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UnRAID 6

Posted: Thu Apr 04, 2019 5:31 pm
by FlyingPenguin
I retired my HP Proliant N40L MicroServer running UnRAID 4.7 last year when I bought a Synology NAS, but it still worked fine and had 4 perfectly good 2TB drives in it with relatively low hours.

Well I decided to dust off the old UnRAID NAS today, figuring it was probably worth upgrading to the latest version of unRAID and putting it back in use as a local backup storage device for my server.

I did a little research and found out that my old unRAID version 4 Plus license was still good for the latest version 6 release. I looked through their FAQ and they have a whole section on how to upgrade an older version like mine without losing your configuration, and how to migrate your license. After confirming that version 6 would run just fine on my ancient HP Proliant N40L with 2GB of RAM, I went ahead and upgraded.

After a couple of hours of research it took about an hour to install and it's all good. The version 6 GUI is a LOT more full featured than the old version 4. It looks a lot like Synology's GUI now. Version 6 also supports Docker container apps, and VMs. This little server isn't powerful enough to run VMs (it's an AMD Turion dual core 1.5GHz), but the docker apps add a lot of features similar to Synology's Packages.

unRAID 6 adds the ability to install an SSD and use it as a cache drive to speed up writes (the slow write speeds was my only complaint about my unRAID box. Read speeds were always good). I'm going to toss a spare 240GB SSD I have laying around in there (I can connect it to the unused CD-Rom SATA port so as not to lose one of the four main SATA bays).

Overall, a fun experiment to play around with on a slow day, and it all went pretty well.

I put the little guy in my network closet on the opposite side of the house from the server for isolation in case of theft, fire, etc. I must say I've gotten a good little run out of that MicroServer. I bought it used from b-man1 WAY back in 2012. Can't complain.

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Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Thu Apr 04, 2019 11:12 pm
by Pugsley
Need to draw a face on that wall plate with all the cables coming out of it to make it look like its puking or eating.

Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Fri Apr 05, 2019 12:39 am
by Genom
Yep, been running my home storage/server off unraid 6 and only time reboot is if I am installing a update for a new feature since I also run my Plex server off it and use the DVB version. Current uptime is around 4 months since I moved it to a new battery backup, but otherwise it's been flawless. Have mirrored SSD cache drives. DOnt need more than 240GB since my wife only reads off it and I have local SSD's on my main rig for capturing/editing, but run all my daily backups to one of the shares.

Also run a duplicati docker that makes my important docs and pictures backup to Amazon S3 storage (differential backups every night as needed), and a few others. Very painless, mostly ignore it once it was up and running unless I needed to do something new or add/remove stuff (like I am now setting up a VM to run a NZB indexer locally since I have bandwidth to burn now)

Yes there are free solututions like freenas and nas4free, but I ran those in the past and there was always something breaking with them, and unraid has been solid since I first installed it.

Also Bob, check the dockers. You have stuff like Unifi controller and a million others that provide a lot of extra utility if needed.

Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Fri Apr 05, 2019 10:10 am
by psypher
Welcome back! I'm a big Unraid fan, been using it for probably 10+ years? So I've seen it grow a lot over the years. Current version is great. I run mine on a Norco chassis with 19 disk drives (dual parity + 17 data + 1 free slot) and 1 SSD for cache. I also have several dockers running on it as well.

Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Tue Apr 09, 2019 2:14 pm
by b-man1
Nice...glad that little server is still getting put to good use!

Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Tue Apr 09, 2019 5:29 pm
by FlyingPenguin
Welp that SSD cache sure helped. Writes went from 10 MB/s to 90 MB/s.

Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2019 10:52 am
by Losbot
Nice performance improvement.

Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2019 11:59 am
by psypher
FlyingPenguin wrote:Welp that SSD cache sure helped. Writes went from 10 MB/s to 90 MB/s.
FYI, those slow speeds (10 MB/s) isn't 100% unraid. That's partly your hardware. My direct writes (without cache) average about 53 MB/s.

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Re: UnRAID 6

Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2019 7:28 pm
by FlyingPenguin
Oh I agree.