There's a utility called "Pre-Clear" that can be downloaded, but it's no longer needed. The drives showed up as "unassigned".įirst step in using new drives is to clear them. Shutdown the PC, attached the 2 NV+ disks, and rebooted.
So, I had the Plus license with 9 devices: 6 in the array counting 2 x parity drives, 2 x cache SSDs, and 1 unattached SSD for storing virtual machines, etc.
The unRAID PC boots directly from a USB thumb drive, which isn't counted in the license.
Pro $129 - unlimited " (technically it's limited by the O/S at 28 data drives plus cache, 2 x parity disks and infinite unassigned disks that aren't part of the array)
You can use it for free for 30 days, but after that, you need to pay for a license: Since I had 2 vacant spots in the case and on the LSI disk controller in the unRAID server, I decided to move 2 of the 3 remaining disks from the NV+ to that box. The RN314 picked it up and rebuilt if perfectly. There's a safety feature that keeps you from formatting a drive from one ReadyNAS in another one, so I cloned the failing drive onto the replacement. So, I replaced the failing drive in the RN314 with a drive from the NV+. By comparison, the newer RN314 runs a much more current LINUX version, is super-fast transferring files by comparison, and so far appears to have no limitation on sizes of drives it can handle. My NV+ runs an older version of LINUX, is a bit slow transferring large data files, and is limited by the O/S to 2TB disks. I knew I was going to take my NV+ offline eventually, and this seems to be the right time. I finally had the time to delve into it, after deciding what I wanted to change. Nice thing about most RAID devices: they can alert you when there's a problem. The reason for this new thread is I had a drive starting to fail on the RN314. I used 2 drives for parity/redundancy, and 4 for data storage, giving me about 2TB x 4 drives = 8TB storage. I initially included 3 x SSD/NVME drives and 5 x mechanical drives 2TB each. ReadyNAS is a Netgear product, originally produced and sold by Infrant Technologies.Īs part of my previous "project" I installed the free-to-try O/S called "unRAID" on an INTEL PC. That's just under 6TB of usable storage each. I have 2 Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, each with 4 x 2TB drives in a RAID-5 configuration. Besides this little setup I have approx- 160TB in each of the Synology 2412+ NAS units.How do you keep your digital music files? I really hope we get support for extra array's soon, so I can migrate all data from my two Synology boxes as well. For cabinet I use an old Norco RPC-4020 and the external is an NetApp DS4246 (Cooling is terrible in the old Norco, so most drives are moved to the NetApp). The GPU is a NVIDIA Quadro P2000 and the HBA's are LSI 9205-8e and LSI 9211-8i together with an HP expander. The system currently runs on a ASUS ROG STRIX X399-E GAMING motherboard with a AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X 12-Core CPU with 64GB RAM. Since the start, I have upgraded motherboard, CPU, memory, HBA's and added both stronger GPU for Plex transcoding and added an external storage cabinet, but the SMR drives are still in there. Compared to my existing NAS units I saved a lot of energi and wear on the drives because UNRAID only needed to spin up one drive and not 12 drives like on my existing NAS units. It was perfect for the role as NAS and media server here in my home. I got 24 8TB SMR drives for free some years back and began searching for a system that could handle them - and UNRAID was the answer. The ones in the photo have all been wiped clean and tested good. There were more drives than than, but I destroyed any drives that failed and recycled them. The pic with the drives in the anti-static bags are the drives that have been retired from the array over the years that were replaced by larger drives. Been running unRAID for over 13 years now. I've got five 8TB drives sitting on the shelf already pre-cleared and ready to insert into the array should any of the drives die.
I can expand the array to 224TB without having to upgrade the parity drives. I'm running 28 data drives of either 4TB or 8TB capacities with two parity drives and a 1TB SSD cache drive. I have three 8-port LSi SATA controllers plus six onboard SATA ports and two eSATA ports on an ASUS A88X-PRO motherboard with an AMD A10-7700K CPU and 32GB of DDR3 memory. I cut a hole in the bottom of the 8-bay rack to feed the SATA cables from the controllers in the lower rack. I'm using a 24-bay Supermicro server rack with an 8-bay Supermicro rack piggybacked onto the larger case. Running unRAID Pro 6.9.2 with 184TB currently with 55.7 TB free.