I use unRAID because I'm lazy. Good points about unRAID - never have to use the command line, seriously. There's quite a few user-maintained GUIs and tools (scripts) that help out, but the standard unRAID UI is self explanatory.
Some of the features like a cache drive took a bit of reading to understand (as in, how to enable the darn thing). The only time where I've had to use the linux command line is to prepare a drive prior to use - unRAID takes a *very* long time to initialize a drive (2 TB is approx. 20-24 hrs). When I first built my array, I did it via a shell script (again, a user-submitted tool) to help speed this disk initializing process. Bad points about unRAID ? I'm impatient, so I dislike having to wait for my drives to spin up after they have been powered down due to lack of use. Tips: you only need to put in enough drives as you need to, unless you want to outfit yourself with 2 TB drives across the board. I still have 3 drive slots empty out of 9, with 50% free so I overbuilt for my needs at the moment. Speed-wise, not great, reading off a single drive but fast enough over gigabit for most media needs (30-40 mb/s) with modern drives. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Weeden Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 2:10 PM To: hwg Subject: [H] unRAID vs FlexRAID So now that I'm going down the path of building a new media storage server, I need to look at options for preserving the data. I think I'm going to not go with a traditional RAID system because your data is striped across multiple drives - any one drive essentially has gibberish on it. The two other options are unRAID and FlexRAID. Both are similar in that the data is stored on individual drives and then a parity is made on another device. So if you have multiple drive failures, at worst your data on the remaining drives is ok. And they are also much more flexible with regard to adding drives, configuring the number of parity drives, and using drives of multiple sizes. The difference is that unRAID is Linux-based and boots from a USB stick, while FlexRAID is basically software running on a host OS. I am leaning towards FlexRAID, mainly because I am not very familiar with Linux and I need this box to do more than just store media. Has anyone used either unRAID or FlexRAID? Your experiences? --- Brian
