[bigdog66]

The advantage of Unraid or any RAID setup is redundancy. I have a lot of time invested in my media library and if a drive fails, then I get to do all the work over again to get it back onto a drive from either BR or DVD. With Unraid, if I lose that drive then I pull it from the server, drop a new one in and it will rebuild the failed drive. While the rebuild of the failed drive isn't quick, it is certainly simple and quicker than repopulated the drive by ripping the data again. The reason I chose to go with Unraid over a traditional raid array was the way it writes data to the drives. There is no stripe set across all the drives, so if I lose 2 drives I can still read the data off the remaining drives. If I went with a RAID 5 setup and lost 2 drives, then all the data is gone.

Raid is not a backup, you need a duplicate copy off site in order to achieve a full on backup solution, but it does add a big layer of security for your data where using drives on a windows 7 setup with no RAID offers no redundancy at all.

I thought UnRaid can only recover from a single drive loss which it then rebuilds using the Parity drive.?

It can only recover "ALL" data from a single drive failure but you don't lose all data if more than one goes down...you only lose the data from the multiple drives that failed....your data on the other drives are still intact

The advantage of Unraid or any RAID setup is redundancy. I have a lot of time invested in my media library and if a drive fails, then I get to do all the work over again to get it back onto a drive from either BR or DVD. With Unraid, if I lose that drive then I pull it from the server, drop a new one in and it will rebuild the failed drive. While the rebuild of the failed drive isn't quick, it is certainly simple and quicker than repopulated the drive by ripping the data again. The reason I chose to go with Unraid over a traditional raid array was the way it writes data to the drives. There is no stripe set across all the drives, so if I lose 2 drives I can still read the data off the remaining drives. If I went with a RAID 5 setup and lost 2 drives, then all the data is gone.

Raid is not a backup, you need a duplicate copy off site in order to achieve a full on backup solution, but it does add a big layer of security for your data where using drives on a windows 7 setup with no RAID offers no redundancy at all.

I see. Good info. Thanks.

I keep hoping I can find info that proves unraid is a "green" solution but assume it would use the same amount of wattage as the win 7 box if I am using the same hardware.

While up and running I don't see a way it could use less energy.....but you setup in the software an idle time that the hard drives would spin down....and only the drive that is needed would spin up if you were to watch a movie or something
although another issue is when you access your library in xbmc your media is spread across many hard drives so you could spin up your drives by browsing through your collection....but this can also be worked around by using "cache dirs" i believe....which basically you tell cache dirs which directories you want stored in cache and if you have enough ram then you could browse through your whole collection without the need to spin up any drives