unRAID update 3

All the best plans….

So the CM Stacker was a dud. Looks like they managed to bolt a right side frame on to the left side as well as the right. Meant that the screw holes for the HDD didn’t line up. Been RMA’d, but now awaiting replacement from the always excellent Scan.co.uk.

Anyway, the SAS card is now in and after some issues with the cable (make sure you have the right kind of SAS cable – apparently there are different types with the same connectors on them….. who knew… ) is seeing the school of Seagate Barracuda drives awaiting inclusion.

Array is now up and built with a 2.0Tb WD Black as parity combined with 2×2.0Tb WD Green for data. Top level directories have been built and are now waiting for me to pull my finger out and copy the data across.

Once the new CM Stacker appears, I’ll need to stop the array and see about re-wiring/re-threading cables to position the drives. I originally planned to put the Parity, two Green and the 320 cache in the stacker as the air flow is slightly restricted due to the closeness of the disks. BUT the SAS cable uses a huge connector that makes it a little too tight to fit behind the drives in the main disk mount. I’ll need to experiment as the WD Black gets hot – 47 degrees during preclear.

DVD Collection

As I have a habit of purchasing music, films and TV shows on physical media rather than digital, it means that the collection takes up a lot of physical space. While I admit that I should probably sell on some of the older films, I feel that if I’ve gone to the effort of buying a film, I should really keep it. Thing is, that I know I’m never going to go upstairs and rummage around in the various plastic crates sitting in the spare room to try and find a film to watch. I’m either going to hit the film channels or XBMC.

I spoke in earlier posts about the potential storage pool available at home. The fact is that this is almost becoming ludicrous – who in their right mind NEEDS 9Tb of storage, let alone the 12Tb CURRENTLY possible with the hardware I have just sitting there?

Still with this amount of storage potentially available, I’m thinking that I might just rip all those DVDs sitting in boxes taking up space in the spare room to ISO and then dump them on the storage pool. Once a disk is done, I can put the physical disk in the loft out of the way. I did this with our music and it’s worked fine. So why not do it with the DVDs?

In the unlikely event that I need more space at a later date, I can always put the ISOs from the pool through HandBreak or it’s equivalent and convert them to MKV files.

Perhaps this needs to go on my project list….

unRAID update 2

Well I managed to rescue an additional WD Green 2.0Tb drive as well as a 2.0 Tb WD Black. I’ve also got hold of a CoolerMaster 4-in-3 disk stacker that I can put into the 3 x 5.25″ bays in the Antec tower. This gives me a theoretical capacity of 10 x 3.5″ disks plus 2x 2.5″.

My plan is now to use the WD Black as the parity (fast drive) with 2x 2.0Tb WD Greens for data. I’ve removed the 2 port SATA card that was in the tower as unRAID didn’t recognise it and replaced it with a SuperMicro 8 Channel SAS card that was thrown away at work. I’ll drop the 3 x 1.5Tb Seagate and the 2.0Tb Samsung drives on to the SAS card and use them to expand the array once I get a license.

I’ll use one of the Seagate drives as a cache drive during the initial bulk transfer and then swap that back in as a data drive and use an old 320Gb WD drive as the cache drive for day to day use.

So using the free license will net me 4.0Tb usable, upping it to the Plus license will give me 9.0Tb useable plus 1.5Tb cache. If I go for the Pro license I can get 12Tb useable and use a 320Gb cache.

Now I need to pull the box from the shelves, do the upgrade and then start the transfer. I’m thinking that it’s going to be quicker to clean the current config and start from scratch rather than try to migrate the little amount of data across to new disks.