NAS & RAID Explained - Why I use unRAID

[@RandomAmer]

Please do a follow up video on set up this is a really interesting topic!

[@kinsi55]

Repeatedly (un)parking / starting / stopping HDD's is the main reason of them dying. Having them run 24/7 is (way) less stress than turning them off / on multiple times a day.

[@mojo2418]

kinsi55 [citation needed]

[@BattleNonSense]

Yes, but it depends on how many times per day this happens. In my case, 2 of the data drives will stay off for days _(as they contain photos and other documents)_ , while the drive that contains the movies and TV series is turned on 1 or 2 times per day, and does not run for more than 3 hours per day (_longer on weekends)_ . The parity drive usually stays off from Monday to Friday, as no data is written onto the array during that time _(I mainly load new files onto the array during the weekend)_. So I'd argue that stopping the drives usually *extends* the lifespan of an HDD in a *home* environment as it's not used most of the time. This is however totally different in a business/office environment. :)

[@BattlefieldRoBin]

Not so much anymore, drive quality is the defining factor. I have 8 old WD RE2 2TB in my storage server that runs 24/7 and 4 more in different computers in my house. These drives are OLD. The only way i have been able to kill them is random read/wright torture tests till they surrender XD. On the other hand i have killed my fair share of WD green/blue/black and a few seagate drives from normal desktop use. Just my experience.

[@dannyboy1121x]

Not if it's an SSD.

[@kinsi55]

Well, i explicitly said HDD.

[@LooneyJuice]

Excellent presentation! Thanks a lot. Having not been given the chance to set up a NAS at any point, I had pretty vague knowledge of some of the terminology and functionality. This lifted the veil of mystery from the ordeal. Thanks again!

[@Yatukih_001]

You must have laughed your ass off when you realized it could not properly connect to the PC. I agree. A NAS is a hillarious and laughable thing in 2020.

[@mikem.s.1183]

Hello, Chris. I hope you're doing super well. Your community misses your detailed, analytical videos. All the best, mate.

[@Yatukih_001]

If I want to share data on a network...all I have to use is a processor. No need for a NAS. No need for anything called Raid. No need for a big buck black box to cause nothing but confusion and needless threats of loss of financial independence. QNap, FreeNAS, nas4Free and UnRaid are all just black boxes full of empty space you can use to store fewer things than a bookshelf can. Thanks for the video! Happy summer in the new post NAS period of 2020!

[@noprob250]

Absolut genial, ich liebe deinen Kanal und schaue mir primär deine Hardware Videos an. Sehr toll erklärt! Vielen Dank für die Arbeit und Gruß aus Wiesbaden

[@mariusborge4765]

Please make one more video like you said at the end of the video, how to set it up and what you need. Preferably RAID 1

[@nickhechtel640]

Marius Borge If you want Help with raids, you can add me on Steam: nickhechtel or [DOC] trexxon

[@ReivecS]

Setting up a raid 1 is pretty damn simple. Most motherboards (if not all these days) will support that directly. Just set the SATA controller to RAID mode and there will usually be a hotkey on boot to boot into the RAID controller where you can assign which drives will be in your RAID 1. However changing the controller mode will make data on the drives unreadable (unless you change it back) and if you add drives to an actual RAID set then they will be formatted so this is usually done before you install anything. Many motherboards will allow you to set only some of your SATA connections in RAID mode and keep others unchanged which will allow you to add new drives to an existing system and not need to worry about data loss. It really just comes down to what motherboard you have. You can also use a PCI raid controller and just attach the new drives to that PCI card and do basically the same thing but a dedicated controller for RAID 1 is usually overkill unless you multiboot many OS'es and they have poor drivers for your motherboard.

[@Yatukih_001]

@@nickhechtel640 He doesn´t need help with a Raid. He needs to realize he does not even have to buy one. WTF buy a raid for if you can just let your computer format the hard drive?

[@Yatukih_001]

@@ReivecS Wrong Reivec. Setting up a Raid unit is pretty next to humanly impossible. The connectivity units are not designed for modern computers but future ones. We have no idea what they will be like in the future or even if they will have access points to a Raid device. Raid devices are great props for science fiction films, precisely because of this concept. Beyond that that is pretty much it for them.

[@ReivecS]

@@Yatukih_001 This has to be a joke that is going over my head..... right?

[@dannyboy1121x]

I use Freenas with ZFS so I get protection in software / caching on SSD tier and - most importantly, snapshots and delta only replication between two storage instances. Great video.

[@BigOlBilliam]

Definitely would be interested in seeing how you set up Unraid. Linus has done a video or two on this before, but further detailed explanation would be awesome to see.

[@MelissaTimea99]

yay.. I now have a term for my nightmare setup I currently have: JBOD (just a bunch of disks). Like many others, I have plex and started by adding 1 external drive to watch some of my movies from anywhere. I now have 6 external drives all hooked up to the 1 pc I do everything on. 4 of the external drives require a/c power, so the cord situation is about as out of control as you can imagine. I am in desperate need of a new solution to my plex media and learning about this stuff now finally.

[@Varstahl]

I'm quite surprised you didn't talk about raid 10. For the same reasons you mentioned about flexibility and hardware raids, I also repurposed and old PC, and it's currently sporting a btrfs 6 disks raid10 setup. Has the bonuses of being a simple debian distribution, upon which I added stuff like Plex for the streaming, a source revision control server, and at one point Deluge for the torrents/seeds. KVM for VMs is also an option, have it setup although not currently in use. Having lost so much data in my life I'm ultra terrified about losing a parity or an unrecoverable data drive, that's why I chose to halve the potential data storage to have way more peace of mind. My first choice was ZFS, it's quite amazing tbh, but the need of ECC ram made recycling what I had around quite impossible, and it would have increased the budget of at least an order of magnitude. Still in love with it though.

[@BattleNonSense]

You lose 50% of the total drive capacity with RAID10. So just like RAID 1 it's not what I would use in a NAS where I want to store large projects, movies, etc. :) ZFS does have a lot of great features which is why I first considered to you FreeNAS. But besides the drawbacks I mentioned, the hardware cost are indeed an issue when building a NAS for home use. I also re-used an old mainboard with a core i-5. So ECC would have required a new mainboard and CPU.

[@Varstahl]

Yup, I totally agree. The non-ECC is why I stuck to BTRFS. I still wouldn't trade the mirroring, giving the ultra important stuff I stored on it on top of the other menial things like movies and tv series. BTRFS also has some very interesting setups, where it allows to mirror metadata (and I think parity too, although I'm not sure) while keeping most of the data striped across the devices. A sort of less costly raid5 with the metadata mirrored across all devices if I read correctly, but being fully satisfied with my now 16 TB raid 10, I didn't quite investigate it any further.

[@code1997]

You can get old HP Servers used for 200bucks with an i5 xeon equivalent and 8-16gbs of ecc. Used ECC is super cheap and I see no reason not to use it.

[@v1m]

Well done! Clear and insightful RAID overview.

[@Parky_T]

Great video as always Chris. Keep up the good work!

[@aidanjt]

I don't know about other NAS boxes, but from a recoverability PoV, Synology just uses standard Linux kernel components for volume management (even with SHR), and you can absolutely mount a Synology volume by spinning them up in a PC (or JBOD box) using pretty much any Linux distribution.

[@Triforcecwp]

i know on Qnap u can add additional drives to an existing array, you can also swap from 3 drives in raid 5, to a 4 drives in raid 6. Ive currently got a raid 6 (3TBx8) running on a Ts-831x. Its great i use it for everything. Also a Qnap raid can be moved over to a new Nas really easily, without having to do a rebuild or anything of the sort. It does get noisy but that's why Ive got my rack in another room :P I hope it works out well for you, i like your videos cant wait until the next one. Take care i wish u all the best.

[@BattleNonSense]

We once had an LSI RAID 5 card at work which died. We could not get an identical replacement card so we tried to move the HDDs to a newer LSI card. This was sadly not as straight forward as we liked. You can face some though challenges when moving your drives to a (newer) hardware controller. O.o

[@aarbbee]

I had a simular issue, around that the first mainboards had Raid. When that went stuck, you had a problem. I tried to go around that, with an Adaptec Ultra Wide SCSI 2 card. But I had to start all over again. After some research I found out that if that Adaptec card would break that the raid would break, and I could not fix it. Not even with the same type of card. The explanation was that the raid is writing something of a card-code in the raid. And you need the exact number of card and it could be fixed. Else you have to rebuild. That was for me reason to use software raid. Eventhough the Raid controller on a mainboard is also software, I found out that the Windows raid was slower but more trustworthy in that particular part. I knew that unraid was slower then the others. But now I know why. Thanks. Thanks Battle(non)sense. @Kyle Middleton: Did something change at Qnap? AS exactly one year ago, I tried to go from 4 disk raid 5 (50% full) to a 4 and later 5 disk raid 6. That was not possible. And that situation was also described in the manual. Eventhough a bit quirky, which made me understand that it could be done. You could back then only go from 0 or 1, to 5, 6 to 10. Or from 5/6 to 10.

[@Triforcecwp]

aarbbee you can only go from 3 disk raid 5 to 4 disk raid 6 , no other number if disks will let you go from raid 5 to 6

[@aarbbee]

Did not know that. Thanks for the info.

[@Triforcecwp]

aarbbee you're welcome, there's an article about it on their site. Have a good one.

[@MichaelHernandez138]

Very well explained! 👍 thank you. Would like to see a video on setting up unRaid with tips on plugins and such. Great work

[@koolaidmangiggity]

Great content! thanks for all your work chris

[@revoker7968]

You may be long winded and make long videos, but your visuals and explanations are top notch.

[@brkbtjunkie]

Revöker long winded or detailed?

[@Nettechnologist]

Seems like unraid is raid 3, dedicated parity drive, but give you option to add addition al parity and cache. But you don’t get the increased read performance when having more spindles with raid 5 or raid 10. But I guess that is somewhat mitigated if using flash and then get limited by network bandwidth

[@thec0r379]

This is certainly a coincidence as I have recently been looking into what is out there in terms of media storage networks. unRaid was always going to be my go to as it was recommended for use with KODI and seemed like the cheaper option though a lot of diy is involved in it. I would love to see a video on setting up an unraid server and thanks for the in-depth explanation.

[@Maxtasy888]

Great video, I like the pace and the simplicity of the explanations. I would be interested to see your finished NAS along with a component list, since I'm looking to replace my old NAS with a custom build. Cheers

[@theint21h]

My setup is very “cheap” compared to what everyone is talking about here. I used an old Acer Chromebox that was gathering dust and flashed it with a custom bios and installed Xubuntu. I attached two 4tb WD MyBooks to it. I guess you could say they are mirrored as the main drive I use is on an early am scheduled backup to the other drive. I have it setup as a samba share. It also runs my Plex server. Occasionally I will login with Remote Desktop (xrdp) to make sure that everything is running like it should. It’s pretty solid and does everything I need it to do. For me that’s all that matters.

[@chemicle]

Thank you - this was very well explained. I've tried FreeNas, and it's good -but want to explore other options.

[@GeckoEidechse]

Definetely do more videos about RAID and network/data technologies in general! :D

[@nmutakaobi303]

clear and concise video. thanks!

[@gglovato]

an interesting take on why chose unraid. I do remember considering it but dropped because of the quirky hdd pooling method. i'm still waiting for BTRFS to be finished and available open source as it has all the advantages of ZFS plus easy expansion later on

[@DalePothen]

Yeah its great. it would be great if you would explain full unraid installation and guide like setting up with all things u can do with unraid

[@BillyMizrahi]

Do a video on a setup guide of the components and settings you used to set up your NAS

[@nutflush5]

a nice refresher course, I learned all this stuff when getting my Informatics degree but this shit goes away if you don't use it

[@Ichmalhiermalda]

I prefer Openmediavault with a RAID 5 over 4 disks. To your video: For some users could be RAID 6 miss explained. In your text on your panel it is right, you need only 2 drives for partity even if you have 5 6 or more disk. But in your explanation it sounds like, that this uses everytime the half of all disks - like 3 from 6 or 4 from 8.

[@Shinta0SaINt]

Please do another video on how to set up unriad sir, this had been the best nonsense I’ve watched on KZbin thus far :) regards Shane from Trinidad

[@Mormodes]

If you are serious about backing your stuff up, do something like a raid 5 or 6 with extra disks, and follow the 3,2,1 rule as well as you can. Haven;t used unraid, but seems interesting. Freenas is apparently adding the ability to add disks to topologies.

[@nvkamath]

Could you explain more about ssd cacheing in unraid and cache pools

[@jettangeles2707]

I’ve got two WD Black in a RAID 0 array and I’ve had it for like 3 years now. It’s still going strong lol.

[@cloud9520]

Thank you for this information! Seems like Unraid is the way to go!

[@R4mzyCoZa]

unRAID looks great. One day I'll give 'em a try... For my home setup I went with a SnapRAID + mergerfs + Samba system (on an Ubuntu system). Costs prevented going with anything dedicated-hardware (I had the PC & drives in spares already), and... well the same thing for unRAID. Initially there was a fair learning-curve to setting it up, but if you have some Linux experience you should be okay. It's pretty much as simple as setting up your drive and mergerfs mounts in your fstab file, defining the data and parity drive layout in the SnapRAID config file, then setting cron or anacron to perform regular SnapRAID synchronisations. I started with four 2TB disks for data, with a 3TB parity disk (the space for parity you need depends on what data you have, rather than the size of the data disks). My SnapRAID checks the array and builds parity data once a day. There is the potential for the newest data to be lost if the parity for it hasn't been built yet - but on the flip side if a file is accidentally deleted, it could be recovered as long as the parity hasn't been rebuilt after the deletion. I really like that I can have any number of different-sized disks and SnapRAID doesn't really care. Though this 'manual sync' thing means it's probably best suited to files that don't change super often. mergerfs handles presenting the data disks as a single mount point on the file system, and just round-robin distributes files to the different member-disks. I then set Samba to share that mergerfs folder for network access, and use the mergerfs folder to direct my downloads and anything else to. One of the 2TB's failed recently; well, it gave A LOT of SMART errors and would occasionally disappear from the file system... Rather than lose it to hard failure and then have to recover from parity, I just removed it from the mergerfs pool and the SnapRAID config, then moved what files were on that disk into the mergerfs pool (so they would be distributed to the remaining disks). There is a performance penalty with mergerfs, since presenting the pool is a CPU load, but my local network becomes a bottleneck before that becomes a concern for me.

[@Felix-ve9hs]

I use FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault, works perfectly for me :)

[@tbareham]

I'm a home user, i have 1 home NAS i cobbled together ages ago with FreeNas and 4 x 2TB HDD's and an old PC. I works great... i was looking at the next 'experiment' and considering a headless linux installation with 8 HDD's [500GB which i already have] but was put off by my having zero command line experience, Having researched a tiny bit into UnRaid and limetech's pricing.... i'm gonna try learning just enough Command Line to get an Ubuntu Server install up and running. In the real world there appears to little to differentiate UnRaid from Raid5/6, just small technicality's. Ubuntu Server, FreeNas etc are FREE..... UnRaid for a 8 Disk array is $89...... It's a no brainer considering you still need to have back-ups regardless of what system you use.

[@Yatukih_001]

Stop using those and just use a powerful processor instead. You don´t need those.

[@michaelksiezopolski]

Check OVM on separate machine with one small OS drive and 7-8 large drives in RAID6 that is scalable. Cheap, elegant, funcional and safe solution with huge numbers of add-ons, way better and safer than unRAID and with possibility of cloud/local or remote backups.

[@mainfighter]

I use a Windows Server 2016 as a mass storage device, just sorta like the way Storage Spaces works plus I use Active Directory, Hyper-V and afew other MS services.

[@MrCorpsy6]

So unless we're writing a lot (perhaps), a NAS built with SSD (TCL) may be more reliable, because they are less likely to fail while rebuilding. Am I right?

[@MusicalDistractions]

Really appreciated this video! I currently have a homeserver that I setup a little while ago that's being used for gaming at the moment. Backed up all my important things in a raid 10 zfs pool and I was using proxmox. This definitely isn't ideal, but I don't really know what is. Part of why I didn't use a prebuilt setup is for the learning experience. Currently my little homeserver isn't even being used as a homeserver, it's kind of being used as a temporary gaming computer. I always appreciate how informative your videos are. The best thing about this one for me though, was the reminder that raid (or any similar alternative) isn't much of a backup. This is definitely something I need to do more research in. Could you do a video on what a safe setup would be? I'm glad that my setup is better than many, but realize it's still not that great. I'd also be pretty stoked if you did a video on your video streaming setup, or any other homeserver things you do. I'd really love to set something up like you mentioned with higher quality bluray video at some point. Can't afford it at the moment, but I definitely plan on supporting your patreon at some point. Keep up the good work!

[@asmcriminaL]

This is exactly what I need. I had the same concerns you had. Glad you addressed them. I was concerned about hardware failures such as a controller or those all in one NAS systems dying. How would I get my data back? I will also need a good processor. The stress for software raid is on the CPU, not the raid controller.

[@ThePixel1983]

Unraid say that for just the nas feature you can do with a Celeron or Atom processor. Running docker containers obviously takes a better CPU.

[@SamGib]

More crazy setup: 5*GlusterFS_Distributed_Dispersed(RAID_60(JBOD(4*8TB))) You got insane amount of storage, flexibility, headache, power cost, and time to build.

[@joealex2463]

When using raid do all drives need to have the same capacity? Can they be different models or brands?

[@screwyluie]

Your video is like seeing inside my mind. I did this as well recently, went through the same research and decisions and came to the same conclusion. Unraid is the solution for me. With that being said you should look at SnapRaid as a free alternative

[@SteveAtwal]

I’m interested in using Unraid to replace my 10 year old QNAP. I was curious to know the following (BTW, I work in Tech so feel free to send techie responses): - what compact hardware are people using for it? - how easy is it to configure shares (I currently mount a share onto my Google TV box, a Xiaomi Mi Box S, to stream media off my QNAP but it’s jittery and would love to use PLEX instead). - how easy is to run VM’s (virtual machines)? Can you also run Mac OS as a VM? - how easy is it to setup a VPN and share folders with family out of town? - can it handle HEVC h.265 without problems? I guess PLEX would handle that? - on a side note: can Unraid run apps like on QNAP/Synology or are those all via Docker (I haven’t really used Docker much). - Is it possible to run a Docker app for crypto mining? :-) Thanks!

[@apoorvgupta9680]

i am only here for these kind of videos, network related. i subscribed

[@Jenuin]

Thank you. I would also be interested in unraid setup video.

[@1blackice1]

Currently I just use the network storage server feature on my router with a 2TB external drive pluged into the usb port. I would like a NAS with something like free nas so I could have redundancy and be able to run other servers, daemons, VMs, etc.

[@55commodore]

Hardware RAID controllers are relatively cheap nowadays, so I buy two of the same that supports the option to copy the configuration from disks, should one controller fail then you can replace it with your backup controller. If you want good read performance, use RAID 1, or if you want a good read and write then use RAID 10. This is the safest option in my opinion. Oh yeah, and always have a backup!

[@TheFilledk]

OpenMediaVault does this with UnionFS (UnionFileSystem) and SnapRaid (these are both OMV-Plugins) and also supports docker and VirtualMachines AND ITS FREE!

[@BattleNonSense]

Doesn't seem that you can grow/expand an existing RAID5 array on OMV that easily though?

[@LarsBars17]

Love that you used a Crucial-looking cache drive! Haha.

[@natehiggins2599]

Is this a storage pool?

[@Perplexer1]

So unRAID is like an Operating System in itself? So you have to install it on some separate boot drive to boot into it? So if I have an old motherboard with 4 SATA connectors, I will have only 3 SATA connectors left for the 3 hard drives to make a RAID. Am I understanding this right ?

[@tsndr_]

I am using a raid controller to mirror two drives, wher i installed ESXi to host my virtual machines :)

[@learningwisdom5161]

wow, great video. Good explanation. Many thanks.

[@SOU6900]

Buy one of the IOSafe branded NAS enclosures if you want an enclosure that can protect your data from fires and floods.

[@Buthos]

Can you make a video testing whether or not having more than one monitor effects GPU performance/FPS. Perhaps include different resolution monitor setups as a variable also :)

[@Berneer]

I just buy 3HDD and backup done drive on the 2 others. No diminished drive capacity. Two of the three drives can be disconnected and unpowered to reduce wear. And one of the back ups can be stored remotely. I do this monthly so the drawbacks are the 36 hours it takes to do a transfer from one hard drive to another as well as potentially losing 30 days of new data should the primary hard drive fail.

[@WizardNumberNext]

what is probability of 2 drives failing at the same time? I have had 2 exactly same HDDs from same batch, not once, but twice, and ALWAYS only one drive had failed at the time, other continued to server for several months

[@mdd1963]

Perhaps the question should be, 'What are the odds of a second drive failing when doing a read/write intensive rebuild?'

[@VirendraBG]

Well explained. Thanks.

[@bimmers50e30]

I run Btrfs (in various levels, my 16tb server being 8 disk raid 6) and have run conversions between raid levels without issue. (it has its problems but has served me will for years ). i did look into ZFS but its really best to run on soliars I also use GlusterFS and span more than one drive and machine. I've been looking into using GlusterFS or CEPH to replace BTRFS other RAID like setups. (gluster can put whole files on seperate "bricks" (which can be whole disks). I'm curious about unRAID... a video with your experiece would be greatly appreciated

[@skulliouss]

Should look into Synology. SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) is amazing and I think it has all the things you were looking for.

[@skulliouss]

www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator It lets to add drives and mix drive sizes

[@BattleNonSense]

A coworker once had a Synology NAS where the disks were still okay but the hardware died. Moving those disks/the array to a new(er) Synology NAS was a small nightmare. I am not saying that this is a general issue, but it somewhat scared me off from using such a "plug and play" NAS box. :-/

[@XDeadzX]

Currently I just share data through windows disk/folder share, running ~12tb on my tower. Not exactly happy with it, looking at getting a hardware NAS to connect to a router in my basement, hopefully expanding that to ~16tb with redundancy. I've been interested in a freenas setup, but I can't justify the hardware cost yet. It'd be ideal but the price less-so. Mostly share movies/tv, and game files at the moment, but ideally I'd like to offload family movies and videos from my tower so I don't need it running just to watch my movies. Do you think you could make a video showcasing your freenas setup and cost? I'd be very interested.

[@luismepu]

So I can have one of those qnap little machines run my plex server?

[@FinlayDaG33k]

Please do note that RAID4 is extremely inconvenient when you want to scale to 4 or more drives. In which case, I'd rather recommend going with something like RAID6 (RAID5 but with 2 paritybits)

[@goodgold6390]

The Spacie Game in the beginning looks GREAT fun to play, what is it called please people?

[@f.gabrielolvera8159]

I also want to know, looks like a Star Wars game...

[@sdrtyrtyrtyuty]

Star Wars Battlefront 2

[@LyRaLex]

I use big thumbdrives and microSD (at least 128 if not 256GB) with my Pi3 and Kodi/Openelec... I'm very primitive with my media watching/consumption. I never grew out of the early 2000's media consumptions habits (i.e. doing everything manually by hand iykwim) for some reason; mostly because I really can't be arsed.

[@84Actionjack]

I use UNRAID as a backup (soon to be remote backup) FTP server to my main server which is Windows 2012R2 using file redundancy for a total of 80Tb.

[@ASBlondontravel]

Hello mate. Anther great video

[@reecehanson3952]

Do a follow up video?

[@Berneer]

I just buy 3HDD and backup one drive on the 2 others. No diminished drive capacity. Two of the three drives can be disconnected and unpowered to reduce wear. And one of the back ups can be stored remotely. I do this monthly so the drawbacks are the 36 hours it takes to do a transfer from one hard drive to another as well as potentially losing 30 days of new data should the primary hard drive fail.

[@Fengtos]

Since it's a software solution how fast is it? What are the write and read speeds? I have a hardware raid controller with 2 different 4 disk raid 5 configs. Have them for a couple years but since disks are getting bigger and bigger. If something fails you will lose massive amounts of data. I'm looking for something safer. Read that most companies even don't use raid 5 but raid 1 is more common or even raid 10 setups. Would mirroring with 2 times 2 10tb drives be safer than say 4 10 tb's in raid 5. (yes I will lose more space) but it's worth it if it's safer.

[@MikaelKKarlsson]

Well done. By the way, drives can be said to have two states of existence; dead or dying... And if you're fine with staying awake at night worrying about your data, study the topic of bitrot.

[@rajarshiparmar1990]

What game us this?

[@RagdollRocket]

subscribed, just awesome!

[@giovannivittorioambrosini6621]

4:32 the possibility of a drive encountering an irrecoverable error during a rebuild is almost 100% if the array is over 12TB

[@brkbtjunkie]

Giovanni Vittorio Ambrosini why is 12tb the threshold?

[@Rawley91]

So you just transfer those Blu-Rays to your NAS and play them on your TV that way?

[@BattleNonSense]

I use VidCover to encode them in 1080p with x265, then I use tinyMediaManager to download the meta data/posters/etc. And I use Kodi with MadVR as my media center. :)

[@Rawley91]

Battle(non)sense Thank you for the fast reply and detailed information. Your channel is awesome and I promise to drop by on your Patreon very soon.

[@rossmpostpro]

Interesting video mate. Do you have any thoughts on local RAID setups? I currently use two SSDs in RAID0 (non critical) in my PC via Windows' own 'storage spaces' technology. Any advantage/disadvantage of using an OS level software solution? I've used hardware in the past but would be interested to know your thoughts. Had pretty good results with Storage Spaces, even reconfiguring itself after a fresh install of Windows. Thanks bro

[@solarsurfer4843]

Hey man I really appreciate the tests and knowledge ...this is kind of offtopic but do you think you will ever test controller and mouse input lag wired and wireless ? I've been curious about it for a while now

[@goodgold6390]

Hi could you please tell me the PC game your playing? looks really cool, love to play it myself....

[@sdrtyrtyrtyuty]

Star Wars Battlefront 2

[@ProckerDark]

so for the rich people who wants the top safety, raid 1 is the best right?

[@perkunast9680]

I if you lose 2 drives your ok, no not true, if one is the parity drive your done. Having them swipe across multiple drives, is a good thing. This increase the hard drive speed many times its not just one hard drive thats working for you. Even a raid 1 is not a bad thing when your data is backed up someplace else, the gain in speed and storage is great option. Raid 10 gives you the speed of raid 1 with backup.

[@AnthonyFrantz]

Good video. Thanks! I don't know what the right things to do is. Right now, I have a main windows server with stand alone drives (non-raid). Every Friday, it backs up to a Drobo box. Then on Saturday, it backs up again to an identical server like my main Windows server. I'm afraid to try unRAID since I'm not familiar with it. I know how to fix a Windows machine. I'm not sure what to do with an unRAID machine when I have a hardware or software problem.

[@Lobstersarefabulouz]

I'm building my dad a system. Since he wante to have 2 3TB HDD in raid one I got him 2 3TB WD blue drives. I always went with wd blue and have never been disappointed. He is gona set those up in Raid 1

[@musmuk5350]

awesome video :)

[@redhawk3385]

I have frontier internet i cant run it without it buffering for 10 minutes

[@ianucci]

Good stuff Chris. I personally have a now rather long in the tooth netgear NAS and am considering what to do when I replace it. Is your NAS made from an old PC or did you buy a new case etc for it?

[@BattleNonSense]

I did in fact use an old ASUS mainboard with a core i5 that I had here - simply because I did not have the money to buy a new, server grade board. However for home use this works just fine. And you can easily move unRAID to a new mainboard as it runs on pretty much anything. :)

[@paulpoco22]

Unraid with 2 Parity, 9211-8i card and MB sata.

[@Valansch]

Raid 5&6 you mentioned "Increased risk of additional drive failure diring rebuild". You failed to mention that this is equally the case for unRaid! The only advantage of not striping is, that you dont lose 100% if too many drives fail.

[@cyberspearmint]

Check out datahoarder on reddit... lots of great info there. I use Windows with StableBit DrivePool - it works as a JBOD that pools disks but can also handle duplication of all files, should you wish. Super flexible and extremely fault tolerant! I highly recommend it. It has many benefits and very few drawbacks.

[@Bourinos02]

Since my NAS had a hard software crash and I lost all my 8 TB, I don't know if I'll ever buy one again...

[@aarbbee]

And what is failure free? Just curious. ;-)

[@Bourinos02]

Well, usually you buy that kind of stuff to keep your data protected... Generally a hard drive dies, no problem, you can hot-swap one and you're ready to go after rebuild (it was a raid5). But here... Man, there was nothing I could have done, and I'm sure that that kind of stuff is not supposed to happen :-)

[@aarbbee]

I only have experience with Qnap. So I cannot speak for all. The Qnaps I know or have are alive for 6+ years. Oldest is a 209.

[@soniclab-cnc]

ZFS 2 is pretty bomb proof. No mention of zfs at all ??

[@GGnext.crazycro]

I honestly use 2 mirrored drives. If one dies the other has a copy of that data. Cheap and simple.

[@DerZaubererFN]

Expensive and simple, yes.

[@Varstahl]

How in the hell is a Raid1 expensive, for the main purpose of redundancy…

[@bimmers50e30]

they are referencing the cost inefficiency.... with that said i have many customers running intel software raid 1 ;-) . Intel RST > Dell PERC

[@SIeipner]

But you loose half of the capacity. I thought about using RAID 5 for maximum capacity but I got scared off by the Unrecoverable Read error that is worse the larger the drives are. I opted for RAID 6 which with 6 disks gives me more capacity than RAID 1 and I can loose 2 disks without loosing data. (Well loosing two disks would mean that the Unrecoverable Read Error could be a problem)

[@Varstahl]

@Marco first of all he never mentioned ZFS, and @Soid yes, you lose half the capacity, but if the main purpose of the raid is to have the maximum amount of redundancy, Raid 5 or 6 won't cut it. I use a raid10, and while there are indeed lots of movies and old stuff you couldn't find anywhere anymore, there are also a lot of work-related stuff in constant change. Losing a week's worth of source control is quite a blow, I'd take the half capacity any day of the week.

[@kobked-x]

Thank you yet again o7 I'd like to ask you to do a network test of Escape From tarkov .. Please Chris!!!!!

[@BattlefieldRoBin]

I guess ZFS was not an option for you due to striping?

[@BattleNonSense]

+Chris Smith striping and unability to add more drives to an existing array/vol later on.

[@Skaronator]

Adding new drives to the array is WIP in ZFS but probably not coming before 2019

[@BattlefieldRoBin]

Ya ZFS is best if you have all your storage up front. There are ways to increase the capacity of your ZFS pool like mirrors or rebuilding with larger drives but im not the biggest fan of either one of those.

[@Varstahl]

In my personal opinion as you said ZFS is only really useful atm if you have all your storage pre planned. The main issue for me is/was the expansion and the use of ECC memory. The cost of ECC ram to go with the raid additions escalate ultra fast.

[@BattlefieldRoBin]

ECC is very expensive. I have 32gb ddr4 2133 ecc and it cost over $500. I still think with the headache of expanding, the complexity of initial set up, and the cost of both ECC RAM and drives its more than worth it if you have a large enough digital library. Just my opinion though :)

[@DynoosHD]

Ich nutze Proxmox mit einem ZFS Raid10 mit 4x2TB für VMs und Storage, ZFS RaidZ mit 3x2TB für Backups.

[@nowonmetube]

If more disks fail than the supported redundancy model, is it possible to recover the data in the not failed disks? Nein Can you add disks at later time? Nein How many disks are spinning when reading a single file? Alle! www.snapraid.it/compare

[@salat]

unRAID seems quite ok but I never got warm with it - My main home server (Supermicro 5028D-TN4T) runs a FreeNAS instance under ESXi (controller passed through) with Raid-Z on and I love to have ZFS's features like multiple auto snapshots per day (drives are always on). On site backup goes to an older HP Microserver which runs FreeNAS directly and is woken via IPMI.

[@ayyycharlie334]

What game is this?

[@ayyycharlie334]

The game that you are playing in the beginning, What is it called?

[@WizardNumberNext]

yeah, lower electricity bills, but rises probability of drive failure as most drives will degrade while they are spun and spun down - you want to keep drive healthy then never spin it down and keep it on at all times by the way big drive will cost more then money you will spend on keeping it on all the time for next say 6-12 years (it will take around 12 years for my drives to consume enough energy in idle to cost same amount in bills as drives itself) Saving on electricity, while degrading drives is purely non-economical - you will loose what you have paid for drive faster, then you will make any savings P.S. this works for both consumer grade and enterprise grade drives - I still own fully working drive, which was on 24/7 unless I have no power and it was working for 10 years until I was forced to change it SATA, as my new Main Logic Board had no PATA and would not accept my old PATA RAID controller.