anyone running unRaid?

[myktek]

unRaid
UnRAID

It's time for me to build an independent storage solution and I've always like the Drobo idea, and from my research, unRaid is close to it and more expandable.

[Cal]

Unraid Blows Drobo out of the water. Love mine.
Digital Media Storage Solutions

Mine sorta looks like the current MD-1510/LL but that not it. Looks like they changed things a bit. The front of mine looks the same. Nice rails to hold all the HDs.

I've got a mix of 300GB to 1TB drives in mine. Most of them are 500GB drives. I've used about 1/2 the bays.

And I've tested it too. You can take any drive and mount it in a windows machine if something drastic fails and you don't want to wait to fix it. I've also pulled a random drive out with no loss. I did a rebuild with a replacement drive too. I even did drive size upgrade that way too just to see what would happen. I pulled a smaller drive out, replaced it with a bigger drive and let it rebuild. No issues. It works as advertised.

I can't record using BTV to it directly across the network. But I can set a folder on it and playback from it across the network.

I currently use it to
- sync my vid folders from BTV (nightly)
- sync the C drive on the BTV machine (nightly) hmm... guess I should redo that so its one job.
- sync my main computer fully. (nightly)
- backup and archive BTV settings (weekly)
- backup and archive scripts from both machines. (weekly)
- Hmmm... looks like I need to add my HomeSeer stuff to this list of backups. Its new. I'm Loving the Home Automation stuff. (its running on the BTV box coexisting with BTV fine)
- Massive network drive for Movie/TV show Archive.

- Karens Replicator is free and does the best job of any replication software I've seen. Its one of the only ones that can handle 500GB plus jobs without memory issues or leaving traces behind. (and its free). Of course it only has to replicate changed/new/deleted files now, but it was the only one that could handle the initial replication without any screwups.

Before I bought this thing both my computers were Raid 5 boxes. But they are built from older 300GB and 320GB drives. I'm considering getting rid of the raid 5 stuff and just putting in bigger normal drives and letting UnRaid handle all the data protection. Tecnically it already is since both machines already sync to it across the network. If I ever fill it up I'll buy a 2nd server.

It may look more expensive to buy a big box like this but try and get the same thing with Drobo or one of the other guys and you will need to buy several of them at much more then this costs. Its far cheaper in the long run.