I won't go into excruciating details, but; as all things Linux, a certain amount of fiddling and out-of-the-box thinking was required before the combination went along happily.
Platform:
HP Proliant Microserver with UnRaid 4.7 (last stable release)
Problems:
Unusable drive performance "out of the box", and
Inability of UnRaid to correctly complete the boot process and unpacking of the embedded OS.
Solutions:
Must ENABLE the "Use Drive Write Cache" in Microserver BIOS.
Do NOT use the internal (motherboard) USB Port, put your UnRaid boot-flash into any front USB port.
Practical points:
Upon successful start, assuming that you have "virgin" HDDs,
1) do not bother generating the Parity (cancel the sync if it has started automatically!).
2) Format the HDDs
3) Enable the "User Shares" (and likely discontinue the default "disk1", disk2", etc shares)
4) Note: One SMB share can span multiple drives
5) Note: You can have SMB multiple shares created over exactly same physical space (drives/folders)
6) Copy all of your media to the UnRAID.
7) Note: I was getting 66 MB (>700Mbs) transfer rate between the drives inside the UnRAID box
8 ) Note: Multiple simultaneous copy operations from different sources to the same UnRAID destination WILL easily reach the 700Mbs bandwiith on 1000Mbs network.
9) Important: I am using 3x 2Tb "4k sector" Seagate drives, formatted to "MBR: Unaligned" according to UnRAID 4.x default, and I do not think that I am experiencing any sector-size related performance payback. Seagate does have the "smart align" firmare, so that might be reason for good performance... UnRAID 5.x defaults to "MBR: 4k", but 5.x is at "beta-10" at the moment.
10) Once you have the initial once-off momentous copy-to done, then you can run the "parity sync". Reason for this is that it is assumed that the data you are copying across will land on "healthy" space and since sync-ing a totally clean drive or a totally full drive takes the same time, it makes no sense to slow down the initial copy-to with parity calculation.
My initial copy-to is still ongoing. The source - Microserver with FreeNAS 7.xx - keeps dropping the LAN connection every so often, which was the main reason why I decided to try something else.
UnRAID box has not gone offline or dropped the connection even once, since it went "live".
Very, VERY impressed with unRAID...
Platform:
HP Proliant Microserver with UnRaid 4.7 (last stable release)
Problems:
Unusable drive performance "out of the box", and
Inability of UnRaid to correctly complete the boot process and unpacking of the embedded OS.
Solutions:
Must ENABLE the "Use Drive Write Cache" in Microserver BIOS.
Do NOT use the internal (motherboard) USB Port, put your UnRaid boot-flash into any front USB port.
Practical points:
Upon successful start, assuming that you have "virgin" HDDs,
1) do not bother generating the Parity (cancel the sync if it has started automatically!).
2) Format the HDDs
3) Enable the "User Shares" (and likely discontinue the default "disk1", disk2", etc shares)
4) Note: One SMB share can span multiple drives
5) Note: You can have SMB multiple shares created over exactly same physical space (drives/folders)
6) Copy all of your media to the UnRAID.
7) Note: I was getting 66 MB (>700Mbs) transfer rate between the drives inside the UnRAID box
8 ) Note: Multiple simultaneous copy operations from different sources to the same UnRAID destination WILL easily reach the 700Mbs bandwiith on 1000Mbs network.
9) Important: I am using 3x 2Tb "4k sector" Seagate drives, formatted to "MBR: Unaligned" according to UnRAID 4.x default, and I do not think that I am experiencing any sector-size related performance payback. Seagate does have the "smart align" firmare, so that might be reason for good performance... UnRAID 5.x defaults to "MBR: 4k", but 5.x is at "beta-10" at the moment.
10) Once you have the initial once-off momentous copy-to done, then you can run the "parity sync". Reason for this is that it is assumed that the data you are copying across will land on "healthy" space and since sync-ing a totally clean drive or a totally full drive takes the same time, it makes no sense to slow down the initial copy-to with parity calculation.
My initial copy-to is still ongoing. The source - Microserver with FreeNAS 7.xx - keeps dropping the LAN connection every so often, which was the main reason why I decided to try something else.
UnRAID box has not gone offline or dropped the connection even once, since it went "live".
Very, VERY impressed with unRAID...
