Advice Media Server Raid

[Poag]

So i've picked up a HP Microserver recently to replace my old MacMini as my plex box.

Atm its only got two drives in it. A SSD for its OS (bay 5), and a 4TB WD Red (bay 1) for media storage. Until i finish setting it up i wont be adding more drives in.

I've previously given unraid a go to handle the file system and raid config. However for 'reasons' unraid has been set on fire.

The machine atm runs Ubuntu 14.04, i'd prefer to keep this as i've setup plex, sab, sonarr, cp etc and setting it up again is a bit meh.

I've been looking into SnapRaid to provide a Raid-Over-Filesystem setup. Spinning up all the disk to read a file, although providing higher I/O, isn't really necessary when playing videos. So spining up only the drive in question is desirable.


Has anyone had any experience with Snapraid? Are there any alternatives i'm overlooking?

 

[Vae]

What were your 'reasons' for setting Unraid on fire? I'm currently running it on a Microserver with 4 x 3Gb Western Digital Red's (1 for Parity and 3 storage). I admit I haven't tinkered with it since I set it up as I have no experience with Unix.

 

[Poag]

Long and the short was that as soon as it booted up. It would complain that it had "run out of space". It was on a 16GB USB3 stick so the stick wasn't out of space.

The /usr was loaded in ram and was still reporting ~2gb of free ram (not including caches). I spent hours forcing it past this point. Installed a couple of plugins, which then ran into exactly the same problem. Spent another hour muscling one of those plugins past it, the next one reported the same problem. Said fuckit and had ubuntu back up and running within 30 mins on a fresh install (saved all my configs off system).

that was ofc on the Unraid6 beta, i also tried the Unraid5 version, but found so much stuff i use daily was missing from the basic install (like ssh! i mean who doesn't include ssh?) that going on the problems with U6 the time investment probably wouldn't have been worth it.

 

[Vae]

I don't use SSH (I think anyway!). I'm running Unraid Plus 5.0.5 so probably not missing the features you are looking for!

 

[caLLous]

I've heard good things about SnapRAID. I think the only thing that it didn't do that I wanted (this was a couple of years ago, mind) was drive pooling but if you can live with everything being on separate drives (and if you're running it all through Plex then it doesn't matter how the files are arranged) then it's no bother.

 

[MYstIC G]

I'm gonna just say FreeNAS and back away slowly...

 

[Poag]

I've heard good things about SnapRAID. I think the only thing that it didn't do that I wanted (this was a couple of years ago, mind) was drive pooling but if you can live with everything being on separate drives (and if you're running it all through Plex then it doesn't matter how the files are arranged) then it's no bother.

Theres been a couple of changes to SnapRAID recently. You can now /pool them and it'll give you a unified folder structure to read from...just not sure if you can write to it

 

[strangely brown]

Have you considered something like greyhole instead of RAID?