I have 2x20TB, 7x8TB, and 1x6TB spinners and 3x500GB SSDs, so a typical RAID setup isn’t really possible. I’m not buying any more hard drives for awhile.

I switched to unRaid from Windows/Drivepool/Snapraid because. Well I don’t really know why, wanted to try something new. Wish I had started with the trial instead of paying for the license, but hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Thankfully it wasn’t too expensive.

My big issue is just write speeds. I run sabnzb/sonarr/radarr/plex, and I’ve got everything configured properly, but sabnzb can barely handle 20 mb/s even though my 1gig cable isp pulls 100 mb/s.

I actually pulled the parity drive out of my array just to get better speeds because with parity you’re automatically 1/2-ing your disk write i/o. With WD shucks 5400 rpm’s I should be able to hit over 100 mb/s writes, but with parity plus sabnzb repairing I’m lucky to get 40 mb/s. It’s just abysmal.

I never had any slowdowns using windows and drivepool. Even during repair + download operations. Obviously snapraid is on demand so parity doesn’t play into things.

I have tried the cache drives, but then it just fills up and you’re in an even worse place where you have to wait on mover to move the data from the ssd cache to the array, but if you’re still downloading then you’re trying to download to the array and repair on the array too. That’s even slower than if you don’t have the cache setup.

I guess if I was downloading a tiny amount everyday it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I’m trying to catch up on the time sonarr/radarr weren’t running while I moved my existing data to unRaid, as well as some new keywords for downloading x265 and upping some 720p content to 1080p. So think about a long, multi TB, queue in sabnzb.

So now I’m in the boat of thinking, maybe I should go back to windows. I’ve read about mergeFS and snapraid, but it seems like a fairly high learning curve when Windows worked fine for years. I wish I had never switched.

Am I missing something? I have reconstruct write “on” and took out the parity drive, and it does alright downloading, but a repair during download still brings it to a crawl. Is there something better out there I’m not thinking of?

Any tips would be appreciated.

  • Freaky_Freddy@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You’ll just be throwing away all the knowledge you have about Unraid and jumping into another setup where configuration is important. Except, in this case, if you screw up the ZFS setup you risk losing ALL YOUR DATA.

    I recently setup my truenas and it was pretty easy after following a youtube video

    but now i’m curious how i can lose ALL MY DATA with zfs

    Can you provide any examples of what would cause this?

    • alsdhjf1@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Sure, if you’re using ZFS’ RAID1 and lose 2 drives, it all goes. Or RAID2 and lose 3 drives, it all goes. Because the data is allocated across many drives, there is not a fundamental “one file one drive” scenario if SHTF.

      Whereas with Unraid, one file on one drive, with a parity check (or two) if you need to recreate.

      • Freaky_Freddy@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        if you’re using ZFS’ RAID1 and lose 2 drives, it all goes. Or RAID2 and lose 3 drives, it all goes. Because the data is allocated across many drives, there is not a fundamental “one file one drive” scenario

        That has nothing to do with how you setup ZFS though…

        That is just the reality of how redundant arrays work, whether its ZFS or hardware RAID

        Losing 2 or 3 disks at once should be a very low probability and either way it shouldn’t be a big issue if you have backups (raid and unraid aren’t backups)

        • alsdhjf1@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yes agreed, all that is true. Regardless of the reason, Unraid takes a different approach and has different tradeoffs which enable partial recovery in the SHTF scenario. I prefer the Unraid approach - plus it is more intuitive and feels simpler for me.