/recovery software will be reliable.

Dave

[valnar]

I use one box running Sage and as a Server. All drives in that box.

I can't see the benefit of making any of my media a network link away from Sage compared to raw SATA or RAID speeds.

[jbuszkie]

I've been running unraid probably over a year+ now. I record to my local box and when I start running out of space, I move stuff over to the raid box.
I have no issue streaming video to the server and a HD200 simultaneously from unraid. I do have a cache disk but I have my limits set up such that I record to the main box first. I have on a couple of occasions have it record to unraid when my main box filled up and I didn't have any issues..

As for the unraid root password.. The default username is "root" and there is no password IIRC. You don't need to log in for it to start up. Once it's configured, when you boot up everything is running fine. and the webpage doesn't need a password (unless maybe you set the root to have a password..)

[Evil_Attorney]

I just switched over from Raid 1 mirrored drives to a WHS setup. Previously, I had both HDPVRs recording to the Raid 1 drives without problems. However, I am unable to record/watch to a "duplicated share" without serious performance issues. As soon as an HDPVR starts recording, WHS starts copying that data to another drive, basically cutting any bandwidth to the hard drives in half. When both HDPVRs are recording, it takes 10 seconds to start streaming on a client with occasional dropouts. Other Sage users have reported issues when recording to a duplicated share too. I had to remove duplication for my recording directory to get it to work correctly. While WHS has some nice features, I think some sort of Raid setup will probably have better performance. I have not tried unraid, so I can't directly compare.

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by davephan

I am thinking of adding more storage space. I looked at unraid a bit and tried booting up to the USB flash drive with the free unraid 3 drive version. I was prompted for a username and password. It wasn't clear what the default username and password is for unraid. This could be a problem if the unraid box is rebooted automatically, it might 'hang' waiting for a log in. I rebooted back into Windows XP after the initial test with unraid and lost both network cards, which did concern me. I powered down the computer and rebooted back into Windows XP and the network cards worked again.

I believe the default is root, with no password. However, you don't need to log in at the console with unraid. Most management can be accomplished via the web interface ( http:// name or ip of your unraid box .) For other things that require console access (some customizations do), you'll usually use an SSH client like putty.

Originally Posted by davephan

I'm a little concerned about unraid access speed. The unraid web site does say it is slower than RAID 1 or RAID 5. I've read posts where recordings are done on other drives and later copied to the unraid server. Is the read access slower too? I don't know if this could be a problem causing video stuttering.

As long as you have SATA controllers in AHCI mode and relatively fast drives (pretty much any modern sata drive) speed shouldn't be much of an issue. However, due to the way Windows communicates with SMB (only uses one SMB connection for all communication with an SMB server, instead of one per operation), if the same Windows box is streaming a video from a spun-up drive on the unraid sever, and then accesses something from a spun down drive on the same unraid server, the video stream will be interrupted until the drive completely spins up. If a different machine accesses a spun down drive, it shouldn't effect the streaming of another machine using the spun up drive -- it only happen with a single Windows machine, and is a limitation of Windows, not unraid. If this is an issue, it can be resolved with unraid's spin-up groups. I haven't found it to be a problem.

Recording to a local drive, and then moving to NAS is the best way, no matter the NAS you use. Write performance in unraid has been dramatically improved in the past few versions, but it's still better to keep time sensitive write, like recording live streams, on a fast, local disk.

Originally Posted by davephan

WHS as I understand it is not very efficient, like RAID 1, consuming 50% of the disk space for redundancy. I understand that unraid only uses one drive for parity, like RAID 5, even with 20 drives. I don't know if unraid could have a hot spare drive like RAID 5. Is it possible to run the unraid parity drive on RAID 1 for more redundancy?

Raid 1 for parity wouldn't add much more redundancy. Adding Q-Parity would, allowing any 2 drives to fail. There was talk of this in the past, but for some reason Tom still hasn't added it to unraid. Perhaps after unraid 5 is complete, he'll look at it again.

There is no hot spare for unraid. There are various add-ons for email notifications if a drive fails, so you can tend to it as quickly as possible, or script an automatic shut-down.

If you lose more than one drive in unraid, you have only lost the data on the specific data drive(s) that failed -- not like Raid 5, where you will lose all data in the array.

[davephan]

I also e-mailed my question to unRAID support, and found out that hardware RAID 1 on the parity drive would be a good idea. My reasoning is if you have the parity drive fail, then if any of the data drives fail before the parity drive is replaced and rebuilt, then you will have data loss. They next big feature being added is P+Q parity so the array can tolerate any two drive failure.

I'm going to start testing unRAID soon. If it works out, I will be able to expand my storage. I could expand my storage from 9 TB to about 16 TB with the drives I already have now. For future growth, the storage limit would be about 34 TB with 19 two gig drives and on two gig parity drive on the unRAID server, plus a RAID 1 volume on the SageTV computer. My case could probably hold close to 20 drives, but I would need additional controllers to get past 10 drives. The recording would be first stored on the SageTV computer, then moved to the unRAID server, probably with SQJ.

Dave

[davephan]

With unRAID, can I start with the free 3 drive version and upgrade later to the 'Pro' 20 driver version without backing up the data elsewhere? Will the 'Pro' 20 drive version recognize the 3 drives used with the free version without losing data?

Dave

[Bizarroterl]

Originally Posted by davephan

With unRAID, can I start with the free 3 drive version and upgrade later to the 'Pro' 20 driver version without backing up the data elsewhere? Will the 'Pro' 20 drive version recognize the 3 drives used with the free version without losing data?

Dave

Yes. That's the common way people start with UnRaid.