New Server - SageTV+unRAID under ESXi 4.1

[dcardellini]

BobPhoenix:

Thx for clarification. I wish there was something I could do with my hardware raid system and the mixing of these older and newer Advanced Format drives. As the hardware raid card mfgr's all recommend building array with the same make/model drive, I suspect I would be on the bleeding edge of that experiment. (one more tick in the box for Unraid, eh?).

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

To the point, though, I do like the promise of Unraid, but somewhere along this thread I lost where you shifted to playing with Flexraid? Where you unsuccessful with Unraid? Or was this a temporary step?

Well I was going to use it, but ran into an ESXi roadblock in that the R5000 doesn't work in a VM. So I basically abandoned the whole VM idea in favor of just an XP system running FlexRAID. I originally thought the only meaningful difference between unRAID and FlexRAID/FlexRAID-View was that FlexRAID was a snapshot (vs live) RAID.

Unfortunately it turns out there are some "unfortunate" limitations design/choices in FlexRAID View regarding folder merging that at best make it a lot more work, and at worst are non-starters for me.

If Unraid is still your goal, I just read (somewhere) that Advanced Format Drives are not compatible with Unraid, and you did mention the WD20EARS drives (which are Advanced Format).

Interesting, I was actually using WD20EARS drives with my unRAID. I did have a couple performance issues (in the VM) that I never really bothered tracking down as I gave up, maybe they were related to that. Or did the drives just not work at all?

I'm actually now considering just going with two separate machines, one unRAID and one SageTV.

-edit:

Interesting, this thread is describing basically the exact issue I was seeing, random very, very slow performance. I'll have to check my jumpers.
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7423.0

[jayman]

Stanger89: Did you ever try an UnRaid VM within a windows host and run into similar problems that Ehfortin did? You mentioned that you're using EARS drives with UnRaid.

Ehfortin: Are any of your drives in your UnRaid system WD "EARS" drives?

My thought is, if both of you have "EARS" drives in common with jumpers incorrectly set, then that would further motivate me to test the UnRaid VM in the Windows host, given that may be a problem in both of your environments. If you guys have this in common, and this plan works out for me, then this may help you guys as well. My reason being is that I'd set it up with 1x2TB FALS, 3x2TB EADS, and 1x1TB EADS. In other words, I do not have any WD advanced format drives (EARS).

I really like UnRaid in that it provides flexible redundancy without losing 50% of storage space due to mirroring or 1/1 duplication like RAID 1 or WHS. With data drive passthrough, one could easily imagine taking the UnRaid flash drive and the hdd's and moving back to a physical machine if ever desired (of course matching drive s/n with the appropriate port on the new physical hardware to match the array config). I'm running a Win7 box and an UnRaid box both without issue (I think you'd be happy with this, Stanger89, IF you are OK with two physical machines as servers), BUT the Win7/Sage box is very under-utilized, and it would be ideal to repurpose the current UnRaid mobo/cpu/RAM to a dev system that's mostly shutdown when not in use OR sell it.

dcardellini: If my 1 FALS drive was also an EADS drive, I'd probably do the Perc 5i like paulbeers and be done with a 4x2TB Raid 5 and repurpose the 1TB EADS. I'm very hesitant to mix 1 black 2TB drive with 3 green 2TB drives in a Raid 5 array. Your point is well taken about avoidance of mixing different model and/or capacity drives in striping arrays.

Also, In preparation for what I thought would be a stab at ESXi, I replaced my onboard Realtek NIC on the Windows/Sage i7 system (disabled in BIOS) with the Intel GbE PCIe NIC previously mentioned, and my Windows Explorer copy (~5GB iso) from Windows to UnRaid jumped from ~35MB/s to 42MB/s with a less "spiked" networking graph in the task manager. In both cases, jumbo frames and flow control are off. I think these Intel NIC's are really nice. If I end up sticking with the two physical boxes, I'll probably disable the onboard 10/100/1000NIC on the UnRaid (780G board; I think it's a Realtek NIC) and slap in a PCIe Intel NIC. I wonder if that will add another 7-8MB/s on the other end???

Jay

[madpoet]

Guys, you might also want to see this if you haven't already... fairly step by step for ESX and unRaid.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7914.0

[jayman]

Originally Posted by madpoet

Guys, you might also want to see this if you haven't already... fairly step by step for ESX and unRaid.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7914.0

In fact, I used the WinImage part of the procedure linkede above to create an UnRaid Pro VMDK which I was able to boot into in Virtualbox on the Win7/Sage host with my flash drive in pass through. The renaming part is also essential. I have yet to connect or assign physical drives to test with the UnRaid VM. In the last section of the UnRaid WebGUI, I can see blank dropdowns for all 20 data disk slots + parity and cache drive slot. If I passed through some drives to the VM, I'm sure I'd be able to make appropriate selections in those slots to build an array. I have bridged networking setup and I can \\tower into this VM. I can see "flash" as a share as expected.

As you can see, I'm close to testing this out for myself, BUT if Ehfortin and Stanger89's problems are common or unlikely related to EARS drives and jumper settings, then there's no reason to believe that I'd be any more successful with the UnRaid VM in the Windows host. Someone once said:"Repeating the same experiment and expecting a different result each time is insanity." I'm pretty sure it was Einstein who said that

[ehfortin]

A few points to cover.

1) I tried using VirtualBox under Windows 7 x64 with a brand new Unraid install (in a VM) using my current Unraid disk. The performance was not good and... at some point, VBox just hang (actually, the process got killed without any warning). I did try it a few times and got the same result. I must say that I had a parity disk check going on so... it was I/O intensive for a few hours before it happens. With performance below 10 MB/sec, it was already not good but... hanging is not an option. Didn't tried to replace VirtualBox with VMware server or VMplayer however. It may have been more stable assuming we can do RDM and USB passthrough with those, which I don't know.

2) I currently have Unraid under a VM with ESXi and it has been running for weeks without problems. Doing a parity disk check in this setup is getting me over 90 MB/sec (I have 10 disks going on, all SATA and 8 of them being 7200 RPM 1 TB ddrive, 2 of them are WD20EARS 2 TB drive (5400 RPM). Based on comment I got on the Unraid forum, that is considered a very good throughput. Before adding the parity disk, I was able to get about 40 MB/sec writing to my Unraid VM. Now, I'm about at 25-30 MB/sec (I'm not using cache disk so... every writes trigger the parity disk as well).

3) I was aware of the potential problem regarding the WD20EARS drive and the jumper thing. I did testing without adding any jumper and was satisfied with performance so... I never added those. I never got the performance issue that was possible. Maybe it is because I'm under a VM so... even if the disks are RDM (passthrough), there is still a layer of ESXi in front of my LSI1068 controller (I've not done a passthrough of the PCIe card itself).

4) Just to make sure I'm clear, I have no issue with Unraid under VM. It is doing it's job pretty well for a few months now.

5) My problem is having SageTV in a VM as recording from my HD-PVR through a passthrough USB port are sometime corrupted in some way. I assumed at some point it was because both Unraid and SageTV were in their own VM which was adding latency at 2 places but... my latest testing prove that even trying to record within the SageTV VM on an independant VMDK was having the same issue. So, I suspect the USB passthrough of ESXi when combined with HD-PVR and Windows XP guest and writing to a virtualized disk may all be part of the problem.

6) Broconne had a similar setup working fine (SageTV VM) but he is writing to a physical NAS server (OpenSolaris server). I'm doing the inverse where my SageTV is physical and I'm writing to my Unraid VM and I don't have issue either with this setup (except for the fact that it require 2 machines)

So, Jayman, if you are to try something over Win7x64, look at the VMware alternatives (VMWare Server 2.x or VMplayer). I like VirtuaBox a lot and use it everyday on my laptop (and also had a firewall running under it for about 6 months before coming back to ESXi 4.1) but... it was not stable under heavy stress on Windows 7 for me at least (and parity disk check is sure to stress such a config for real). Make sure to let us know if you have success.

Hope this clarify some of the points of the recent posts.

Thanks.

ehfortin

[jayman]

Originally Posted by ehfortin

A few points to cover.

1) I tried using VirtualBox under Windows 7 x64 with a brand new Unraid install (in a VM) using my current Unraid disk. The performance was not good and... at some point, VBox just hang (actually, the process got killed without any warning). I did try it a few times and got the same result. I must say that I had a parity disk check going on so... it was I/O intensive for a few hours before it happens. With performance below 10 MB/sec, it was already not good but... hanging is not an option. Didn't tried to replace VirtualBox with VMware server or VMplayer however. It may have been more stable assuming we can do RDM and USB passthrough with those, which I don't know.

So, it looks like the hanging thing during parity sync happened on virtual drives in your environment. As I understand you couldn't do this on raw drives because of the drive number shift you were observing in disk manager.

Do you think the drive number shift thing was due to EARS drives, the large number of drives you have, both of the above, none of the above, something else???

So the way I see it, this was not tested in the windows host with raw disks (due to potential for inaccurate //PhysicalDrivex maps due to Disk Manager numbers randomly changing) OR with non-EARS drives in the mix. I think I will try this on VBox since it will be somewhat of a different experiment.. I will shy away from Vmware server for now due to its lack of support for raw drives.

Here's what I'll do....
1. Add blank disks to the i7 physical machine and power on (physically speaking).
2. Take note of S/N's, positions on mobo, positions in BIOS boot order, and Disk# in disk management console (DM).
3. Reboot
4. See if anything changes positionwiso in BIOS or DM.
5. Plug in sevaral USB pen drives and see if Disk#'s in DM change.
6. Reboot
7. See if boot order in BIOS changes as well as Disk # in DM after reboot.
8. If all holds consistent create raw maps via raw VDMK creation (Chapter 9 of VBox manual) for the 1x2TB FALS and each of the 3x2TB EADS
9. Add VMDK's in 8 above as SATA drives in the UnRaid VM in Vbox, which is also setup to do raw passthrough on the UnRaid Flash Drive to get the pro license. Note, the UnRaid VM will have 1CPU and 1024MB RAM dedicated
10. Power on VM and Log into UnRaid WebGUI
11. See if new drives are selectable in the devices section. If so...
12. Add FALS as parity drive (fastest drive) and the three EADS drives as disk1, disk2, and disk 3.
13. Power up array in UnRaid WebGUI and do parity sync.
14. Take random screenshots of parity sync speed in WebGUI, each time after hitting refresh.
15. Monitor performance of Win7x64 host.

Questions:
1. Does this look sound as far as a step-by-step plan goes?
2. Can I use the performance monitor in the windows management console to monitor host performance. If so, what should I add as monitoring criteria?
3. What are the big risks of raw disk mappings in a VM, aside from the disk number thing in DM console?

If this works well (we can deside what this means a bit later), I'll powerdown (VM and host), add an old 300GB IDE HDD, give it a RAW VDMK, add it to the VM and assign it the cache slot in UnRaid. Then I'll try to copy a large iso to the cache drive, directing to a DVD user share....

A poster named "unraided" in the UnRaid forum created an UnRAid VM in VBox with a basic version of Unraid 4.5.3. (I intend to use 4.5.6 PRO; only reason I have pro is that I had an older IDE based unraid with 8 IDE disks back in the day)

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6260.0

From the looks of this, this appears to use virtual disks rather than raw disks, would you (all) agree?

In sum, what I see as different in this experiment is:
1. All raw disks (FLASH and HDD's) if DM numbering doesn't shift
2. Smaller array in terms of number of disks (6TB over 3 data disks with 2TB parity)
3. No EARS drives in the mix

[ehfortin]

Hey,

I used my RAW disks when I tried VirtualBox on Win7x64. So, I basically took my Unraid disks from under VMware ESXi and move them to VirtualBox. Same disks, same content (that's the fun part of using RAW but it can be scarry sometime).

So the hanging was with the RAW device, yes.

I've figured out the disk shifting in Windows 7. I have 3 SATA controller on this machine. One Marvell (dual port), one Intel (6 ports) and one LSI1068 (8 ports). That's not counting the USB thumb drive that shows as IDE disk as well when they are already there. My problem was that I've used the fact that my SATA controller all accept hot plugging so... I've inserted my drive in the order they should be based on the SATA controller but... the BIOS is not thinking the same so when I've rebooted, it changed the order of most drives. I had to do a few reboot to figure that once you don't change anything, the drives seems to stay at the same spot. My only concern is about replacing a drive as I expect it may not take the spot of the old one as it will be different based on serial number alone. But... I won't have to try this as VBox is out of the equation now.

Regarding the steps you are proposing, your steps 1-7 should give you a pretty good idea about if you have something to worry about. I would probably add the "bad disk replacement" scenario to see how things are looking after such a change.

For the monitoring, I guess you can use what is available in Windows (in addition to what is reported by Unraid itself) but... I've didn't used it so I would not know what could be useful. I guess I've looked at CPU monitor but can't remember the result. With a quad core, it may not be able to get the CPU at 100% because you won't assign all core to your VM. I think I remember it was much more CPU intensive with VirtualBox then ESXi but... I guess not enough for me to remember about it as one reason not to do that

To me, there is not much risks at using raw disk mappings. It is used as a normal disk under physical hardware. So, the same caution apply in both case. The only greater risk is that it may be easy to use the wrong disk by mistake as you are not relying on physical parts connected to physical cable. That's where thing can get confusing sometime.

I've took a look at the post from "unraided" and he is now telling much about the disk part. It may well be regular VMDK/VDI file over the physical drive. Raw device mapping is relatively esoteric for most people so I assume he would have talked about it if it was the way he did it.

Have a nice weekend, you will probably be busy

ehfortin

[dcardellini]

Originally Posted by jayman

......dcardellini: If my 1 FALS drive was also an EADS drive, I'd probably do the Perc 5i like paulbeers and be done with a 4x2TB Raid 5 and repurpose the 1TB EADS. I'm very hesitant to mix 1 black 2TB drive with 3 green 2TB drives in a Raid 5 array. Your point is well taken about avoidance of mixing different model and/or capacity drives in striping arrays.

......Jay

I couple of other things about the EARS that I should point out. With hardware RAID cards (not sure about the Perc 5i though), the hardware RAID cards will automatically fix bad read and write sectors on individual drives, using the redundant data in the array and moving data to new location on drive. If you do not use drives that are intended to be used in these self correcting arrays, here is what happens:......the drive takes too long to come back to the RAID card and report an error...because IT is trying to do something about it. The hardware RAID card, after x nimber of seconds thinks the the drive is dead, degrades the whole array, and you are forced to rebuild the array.

Western Digital has a utility, WDTLER, that forces the drive to report the error in a much shorter time, avoiding this problem. This utility works on the WD20EADS, but they have disabled it on the EARS line (trying to force hardware RAID people to spend double for their Enterprise drives).

Lastly, I could not confirm whether the EARS had a jumper for staggered spin up. With 17 drives, my system would not boot until I enabled staggered spin up. I draw about 190 watts under normal operation, have a small power supply. Seems riduculous to have to use a 1000+ watt supply just to handle startup. The WD20EADS has the jumper option and it works great with my 3Ware card.

[dcardellini]

Originally Posted by stanger89

.....I'm actually now considering just going with two separate machines, one unRAID and one SageTV.

Ahh.... and then that obsession thing kicks in...... throwing towel in from what "should be easy to do." I thought that you have used a 3Ware card in the past, Stanger? I am delighted with my hardware raid cards over past 5 years. It is a platform that is upgradable, transportable to virtually any operating system/hardware platform (that has a PCIe X8 or X16 slot), and is incredibly robost. The big downside I see is cost. My 24-port board was expensive. Having to use same model drives is a bit of a pain, but I suspect that even if you were unraiding, and had slowly grown your mismatched drive collection over time, you would, at some point replace a lot of mismatched drives with half or less the number of much higher capacity drives. Just curious why Hardware RAID has come off the table for you?

[dcardellini]

....and to finalize my rant on the EARS's.....

Forgetting RAID completely, these Advanced Format Drives probably work great on Win 7.......but if you plan to use them on XP, beware of some things there.....do your homework...... alignment tools, performance, etc. etc.

[jayman]

Originally Posted by jayman

Here's what I'll do....
1. Add blank disks to the i7 physical machine and power on (physically speaking).
2. Take note of S/N's, positions on mobo, positions in BIOS boot order, and Disk# in disk management console (DM).
3. Reboot
4. See if anything changes positionwiso in BIOS or DM.
5. Plug in sevaral USB pen drives and see if Disk#'s in DM change.
6. Reboot
7. See if boot order in BIOS changes as well as Disk # in DM after reboot.
8. If all holds consistent create raw maps via raw VDMK creation (Chapter 9 of VBox manual) for the 1x2TB FALS and each of the 3x2TB EADS
9. Add VMDK's in 8 above as SATA drives in the UnRaid VM in Vbox, which is also setup to do raw passthrough on the UnRaid Flash Drive to get the pro license. Note, the UnRaid VM will have 1CPU and 1024MB RAM dedicated
10. Power on VM and Log into UnRaid WebGUI
11. See if new drives are selectable in the devices section. If so...

Created a raw vmdk from a single 2 TB EADS drive (Disk2 in DM) and added to the VM as SATA AHCI. Started array. Could see the disk in the dropdown for parity, disk1, disk2, etc. in the unraid webgui. Good. Added to the disk 1 slot and went to main page of unraid webgui. Disk assigned as disk 1 with no parity drive. Good. Started the array and got green dot next to disk 1. Good. Checked the box to format the disk and clicked the format button. The UnRaid VM froze!

[jayman]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

I couple of other things about the EARS that I should point out. With hardware RAID cards (not sure about the Perc 5i though), the hardware RAID cards will automatically fix bad read and write sectors on individual drives, using the redundant data in the array and moving data to new location on drive. If you do not use drives that are intended to be used in these self correcting arrays, here is what happens:......the drive takes too long to come back to the RAID card and report an error...because IT is trying to do something about it. The hardware RAID card, after x nimber of seconds thinks the the drive is dead, degrades the whole array, and you are forced to rebuild the array.

Western Digital has a utility, WDTLER, that forces the drive to report the error in a much shorter time, avoiding this problem. This utility works on the WD20EADS, but they have disabled it on the EARS line (trying to force hardware RAID people to spend double for their Enterprise drives).

Lastly, I could not confirm whether the EARS had a jumper for staggered spin up. With 17 drives, my system would not boot until I enabled staggered spin up. I draw about 190 watts under normal operation, have a small power supply. Seems riduculous to have to use a 1000+ watt supply just to handle startup. The WD20EADS has the jumper option and it works great with my 3Ware card.

If I run WDTLER on my 3 EADS drives and on my 1 FALS drive (just to be safe), then created a 6TB Raid 5 on a Perc5i with all 4 drives, do you think the FALS drive mixed in with the EADS drives would be problematic?

It looks like paulbeers (another similar thread) may be running green drives on a Perc 5i....

[dcardellini]

I am really an amateur on the low-level specifics (my day job has nothing to do with computers) so cannot offer any advise here on mixing drives. It does look like the FALS drive can also be TLER'ed, though....

The decision to TLER or not really depends on your hardware. By enabling TLER, you are essentially handing responsibility for error correction from the drive itself to the RAID hardware......disabling (partially,totally??) error correction on the drive itself.

So before TLER'ing, ensure that your Perc 5i automatically handles and fixes sector errors.....

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Ahh.... and then that obsession thing kicks in...... throwing towel in from what "should be easy to do." I thought that you have used a 3Ware card in the past, Stanger? I am delighted with my hardware raid cards over past 5 years. It is a platform that is upgradable, transportable to virtually any operating system/hardware platform (that has a PCIe X8 or X16 slot), and is incredibly robost. The big downside I see is cost.

And that's really the issue, I'm not keen on the idea of spending $600+ on a RAID card. Of course there are some other things, like I like the idea of being able to put whatever drives I want in, and not having all the drives spinning all day.

Of course that brings up another issue I was thinking about. With <=25W PCs available these days, I'm actually thinking one hardware machine with virtualized unRAID and SageTV systems on it, might actually use more power than two separate machines. Just looking at some math 25W is equivalent to about 6-7 WD Green drives (they pull just under 4W according to WDC's specs).

Of course the other issue is how many years it would take to recoup the cost of the second machine.

My 24-port board was expensive. Having to use same model drives is a bit of a pain, but I suspect that even if you were unraiding, and had slowly grown your mismatched drive collection over time, you would, at some point replace a lot of mismatched drives with half or less the number of much higher capacity drives. Just curious why Hardware RAID has come off the table for you?

Cost mainly. But regarding mismatched drives, the nice thing about unRAID is you don't need to grow the number of drives to huge numbers. For example I just bought 2TB drives for my testing/setup, and now 3TB drives are out, so I can buy those when I need more space, and so on. I'm not "stuck" buying 2TB drives because that's what the rest of my array already is.

Still not sure what I'm going to do, one option is to get another HD PVR and "replace" my R5000 which was the reason for giving up ESXi.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Still not sure what I'm going to do, one option is to get another HD PVR and "replace" my R5000 which was the reason for giving up ESXi.

You'd need the extra 3TB drives to make up the change from 5Mbps streams from the R-5000, to the 11+Mbps streams the HD-PVR would require to get the same quality.. ;-)

Honestly, though, while virtualization is great and all, for something like this to work well, and have good enough performance, I'd need to upgrade my system to a VT-d supporting motherboard, to get the R-5000's to work (dedicate the USB controller to the VM). In the end, the cost of doing this, versus just dedicating a super budget/low power PC to unRAID means I may end up with two small PC's instead of one large one.

That, or I just forget about RAID, and keep my drives independent like they currently are. Re-ripping isn't going to be the end of the world.. ;-)

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

You'd need the extra 3TB drives to make up the change from 5Mbps streams from the R-5000, to the 11+Mbps streams the HD-PVR would require to get the same quality.. ;-)

I don't record to the array, and probably 90% of my recordings are already on my HD PVR, Sage seems to prefer the HD PVR for some reason, and considering the HD PVR is more reliable, it works for me.

Honestly, though, while virtualization is great and all, for something like this to work well, and have good enough performance, I'd need to upgrade my system to a VT-d supporting motherboard, to get the R-5000's to work (dedicate the USB controller to the VM). In the end, the cost of doing this, versus just dedicating a super budget/low power PC to unRAID means I may end up with two small PC's instead of one large one.

From what I've seen, the R5000 is the only thing that won't work with just standard USB passthrough. I suppose I could try that potentially though. My i7 supports VT-d, I could drop ESXi on a flash drive on that again and try the R5000 in that. Might be worth a shot, to see if it would be worth buying an i5 system for this endeavor.

That, or I just forget about RAID, and keep my drives independent like they currently are. Re-ripping isn't going to be the end of the world.. ;-)

I've been "saved" a couple times by my "RAID" setups. Granted I think poor airflow/cooling was the root cause, but it's still enough that I'm not going to keep TBs of data around without redundancy.

[dcardellini]

Originally Posted by stanger89

...... Of course there are some other things, like I like the idea of being able to put whatever drives I want in, and not having all the drives spinning all day.

Hah. Forgot about that too (as an advantage of UnRAID over hardware RAID). And, on this track, I can see a rationale to give up my obsession for "one box does all."

I know that this thread is not about "UnRAID versus Hardware RAID," but the gist of this thread is:

"I'd like one box that does it all, and here is a possible solution to get there."

As Hardware RAID can do that now, it is natural to weigh it against UnRAID.

So here is what I see to date (advantage of Unraid over Hardware RAID):

1. Cost is much lower

2. Don't need to match exact make/model drive as you expand array

3. Can add larger drives to array as they become available.

4. Don't need to use drives that support some form of TLER.

5. Only lose one drives worth of data versus whole array lost with two drives failed (RAID5). Toss-up on on whether RAID6 is still better tolerating two failed drives with no data loss (but its all gone with three lost!).

6. If array not being used, drives can be put to sleep. (maybe ARECA hardware RAID does this now).

7. When accessing array, only drives with data are spun -up to retrieve, unlike my 3Ware, where 17 drives light up for the most minor access.


I do the same as you, Stanger: all my recordings go on a MB-connected drive, and nightly an automated batch transfer takes them to my array...this opens some interesting possibilities. With kids out of the house now, we are often gone from house or not watching/using the system....why can't my 17 drive array just be shut down, with a low power PC making recordings as needed (I don't use placeshifter while away due to lousy internet upload rate). It just isn't very friendly to "turn it on when needed" and not clear how Sage handles disappearing/reappearing locations for media content.

Hummm...

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by dcardellini

Hah. Forgot about that too (as an advantage of UnRAID over hardware RAID). And, on this track, I can see a rationale to give up my obsession for "one box does all."

I know that this thread is not about "UnRAID versus Hardware RAID," but the gist of this thread is:

"I'd like one box that does it all, and here is a possible solution to get there."

That's not exactly what I was looking for. Where I'm coming from is more along the lines of, I've already got a server with an (old) 3ware card in it, that's long been full and I need a new storage solution.

My research led me to unRAID as being the ideal storage solution for my situation. The problem is unRAID is an OS, and based on Slackware not Windows so as such, normally requires it's own machine. Given that I already have a SageTV server, and a ReadyNAS, I'm not keen on having a 3rd machine/NAS running all the time.

Finally, I came across ESXi adding USB passthrough support, and since all my tuners are either network or USB, it seemed like a great aligning of the stars as it were, to allow the two main functions I'm looking for (SageTV and unRAID) to be done on one machine.

As Hardware RAID can do that now, it is natural to weigh it against UnRAID.

Right, and that's what I've got now and it works pretty well. But I've been looking at my needs, how I use my system, and everything else, and a $500 RAID controller (I was figuring something like a 9690SA if I went that route) just isn't very attractive IMO.

1. Cost is much lower

2. Don't need to match exact make/model drive as you expand array

3. Can add larger drives to array as they become available.

4. Don't need to use drives that support some form of TLER.

5. Only lose one drives worth of data versus whole array lost with two drives failed (RAID5). Toss-up on on whether RAID6 is still better tolerating two failed drives with no data loss (but its all gone with three lost!).

6. If array not being used, drives can be put to sleep. (maybe ARECA hardware RAID does this now).

7. When accessing array, only drives with data are spun -up to retrieve, unlike my 3Ware, where 17 drives light up for the most minor access.

Yup, I've got a 750W PSU (IIRC) in my server just to handle the spool up of the 8 RAID drives plus other drives (I think it was 12 total).

I do the same as you, Stanger: all my recordings go on a MB-connected drive, and nightly an automated batch transfer takes them to my array...this opens some interesting possibilities. With kids out of the house now, we are often gone from house or not watching/using the system....why can't my 17 drive array just be shut down, with a low power PC making recordings as needed (I don't use placeshifter while away due to lousy internet upload rate). It just isn't very friendly to "turn it on when needed" and not clear how Sage handles disappearing/reappearing locations for media content.

Well FWIW, I don't even transfer my recordings to the array, my recordings are completely separate from my "static" media (basically DVD/BD rips) which is on my redundant storage. I don't save recordings, in general if it's worth keeping it's worth buying on BD to avoid the issues of broadcast.

As far as "disappearing", I'm not exactly sure what you mean, the drives don't disappear when spun down, the data always appears online. The only downside to spindown is that you have to wait a couple seconds for the drive to spin up when you first access data on a spun down drive.

I wouldn't allow my whole unRAID machine to sleep or turn off, just like I don't let my Sage machine sleep either.

[dcardellini]

Originally Posted by stanger89

....As far as "disappearing", I'm not exactly sure what you mean, .....

Sorry for confusion....this was a leap to moving Sage to another low power box, and physically turning off my current server with hardware raid card, as that is the only way to drop my 190 watt continuous need. Not likely I would dump my 9650SE-24 at this point. Not sure that Sage would like that, along with the complication of turning on, putting to sleep the server box.

.....but now I am way off topic for this thread....apologies....