unraid on raid 5 card

[piercetorres]

im planing to get a xl60 from 45 drives and putting a custom gaming PC in it but i was wondering if i can put unraid on it using the raid cards that come in it or if i would have to use some random pcie to 15 sata ports also Linus you should make a video on this if its possible 

[Jarsky]

UnRAID doesn't run off disk, it runs in memory. 

I would not use UnRAID if you're planning to use 60 disks. 

 

Reason?

- UnRAID read speeds are limited to a single disk

- UnRAID write speeds are limited to a single disk or speed of write cache

- UnRAID is limited to 24 devices in an array. 

- If you were to RAID physical devices into logical devices to fit them all in to your 24 device limit, and running them in an array in UnRAID then you'd have double parity which could cause a major issue. 

 

This is assuming you aren't going to be creating an array using the ZFS plugin, but then what would be the purpose of using UnRAID if you're using ZFS which means you have to create all your smb configs manually?

 

 

[Mihle]

2 hours ago, Jarsky said:

UnRAID doesn't run off disk, it runs in memory. 

I would not use UnRAID if you're planning to use 60 disks. 

 

Reason?

- UnRAID read speeds are limited to a single disk

From my understanding, that's true for writes. For reads it's limited to a single disk when doing 1 file, but if two computers is reading a file from two different drives, then each one get speed of one disk (if ethernet is fast enough) because parity does not happen with only reads.  Not totally sure tho, correct me if I am wrong.

Quote

- UnRAID write speeds are limited to a single disk or speed of write cache

True

Quote

- UnRAID is limited to 24 devices in an array. 

No, it's 28 + 2 parity last time I checked, and from my understanding, cache limit drives is on top of that and not instead of but not totally sure.

 

Drives that is unallocated do not count against that limit, so you can have unallocated drives you use for stuff if you want to.

Quote

- If you were to RAID physical devices into logical devices to fit them all in to your 24 device limit, and running them in an array in UnRAID then you'd have double parity which could cause a major issue. 

 

This is assuming you aren't going to be creating an array using the ZFS plugin, but then what would be the purpose of using UnRAID if you're using ZFS which means you have to create all your smb configs manually?

Not saying you are wrong, just some inaccuracies.

[Windows7ge]

UnRAID uses it's own RAID implementation that should make a dedicated RAID controller unnecessary and in some instances not recommended.

 

You would want to look into HBA cards like the LSI-9201-16i. If UnRAID has the disk number limitation as both Jarsky & Mihle mention then you'll probably want to go with something different like ZFS or BTRFS on a different distro of Linux.