[dba-VB] Unraid is (mostly) working

Man Linux is *so* much fun.  ;)

UnRaid is a bare bones application that does exactly what it advertises.  Getting the boot flash 
disk built and booting is a no brainer.  For windows users, anything after that is not.

But we persist and eventually get there.  I now have a system with 4x 1 TB disks for storage and a 
1.5TB disk for parity.

Because the parity drive has to be as large as the largest data disk, and because I had two 1.5 TB 
disks and wanted to be able to use them in the UnRaid server, and because both were full of video, I 
had to figure out how to do things that you wouldn't normally have to do - run without parity long 
enough to empty one of the parity disks, then slide that (now empty) disk in as the parity disk.

But in the end it worked and I now have 4x 1TB data disks and a 1.5Tb parity disk.  There is data on 
one of the TB data disks unprotected until the parity build finishes in about 8 hours.  Once the 
parity build finishes I will copy the data from the other 1.5 TB disk onto the UnRaid data disks and 
then drop that last 1.5 TB disk into the UnRaid.

At that time I will have all 6 of my motherboard's SATA ports filled - Parity and 5 data drives. 
Beyond that I will need to find an add-in card with more SATA ports.  It appears that the community 
uses this card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101358&Tpk=Supermicro%20AOC-SASLP-MV8

which provides an additional 8 ports and apparently just works.

I do have a ton of 640 GB drives which I could drop in if I need the storage but near term I do not. 
  Long term I will probably use this as backup storage - backup of my computers around the house / 
office as well as near line backup for the SQL Server.

So I am close to having a usable UnRaid NAS, just waiting for the parity calcs to finish.

-- 
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com