limetech

In the past Promise firmware wouldn't support more than 8 drives. Maybe could use a m/b with 8 SATA ports, 2 PCI Promise cards, and 1 4-port PCIe card would get 20 ports. Problem, though is how willing are you to have 1 parity drive for 19 data drives? The wider the array, the greater the chance of 2 disks failing simultaneously, thus resulting in data loss (though not complete data loss thanks to unRAID). Anyway it would be tempting to put it together just to see if everything can handle that many drives (bios, drivers, linux, etc).

Yes, the AMS SATA cage fits perfectly in the Stacker. Theoretically you could get 20 drives in there! Not sure how you get 20 SATA ports though.

Yes, exactly correct Joe (thanks!).

Great idea! Added to the future feature list: - provide internationalization support, e.g., in System Management Utility I need to think about this for a while to see how to implement.

Yep. If something's not working right, 99% of time it's hardware - problem becomes one of isolation - at least that's what I like to say to keep those engineers busy while I debug the code

Good question... Two ways to answer it: 1. Buy one and try it! 2. Google the motherboard model followed by the word "linux" and see what pops up

We have those components in-house - I can go see how they fit tomorrow and report back. As for motherboard - I would recommend Asus P5B-VM DO. It has on-board video, 7 on-board internal SATA connectors, plus 1 eSATA connector. Add two Promise SATA300TX4's and you can support up to 15 internal drives + 1 external drive. Hint: next release of unRAID will support 16 drives. The board is not quirk-free: once you get 13 or more hard drives installed, the Flash no longer appears in the boot list ?! Setting bios to make USB mass storage appear as "Forced-FDD" seems to solve problem, at least with all Flash devices we've tested with so far (but which isn't a lot).

The case is an AOpen H800A. I have a friend at AOpen who gave us a good deal on a pallet of these. The unit pictured has 3x 3-in-2, plus 1x 4-in-3 for a total of 13 sata drives. However I am not happy with this configuration and instead we are going to offer 3x 5-in-3 for 15 drives, plus an eSATA connector to support a grand total of 16 drives! Unit goes out soon for photos & will be available for probably around $1300. This case has a rackmount option. We're also considering offering the same disk configuration in a Lian-Li PC-A16B case.

Thank you for the report!

1/ Check the mounting of your motherboard in the chassis and of PCI cards (if any) in the motherboard. Make sure everything is well seated, no possible shorts, all connections solid. 2/ You mention the new case has "cooled drive bays". As a test, bypass those bays - just hook up drives directly to power & data cable, letting them hang out the case. Also consider disconnecting all the case fans - but not the cpu fan It should be perfectly fine to run your system like this long enough to figure out if it's now working correctly. If so, start reconnecting stuff one-by-one until you find the component which is the culprit (e.g., a bad fan might be producing all kinds of ripple on +12).

SATA2 also introduced two additional features useful for arrays: 1/ A signal on the power-connector which can be used to indicate hard drive activity. 2/ A "locking" connector style to support locking SATA cables.

I'll send you as many keys as you want for free - we have a big pile of them Just send me an email - [email protected]

Too funny! That is truly hot swap To answer your question: Never thought about it before, but you know that's a really good feature of unRAID... If you use a particular drive to be the "backup" for all your critical files, you can put a big sticker on it: "In Case of Fire: Yank Me Out".

Yes, what Joe says. You can also have messages forwarded to another system on your network, for example a PC running a windows version of syslogd. This works pretty well - I've been meaning to create a write-up on this... maybe someone would like to take a stab at it and post to the wiki?

Actually, yes I think that particular card is supported. Give it a try and report back please!

There will be a new pre-assembled server appearing on our website soon. Attached are some photos. The same chassis can be configured as tower or rack mount.

I understand the frustration... What's strange about this problem is that the Flash partitions are not recognized after being formatted via Windows, but are recognized after running 'fdisk/mkdosfs' via linux... I've never seen this before. One more thing to try: Earlier you mentioned that you had an old Flash that worked. Boot 4.0 off this Flash. Then put your Verbatim Flash back into the PC and format under windows as described earlier (but set a volume label other than UNRAID, e.g, TEST). When done, plug the flash into the running 4.0 system. It should show up as 'sdb'. Let's see if we can get this far.

This system log is incomplete. The the very end of your syslog reads: Jun 1 20:03:39 Tower kernel: [ 49.174801] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access VBTM Store 'n' Go Pro 5.02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS Jun 1 20:03:39 Tower kernel: [ 49.175818] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda Jun 1 20:03:39 Tower kernel: [ 49.180659] usb-storage: device scan complete Jun 1 20:03:42 Tower login[824]: ROOT LOGIN on `tty1' Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.445960] SCSI device sda: 1019391 512-byte hdwr sectors (522 MB) Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.446573] sda: Write Protect is off Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.446577] sda: Mode Sense: 45 00 00 08 Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.446580] sda: assuming drive cache: write through Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.447822] SCSI device sda: 1019391 512-byte hdwr sectors (522 MB) Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.448448] sda: Write Protect is off Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.448451] sda: Mode Sense: 45 00 00 08 Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.448453] sda: assuming drive cache: write through Jun 1 20:03:57 Tower kernel: [ 78.448457] sda: sda1 The ROOT LOGIN line is you logging into the console. Was the line immediately preceeding it also the last line being output on the screen? The symptoms here don't make sense. Should not have to run 'fdisk' on the Flash. It could be that this particular model Flash is doing something unusual/unexpected. Might be better to just go out and buy a $20 Lexar or Sandisk.

madshi - I read through the thread and I'm not sure what state you're at now. To set a baseline, please plug your Flash into a PC and take these steps: 1. Format using Windows - right click the drive letter and select 'Format'. Format as FAT32, Quick format is fine. Specify 'UNRAID' as the volume label. 2. Run 'syslinux' specifying the Windows drive letter. 3. Copy the 4.0 release files to the Flash. 4. Right-click the drive and select 'Eject'. 5. Remove all hard drives from your server (just disconnect their power). 6. Plug Flash into your server & boot. Now if I'm following everything correctly, it will not mount the Flash for some reason, and hence can't find the config files. If this is the case, do this: 1. From console (keyboard), type: cat /proc/partitions You should see an entry there for your Flash which something like this: 8 0 500736 sda 8 1 500592 sda1 (It might not be 'sda', whatever it is use that below.) Now type: mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /boot This should mount the Flash on the /boot directory. Now type: cp /var/log/syslog /boot/syslog.txt This will copy the system log into the root folder of the Flash. Finally, plug Flash back into PC and post the system log.

Great question! We backup all our development systems to an unRAID server using rsync & a cron job. I use a program called MirrorFolder to synchronize home PC's to an unRAID server.

The "Estimated speed" is measuring the rate at which the parity drive is being accessed, and thus can not go faster than the speed of the parity drive. 59MB/sec is very nearly the max speed of any 7200RPM hard drive.

Nice job! Thanks.

Great report! 1) Whey you say the Silicon Image controller only works in IDE mode, do you mean that attached SATA drives appear as "IDE" drives (ie, as /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, ...)? 2) I'll try to look into JMicro IDE problem. 3) For current unRAID OS, only 1 LAN port is supported (though linux guy might get both going with enough tinkering). Does the bios give you the ability to enable/disable either one? If so, try both ports that way, ie, first port 1 enabled, port 2 disabled, then other way around. 4) Regarding USB boot - look for options in bios for setting "USB2.0" mode. 10 minutes is waaaay too long and it's probably using USB1.1 for some reason.

In future, you can send me an email [email protected] and I can spend some time trying to resolve such issues.

Correct!