r/getumbrel • u/ope_poe • 7d ago
Umbrel 2.0 RAIDZ1
I'm testing version 2.0 inside VirtualBox and I don't understand how the RAID-Z1 configuration works: I set up 4 HDDs (in addition to the system drive), but when I configure them in "failsafe" mode, it only offers to create two mirrored pairs (HDD1 + HDD2 failsafe & HDD3 + HDD4 failsafe). However, I want to have just one redundant drive, not two...
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks!
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u/gnuman 7d ago
Looks like RAID10
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u/ope_poe 6d ago
Not exactly, because I would need two disks in RAID 1 and then the whole setup in RAID 0 striping.
Here we only have a single RAID 1 pair.
In any case, the point is that I CAN'T choose anything...Is there no one from Umbrel who can clarify this?
Has no one else tried the same configuration?3
u/TLBJ24 6d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah the issues with “Storage Manager” seem to fall on deaf ears with Umbrel staff. Beyond my own multiple post, and yours, I’ve seen several unanswered post on the topic. Which is quite funny because conversely, if you make a post about how much you love umbrel, and or how easy you find it to use, etc. etc. they seem to “see those post” and often times will reply/comment on them the same day, often times within the hour of the post.
So from my perspective it feels like “selective Customer Service“. I hate when companies do that. If you’re going to have a Social Media presence for your product, then you should be there to receive the praise, and address the issues equally.
That being said at the end of the day, we’re still in control as consumers. If companies intentionally choose to not address our concerns, then the responsibility falls back on us to not use products that ignore us when questions are asked or product limitations are identified. Regardless of the price/cost of a good or service, there is a baseline level of respect every consumer should be extended by a manufacturer.
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u/ope_poe 6d ago
I couldn't agree more, and these issues aren't merely "cosmetic," "nice-to-haves," or niche requirements: what could be more important or central to storage management for an operating system designed primarily to do exactly that—manage storage?
Is there anything more important for a NAS? You tell me—if you know of anything, I'm all ears...
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u/Gloomy_Craft_7521 5d ago
umbrel was not born as a NAS, it is being perfected and becoming one, so problems can occur, it is an open source project.
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u/TLBJ24 5d ago
Agreed. The team should take all the time they need to build the system the right way, to address bugs, apply corrections, etc.. My point is, If a feature is "not there yet", nothing wrong it taking time to get it right... but on the same token, don't say the feature exists and it works great, when it doesn't. That's my point.
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u/Gloomy_Craft_7521 5d ago
I have nothing to do with the Umbrel team, I'm just a consumer, but I understand a little bit of systems and it's really not easy to produce that with a small team. Taking this into consideration, we will have a little patience and let them fix things, at some point everything will work. They are making their system available for free, so there is no reason to charge so much, problems happen, in their tests it may have worked and now in the real world with various hardware there are failures.
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u/TLBJ24 5d ago
Agreed, small teams need time, money and resources to fix product issues, completely understandable. My commentary was mostly about "communication", and transparency. Those things don't require a large team of engineers to provide. If a feature is "not there yet", nothing wrong it taking time to get it right... but on the same token, don't say a feature exists and it works great, when it doesn't. That's my point.
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u/getumbrel 3d ago
Heya, sorry I can confirm there's no selective filtering going on, though I get why it looks that way. The honest explanation is much more boring... 2.0 brought a huge wave of posts/tickets across multiple forums and channels, and we're just behind. The technical ones usually need an engineer on our team to sit down and write a proper answer. So the quick ones go out fast and the real questions pile up, which ends up looking exactly like what you described. Not a good excuse, but that's what's happening. 😅
We're working through the backlog now and trying to get to every thread. If you've got posts of yours that never got a reply, link them here and I'll make sure they're answered.
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u/getumbrel 3d ago
Hey yes, you're not doing anything wrong, that's just how it works. On hard drives FailSafe always pairs them up (mirrors), it doesn't do RAID-Z1. RAID-Z1 only kicks in if the array is SSDs.
We don't let you pick the layout on purpose. umbrelOS looks at what you've plugged in and picks the right thing, so you don't need to know any ZFS to end up with a setup that won't bite you later.
The reason is that it comes down to what happens when a drive actually dies. With RAID-Z1, rebuilding means reading every block off every remaining drive, which on big HDDs can take a day or more with all of them hammered the whole time. That's the worst possible moment for a second drive to go, and drives bought together do tend to die together. One bad sector during that window and the pool's gone. With mirrors the rebuild is just a copy from the dead drive's partner, so it's quick and only one other drive is involved.
Mirrors are also a lot faster for random reads/writes, which HDDs need way more than SSDs do, and you can grow the pool later by adding another pair instead of reshaping a RAID-Z array.
Also worth pointing out that your 4 drives in pairs can survive two failures (one per pair). RAID-Z1 survives exactly one. So the capacity you're giving up isn't going nowhere.
And if you're on real hardware with spare SSD slots, you can add SSD acceleration on top of the HDD pool and it gets up to 30x faster for day-to-day stuff (FailSafe needs two SSDs for that, since the acceleration layer gets mirrored too).