unRAID: A Great Storage Solution
For a while now I’ve been looking for a good storage solution. For important things like pictures I would make duplicates across several drives. As my storage needs would grow, I would buy bigger hard drives and copy things over. My main machine became a behemoth with 6 hard drives in it. Still, most of my data was not protected.
I have looked into RAID solutions, which would provide data security, but I found the price per GB to not be so great. I’ve also heard horror stories about people being unable to recover from a failure. Plus most RAID setups require the same sized drives, which means I would have to upgrade all my drives simultaneously in the future.
Enter unRAID. unRAID is a non-striped RAID solution that supports drives of different sizes. It’s being developed by a single developer. Currently there is a requirement that your parity drive be larger than your other drives, but this may go away soon. It supports a virtual view of the file system where the directories on all the drives are unioned together, and write support is coming soon.
unRAID runs Slackware linux off of a USB key drive. The Pro version can support up to 12 drives. The management interface is a simple webpage. It gives you temp and space info, as well as a count of read/write errors. So you can swap out failing drives. Another cool feature is that because the data is not striped across the disks, the server can spin down disks after a period of inactivity, lowering temperatures and saving energy and lifetime on the disks.
Here’s my unRAID server setup:
CPU: Intel Celeron D 331 Prescott 2.66GHz
Case: Raidmax Ares ATX-801WBP
MB: Asus P5PE-VM
Memory: 1 GB PC 3200 (1 stick)
PCI SATA II Controller: Promise SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II
USB Stick: Sony Micro Vault Tiny 512MB Flash Drive
Parity Drive: WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA II (on Promise controller)
Data Drives: Two Maxtor 6V300F0 300GB SATA II (on Promise controller), One Western Digital WD2500JB 250GB drive on motherboard PATA controller
unRAID Plus Software
The system without hard drives would probably cost under $400 total (I had some parts already). I’m shipping data across gigabit ethernet from an Athlon 64 3500, Abit AV8 machine across 2 Netgear Gigabit switches to my HTPC.
My 64K results, compared to Tom’s Hardware’s fastest NAS:
| SATA II READ | SATA II WRITE | IDE READ | IDE WRITE | Tom’s NAS READ | Tom’s NAS WRITE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 32MB | 33.913 | 31.436 | 37.879 | 29.381 | ||
| 64MB | 35.008 | 33.137 | 37.030 | 25.420 | 46.1 | 42.5 |
| 128MB | 35.573 | 26.578 | 38.863 | 25.832 | ||
| 256MB | 36.475 | 25.211 | 41.690 | 25.724 | 45.5 | 32.2 |
| 512MB | 42.171 | 25.496 | 44.173 | 25.488 | ||
| 1GB | 8.356 | 16.291 | 8.290 | 16.930 | 22.0 | 28.3 |
So with just a few hundred dollars, I created an expandable, reliable, decently performing storage solution. People on the unRAID forums have reported even better performance with newer motherboards.