Losbot wrote:My Drobo actually had 3yrs of warranty and before it expired, I extended it twice by 2 more years. In that time, they replaced the unit with the newer model. I simply pulled the drives, inserted them in the same order into the new unit and powered it up. Config is stored on the drives so it was quick and painless.
I'm looking for more features than the Drobo offers at this point.
Got any good links I can read through on the Unraid Psypher? I'm always curious.
Ah ok, well yea if you the ability to extend it then I see why it was an attractive choice. Well they've revamped their website so you should be able to get all the info you want from there.
http://lime-technology.com/
But of course if you have any questions on it, feel free to ask. But I can give you a quick run down.
If you can build a PC yourself, then that's a good start. Mostly because if you want/need something with a ton of drives, then you'll need to either have a tower than can hold enough drives or you'll be buying something like a Norco which can hold 20 or 24 drives. Personally I love having the Norco because when a drive dies it's really nice just being able to pull the drive tray out. You can actually download a free version that only limits the number of drives you can have to test it out. The Unraid software all goes on a USB stick, there really isn't much of an install other than preparing the USB flash drive with the software. Once it's running you'll access their web interface which is really nice to configure and get the drives up. This is where it gets to be a bit of pain initially. While the architecture allows you to easily just add drives to increase storage without needing to rebuild the array, the drive has to be cleared (all 0s written to it). 4TB+ drives take close to 24 hrs to clear out. Thankfully with the right scripts installed and plugins you can prepare a drive through the web interface before adding it to the array. The way Unraid works is that instead of stripping data across all drives, it uses a single parity drive that is used to calculate the parity across all drives. Each drive is treated individually, so complete files are written to each drive. This is where Unraid has a huge advantage as a media server. When you are accessing your media, it only needs to spin up the drive that has that specific media. It doesn't need to spin up all the drives as a typical raid stripped system would need. The new Docker support in Unraid 6 is great. It lets you easily add applications like SickBeard, Sabnzb, etc.. all running in their own standalone container. This makes it way more than just a NAS. It can even be a VM host if you want as well.
