Unraid Server

[BBCritical]

Can anyone tell me the advantages and disadvantages of using an unraid server with sagetv.... Thanks

[Lucas]

An unraid server or a separate file server in general?

I use NASlite V2 software on a basic PC.

The benefits are:

- 24x7x365 operation of the file server available on the network.
- A separate tailored and well ventilated box for holding lots of disks.
- Ease of maintenance and expansion.
- Not cluttering the SageTV server with Drives and RAID cards.

[lovingHDTV]

I've been using my UnRaid with SageTV for ~1 year . . .

The UnRaid advantage is that the data is not stripped. This allows you to use the full size of all data drives even when they are of different sizes. And still have parity (data) protection.

If you loose a single drive you loose nothing, if you loose more than one drive you only loose the data on the dead drives. All other drives are still fully intact. This is not something that any stripped RAID setup can provide.

The cons for the UnRaid is write performance. As of now I have only been successfull writing a single HD write stream at a time. If there is more than that I get dropped frames in the recording. It can server (for playback) several with no problems, but the write speed is limited. I have no problems with SD streams, just HD.

Honestly, after using this for quite a while I've come to the conclussion that I don't need to have my "daily" tv recordings under Raid protection, but that I do want all my DVDs, photos, and archived TV shows protected. So I am moving to having my daily recordings written to an unprotected drive, then if I decided to archive it, I move it to a protected disk.

[BBCritical]

So it works well with strictly SD recordings, photo, dvds and music?

[lovingHDTV]

I have not seen any issues with those. I only have a single SD tuner so I don't know what multiple simultaneous recordings would do I'm sure there is a limit to its write capability there as well.

But as a playback server it works very well.

[PGPfan]

Originally Posted by BBCritical

So it works well with strictly SD recordings, photo, dvds and music?

Yes, it works perfectly with what you posted. I've been using mine for about a year and have had no regrets. It really is different (better ) than any other solution I've seen for the home environment. It's dirt cheap to implement (free for the basic '3-drive' version), and very reliable.

-PGPfan