is unRaid for me?

If this works as good as I think it works, it could be a dream for my setup...

 

I have a main computer, a Mac, in one room (where the internet and router are), and in my living room I have a XBMC HTPC running Win XP.  I'd like to get this unRaid and stick it in the closet of the front room.

 

I'd like to move my music collection (nearly a TB) HD out of my Mac, and my movie drives (about 3 TB right now, but I have many more on disc) out of my HTPC and put them in the unRaid...

 

-Would I be able to mount that all as a single large hard drive on both my Mac and my HTPC? Would I be able to build my iTunes library on the Mac from the music stored on the unraid, and also build my XBMC music library from that same music?

 

-Half my HD's are formatted NTFS, half are HFS+ formatted... will that matter to unRaid?

 

-Would my cheap router be fast enough to stream movies from the unraid to the HTPC, or would I need to directly connect them/buy a fast router?

 

-Would my cheap router be fast enough to stream Apple Loseless form the unraid to my main computer? Not possible to wire them together...

 

-Could I download torrents on my Mac to the unRaid? If could download them to my media folder on the unraid, and my XBMC media library was set to watch that folder... it would be great! I could start a movie downloading on the Mac (free legal movies of course!), and when it was done it would show up in my front room!

 

-What kind of PC would I need to run it? I have a E5200/mobo/2 GB RAM laying around, but I'd like to give them to my Dad if I could use his old Athalon XP/1 GB ram computer as the unraid computer...

 

 

 

Yes, all the stuff you want to do is possible.

 

Check out the Best of the Forums, Topical Index, and the FAQ.  That should get you started on the right direction.  If you have any more questions feel free to ask.

 

Of note: I use my unRAID server with a mac in my house and an original xbox that is running XBMC, this works great and is one of the best setups for watching my backed up movies on my TV.

I strongly recommend you add an inexpensive gigabit switch to the mix:

* D-Link DGS-2208 - good, very inexpensive ($39)

* HP J9077A 10/100/1000Mbps ProCurve Switch 1400-8G - great, costs a bit more ($72), but better reliability and performance, read the reviews

 

These do not take any configuration, and do not replace your current router.  Leave the router to handle the Internet connection, run a cable from it to the switch, and move the rest of the cables (from desktops and servers) to the switch, done!  Network will look the same to any desktop, only faster.

 

See also Getting Started with unRAID

-Half my HD's are formatted NTFS, half are HFS+ formatted... will that matter to unRaid?

unRAID will reformat any drive you add to its array.  You will need to incrementally add your drives to the array starting with one or two that can be freed up or are new and initially empty.

 

I say 1 or 2 because you do not initially need to have a parity drive, but you will need to allocate one of the largest drives as the parity drive. It must be as large, or larger than any of your data drives.  It does not get a file-system, but instead is loaded with parity calculations based on the data drives)  You can load all your data drives with data and then populate the parity drive assignment on the "devices" management page, but if you do you will not have protection from a disk failure until you populate it.  Personally, if you are incrementally moving data and re-using drives, I'd put parity into place as early as possible in the process, even if it will take a bit longer to migrate the data because parity is being calculated as the disks are loaded.  So, you can start with 1 data drive... move the files from one of your PCs to it, then populate the parity slot... calc parity to gain protection from a disk failure, then migrate the next disk's worth of data across the LAN, then re-allocate it to the unRAID array, etc.

 

You will want to consider your eventual needs, but if your older MB has enough IDE slots for the existing drives, or enough SATA slots for the newer ones, then you 'll be fine.  It will not be fastest in its Parity calculation speed with lots of devices on a PCI bus, but many of us have a fairly large array of disks on an older PCI bus.  Just expect 12-15MB/s parity speeds instead of 50-60MB/s once you get 8 or 9 disks in the server.  It makes no difference to playing movies/music.  They'll work very well on an older MB. 

 

The use of a GB switch will help some, but my network  media players only have 100MB disk controllers in them, and they play ISO images of DVDs just fine...  100MB is plenty enough for music and movies.  Where the GB switch will make a HUGE difference to you will be in transferring all your media to the unRAID server... assuming, of course, that the source PC has a GB network card and the old MB also has one (or you add a newer GB network card to one of its slots).

 

Joe L.

I was thinking of picking up a pair of the new Samsung EcoGreens ($75 a piece) TB drives...

 

So I'd have with my other drives:

 

SATA: 1 TB, 1 TB, 750 GB, 750 GB, 500 Gb, 320 GB

IDE: 500 GB, 160 GB

 

So one of the TB drives would be parity, and the rest would show up as a giant 4TB drive? I guess transferring slow is okay, I've been FTPing from my Mac to my HTPC, and it goes about 1MB/s now... slow, but if I queue stuff up overnight, it finishes...

 

 

About this gigabit thing though... there's no way to get a cable from my Mac to the HTPC or closet... I could have the unraid and the HTPC hooked up though.. as long as torrents and things will still work over the air between the mac and the unraid.

 

Assuming there's enough SATA/IDE ports, I may just try this on the old Athalon motherboard... one last question, what's the cheapest case I can get to fit lots of HDs? Size/noise/looks don't matter, just want room for future expansions.

 

I was thinking of picking up a pair of the new Samsung EcoGreens ($75 a piece) TB drives...

 

So I'd have with my other drives:

 

SATA: 1 TB, 1 TB, 750 GB, 750 GB, 500 Gb, 320 GB

IDE: 500 GB, 160 GB

 

So one of the TB drives would be parity, and the rest would show up as a giant 4TB drive? I guess transferring slow is okay, I've been FTPing from my Mac to my HTPC, and it goes about 1MB/s now... slow, but if I queue stuff up overnight, it finishes...

 

 

About this gigabit thing though... there's no way to get a cable from my Mac to the HTPC or closet... I could have the unraid and the HTPC hooked up though.. as long as torrents and things will still work over the air between the mac and the unraid.

 

Assuming there's enough SATA/IDE ports, I may just try this on the old Athalon motherboard... one last question, what's the cheapest case I can get to fit lots of HDs? Size/noise/looks don't matter, just want room for future expansions.

 

I'd recommend considering the 160GB drive as a cache disk.  1 MB/sec is pretty slow - even for writing to the protected array.  You should get 10-15.  The cache disk is a staging area for writes to the array - and can give you write speeds of 40MB/sec or higher.

 

Keep in mind that unRAID does not really combine the capacities of your disks and make one giant disk - like a RAID array would.  Each disk is autonomous.  The user share feature can be used to create a illusion of one giant disk, but there are some caveats you need to be aware of to make this work the way you'd like.  In particular, setting the split level properly.

 

See the hardware forum for lots of advice on cases.  I noticed that newegg has a free shipping on cases special.  Might want to look into that!

 

Good luck!