Unraid to Flexraid

[EzBox]

Hello Everyone,

I dont know if this has been covered before but here it goes. I am currently an Unraid user with 9 data disks 1 parity and one cache drive. The system is working ok right now but was looking for options if this changes or no release of current beta occurs soon.  To be able to duplicate the functionality of Unraid. I am guessing I will use the cache as a boot drive, will have same 9 data and 1 parity, run windows 7 (Interested in running plex which appears to be more stable in windows than in Unraid). 

Questions I have:

1. Snapraid or Realtime ? Unraid writes parity information when you copy to the drive if no cache is present and when you delete/move content. Which method would mimic this functionality? Snap or RT? If I use Snap do i have to run some sort of parity check every night? or is it automatic?

2. I am also guessing I have to format the drives when I switch to Flexraid?

Thanks for any information that can be provided,

EzBox

[Brahim]

I spent the last two weeks revamping the Real-Time RAID core to make it more stable.
As of now it is experimental but fairly stable (and more stable with the release of 2.0 update .

RT RAID vs Snapshot RAID depends on your usage scenario.
I use Snapshot RAID for my mostly static data like movie backups, full system backups, music and the likes.
I then have an RT RAID setup for my data that change frequently like my hourly incremental backups, temporary downloads, etc.

Snapshot RAID required scheduled update runs and leaves you vulnerable for certain changes in between updates.

[Stokkes]

Hi Brahim,

Same question here. I'm looking to test FR on a Ubuntu system and would like to re-use (read: not reformat) my pre-existing ReiserFS disks that were done in unRAID. Do these need to be formatted? This isn't clear from the wiki (or maybe I'm missing something).

I'd much rather work with a distro that I'm used to than Slack, which has a lot of problems.

[Brahim]

No, you don't need to reformat your drives and migration should be straight forward.

[captain_video]

Will the migration be the same with FlexRAID on a Windows 7 platform (i.e., migrating from unRAID to FlexRAID)?  Windows can't see data on a reiserfs drive on the same PC, IIRC.