We found a must have product for building a file server to store and protect the data in your home. It is called unRaid by Lime Technology and it is based off the Slackware Linux kernel. It is pretty good way to store all of your media content including pictures, movies, and videos at home or small office. It is also a great program because it is scalable to 21 hard drives and redundant because of it use non stripe parity technology in case of hard drive failure. It is equivalent to a RAID 4 configuration but a little different because it does not stripe data across disks like a RAID5 configuration you can install all different size disk unlike other RAID configurations. Also, each disk is directly accessible if the array fails with a drivers you can remove the disk and install it on a Windows computer to read the data from the disk. If one disk fails it can be recovered from parity drives. If two disk fail at the same time you will only lose data on the second drive. It cannot be done with a traditional RAID 5 solution because data is stripe across all disk and disk the parity is broken you will lose data on all disks.
Anyways, what we decided to do was to build a new file server from scratch. Our goals were to shy away from the traditional and expensive hardware RAID configurations and build something that was an alternative to using the Windows Home Server. Also, we wanted to rid ourselves from the use of a backup server, tape drive, and other NAS products because of the type redundancy unRaid provided we feel comfortable about not purchasing an expensive backup solution to re-duplicate add the data we have.
Some of the things need to be address before the build were:
- Hardware
- Software
- License purchases
- Configuration settings
Hardware
We choose to use some older parts with some new equipment but the most important parts are new.
New Parts list
- Intel Celeron e1400 2.0GB Dual-Core Processor $49.00
- Gigabyte GA-EP45-UP3P Motherboard $145.00
- 2 – 2GB DDR2 1066 Ram $79.00
- 4 – 1.5TB Seagate Sata II 7200rpm Hard Drives $129.00 each total $516.00
- 2GB Lexar Firefly USB Thumb Drive $11.99
- 2 – 120mm Fans $7.99
- 2 – 80mm Fans $2.99
The processor, motherboard, and thumb drive are all recommended purchase from Lime Technology to insure that there were limited incompatibility problems.
Old Parts List
- Ultra 650Watt ATX Power Supply $69.99
- 4U Norco 450 Rackmount Server Cases $99.99
- 3 – 500GB Seagate Sata II 7200rpm Hard Drives $99.99 each
- 1 – 120GB Western Digital Sata I 7200rpm Hard Drives $Free
- ATI Radeon x600 Video Card $19.99
- 1U APC Smart-UPS 1000 Rackmount UPS $Free
- 5 Port Trendnet 10/100/1000 Switch $29.99
- 3 -15ft Category 6 Cables $9.99 each
Much of this stuff is from our existing test network and the parts from scrapped computers and the prices represent what the parts cost at the original time of purchase. We also did not include a DVD Drive because it is not needed because the unRaid operating system will is installed and run from the USB thumb drive.
Software
We downloaded the unregistered version and test it out on our hardware and it worked okay. We thought it operated a little slow for the new hardware we have in it but it worked good enough for us to purchase the Pro License key for it.
License Purchase
The decision was made to buy 2 Pro licenses for the unRaid but we got a great deal on it because we found a friend of ours how wanted to build an unRaid server to so we split the bill on the licenses and only paid 75 dollars for it since we only needed one license to support up to 21 drives in which 19 drives are for data, 1 parity drive, and 1 cache drive. If you want to build an unRaid server find someone who want to split the bill with you and get it for cheap! The license is registered to the serial number and GUID of the thumb drive; therefore, you must make sure that have a thumb drive that has a GUID on them.
Configuration Settings
The configuration settings was fairly simple. We were able to find out a lot of the information in Lime Technology’s forum and Wiki pages so we added some features for unRaid called unMenu, Clean Power shutdown, APC UPS management.
We followed the instructions and build the server and we got the shares configured and test some of the speeds and here are some results.
- With 120GB SATA 1 drive installed as a cache drive. We was getting network writes speeds of 23MBs.
- Took 1.5TB SATA 2 parity offline the array and added as a cache drive and remove the 120GB drive.
- Copied files directly to cache share and received transfer rates between 76MBs and 102Mbs on the network writes speeds.
- Copied files to the array and received transfer rates between 18Mbs and 20Mbs on the network writes speeds.
- Some reason we notice there is no files in the cache drive that was copied to the array. I think the files copied directly to the array and by passed the cached drive. Even though the share has cache enabled. Maybe the moving of the drives without a reboot cause the problem.
- Before we rebooted the server we changed the cache back to the 120GB Sata 1 drive and did a speed test copying files directly to the cache share.
- Copied files directly to cache share and received transfer rates between 38Mbs and 76Mbs on the network writes speeds.
- Rebooted the server.
- With 120GB SATA 1 drive still installed as the cache drive I copied files into the array and received transfer rates between 19Mbs and 22Mbs.
- We did verify the that files are to the cache drive and not directly into the array.
- We believe anytime you take the array offline and moving drives around you should reboot immediately afterward.
- We changed cache drive from 120GB Sata drive to 1.5TB and rebooted server and received transfer rates of 20Mbs to 24Mbs.
So we came to the conclusion that the speed are faster when copying files directly to the disk shares than they are when copying files to the array user shares. We really did not test read speeds because we are going to be streaming data and there is not a lot of reads needed for that on a gigabit network.
We copied over 800 movies and 33000 music files, 300GB worth of application software and 2Gb worth of pictures into unRaid and all videos, music and pictures are being streamed them to all our HTPCs in the house and it works great.
Let us know if you are building an unRaid server. We like to know what other people are doing with it.
