Data Hoarders Thread - The Scriptatorium of the Modern Age

[Almighty Space Duck]

I got the unraid license they advertised “before our rate hikes!!!1” I believe I paid 50$ and it was capped at I think 6 drives

That’s not so bad, you can still upgrade that license in the future and not be screwed out of getting updates after 12 months.

And it’s all xfs one 6TB two 12TB with a 12TB for parity. I know if I moved to zfs I’d lose a drive and be to 12TB?(dont quote me im not up to date on zfs)

Is that 3x 12TB - 1 for parity and 2 for storage? If so you’d end up on a 3-wide VDEV in ZFS and have 24TB usable, if you have just the 2 drives then you’re stuck with a mirrored pair. Here’s the thing though with ZFS, outside of a few circumstances, once you make a VDEV that’s it. No expanding it or any of that nice stuff you’ve gotten used to under UNRAID. If you buy more drives later- that’s a new VDEV. ZFS comes in 2 flavours that matter for a home user. RAIDZ1 and RAIDZ2. Z1 has 1 drive for redundancy so your usable pool is (n)-1 drives and Z2 is 2 for redundancy (n)-2. There is no mixing capacities or anything like that. If you do then your pool is limited to the capacity of your smallest drive x number of drives - redundency.

We haven’t touched on the biggest part yet. If you move to ZFS then you will need to format all your drives at once.

It’s an old 1230v2 DDR3ECC setup I got the “naskiller 4/5) and for containers I mainly use plex, FileZilla, and a few other low impact ones

Honestly, with hardware of that age, you’re going to have a bad time trying to do anything with IOMMU and virtualisation.

Sounds like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze but I just hear all the good stuff

As above, with your current hardware I would agree. If you need to expand your storage pool just get an upgraded license. I can’t remember if UNRAID do any kind of sales in the summer (I had the infinite drives license by the time I moved off it) but they certainly do on Black Friday.

I did move away from UNRAID when I decided to transition to a ‘proper’ ZFS pool. But to make that really work I ended up going all in with a LSI HBA, a bunch of 14TB SAS drives and some other nice stuff too. Was it worth it? Absolutely! I’d probably still be using UNRAID if I hadn’t outgrown it. It was wanting to do things with SR-IOV and VDI that sealed me making the move.

 

[Betonhaus]

I find mergerfs+xfs seems to work fine, and makes it easier to add and remove drives. I don't even bother making partitions and I just format the entire disk

my mergerfs pool fstab entry if you're curious
/mnt/dsk/*/ /mnt/pool fuse.mergerfs func.readdir=cor,func.getattr=newest,lazy-umount-mountpoint=true,cache.files=off,moveonenospc=true,dropcacheonclose=true,minfreespace=10G,category.create=pfrd,fsname=mergerfs 0 0