Hello
I am building my first unraid server, mainly to consolidate all the fileservers in the LAN (xtreamer etrayz 2x2TB, xtreamer pro 2x2TB, QNAP 409 4x1TB and a small linux machine that runs a webserver and slimserver software) I will decomission the old machines and use their parts to build the unraid server:
Fractal Design ARC MIDI tower
ASUS AT5NM10T-I board
2x4GB RAM
3ware 9500s 4 Port @1GB cache in 32Bit PCI
3x2TB and 1x1TB data disks - these will connect to the 3ware
1x2TB as parity, Momentus XT 500GB (or a 60GB OCZ Vertex) as cache drive - both will connect to the onboard SATA ports .
I have headroom on the old fileservers to free up 1 or 2 of the big drives to initially attach to the 3ware. I will then start copying over files until the rest of the big drives and one 1TB can be moved to the unraid server.
The qnap will be reconfigured to 3x1TB JBOD and then be used as a backup for important files once I feel it is necessary to backup stuff, otherwise it will be switched off.
I may later replace the mainboard and controller to get more SATA ports but these are the components right now available to me.
Does the build sound reasonable to you ? Will the 9500s work out of the box (the forum is not clear about this) ?
The 2TB drives are from different manufacturers. Does it matter which one is used as parity drive or can I assume that the bytecount is the same throughout different vendors? Is it possible to let unraid not use the complete datadisks but only 99% for the filesystem?
Is there an addon that sends a mail when a configurable amount of data in a share has changed so that I can switch on the backup machine to rsync data off from the array?
If I preclear the drives on my workstation I just drop them in the unraid box and can use them without further delay, correct ?
Is it possible to add the parity drive as the last drive after the array is created?
Best regards,
Christoph