abhi.ko

Thank you! That probably seals all the questions I had, will check once I get back home and report again! @Helmonder - Unrelated question - noticed you had a 3TB WD Red in your mix, how is that drive working for you. I might be buying this in the near future if I decide to expand my array - I read great reviews about the WD Reds, IMO the TLER feature is great to have without a lot of other features that enterprise drives have but is unnecessary in the SOHO environment and the price difference is bearable. My problem is the speed - Intellipower, in other words 5xxx RPM. How is that working for you? The question is open for anyone else who have had experiences with the REDs...!

Thank you both...! I have added it on, and started pre-clear yesterday night before your replies and the array drive is now connected to the expansion card and the cache drive to the MoBo. I am currently running pre-clear on the disk since yesterday night - it should be almost done by now, did not get a chance to check it before I left for work today. @ Helmonder - thanks for this info, did not know that till now: Though I started the pre-clear before your reply, will keep this in mind for the next time I add a drive. I am telnetting into the server to run pre-clear, but not using screen, hopefully my windows machine will not shutdown or crash. @Joe L - I am using the "-A" option to run pre-clear on all my drives is that well advised, this drive as NTFS formatted as it was in a windows machine prior to this would that make a difference. This is the command I used: cd /boot ./preclear_disk.sh -A /dev/sdf My array is started without the cache disk, while the pre-clear is running and as you guys said unRAID did identify the disk that was plugged into a different slot and added it on the right location. Only one question remains now, I did not see an option to enable cache in the user shares now, would that appear by itself after the cache drive is enabled and array is restarted? Thank You Again!

Bump : Anyone...!

Hi, My apologies if these has been asked before somewhere and I missed it. I have read a lot of good posts/questions/answers written by many of you here about the cache drive and the mover script and how it works, but I still had a few specific questions/needed confirmations regarding my situation, so here goes: My current tower build is with 6 * 3TB drives (1 parity and 5 data) running on unRAID 5.0-RC5 with a plus license, so I am at the max in both number of array drives I can use and also SATA ports on my MoBo (only 6). Now I am planning on adding a 2TB cache drive (been very sparingly used in an HTPC) with a PCI-e 2 Port SATA card, so: 1) I read somewhere that the cache and parity drives must be connected to MoBo SATA ports directly and not to the addon cards - is that true? 2) If it is true then I would unplug a array drive from the MoBo and connect the cache drive to the MoBo port and then plug in the array drive to the PCI-e card. The drive I'm planning on unplugging and reconnecting is an empty drive in the array, it has not been used yet. Here is what I am planning on: Power-down the server. Add the SATA port card and the drive. Unplug the empty drive from the M/B and connect it to the SATA port on the add on card. Connect the cache drive to the M/B. Power-up and select the cache drive on the main page of the Web GUI. Enable cache in the user shares that I want. That's it and I'm done. Is this right? 3) Question about powering up the server - my array starts automatically when I power up the server (reboot), is this a setting I can change? Where can I change it from? 4) Should I pre-clear the cache drive? If I don't would it take a long time to enable it? 5) Would switching SATA ports for an existing array drive cause the drive from being not recognized immediately by the array? Would I have to run a parity check after doing this? Just to confirm I am running the drives inside the case and not using the hot-swap bays or drive cages. That is all for now. Thanks for all your help in advance. Thanks - Abhi

@ Johnm - I asked the same question in my thread here but did not get an answer from you, saw the OP had the same question so here it is again: Question on the definition of power on hours there - doesn't UNRAID spin down drives when they are not being used (read/write)? Would it still be counted as powered on then? My use for this tower is mainly to store and serve media to my HTPC and other players. So even though the unraid server system would be on 24/7 the disks would only be spinning as and when I access it right? If so, then 2400 hours roughly translates to around 6.5 hours per day, but I would never be able to watch movies for 6.5 hours a day (unfortunately). If I would estimate the hours of use it would be probably 8 hours a week, which is around 500 hours a year (with a buffer). So I should probably run without issues for a few around 5 years, hopefully. Am I understanding this 'power on state' definition correctly? @ OP - My tower has 5 of these disks running and 2 out of the 5 I've had for over 8 months now and have worked fine so far without issues, the other I have had for close to 3 months and they are working great as well. I got these drives by opening up the Seagate Expansion 3TB external drives, which is sold at a hefty discount than the bare drive on Newegg and Amazon - when I bought them they were at least $60 cheaper. Of course you would loose the warranty if you pry open the enclosure so not advising you to do this, but for me the premium of $60 for a year of limited warranty for a $120 drive was too much and so I decided to go without it. But to answer your question the drives are awesome fast and works very well for most of my uses.

Thank You all for all the suggestions. From what all of you said I am guessing OpenVPN is the best alternative. Few questions : @darkside - thank you for the detailed explanation, from the cons for OpenVPN I had a question on the configuration/client software: So, once I have upgraded the firmware no the router and configured VPN access, what kind of configuration/software would I need at the system from which I plan to access the server (office computer)? I do not have admin rights to the work system that I plan to use. Would I able to log into the server and do maintenance tasks from any system connected to the internet? This 3rd party firmware is reliable right, I've used DD-WRT and Tomato on my old Netgear routers in the past, first time coming across this. Hence the question, please don't mind, this won't brick the router, right? Have any of you used this?

Thank you for the responses. My router is - ASUS RT-N56U.

Is it possible for me to access my media server box (unRaid 5.0 rc3) from outside my home network? Say from a work network, log in, access the web GUI and unMenu do maintenance tasks etc.

Not exactly since once you rip them out of the external case you couldn't send them in for repair/replace under warranty during that first year unlike a bare drive. I agree it (was) a good deal though and probably a good bet once 1 or more preclears are run while they are in the case to test them out before install. That was what I was saying since I am already into 7 months of the 1 year warranty, only if something fails in the next 5 months then the warranty applies(that too limited) not after that. Question is how much are you willing to pay for that pseudo insured feeling - in this case the cost was almost $60 - that seemed excessive to me. Again not encouraging you or anyone here to rip open the drive if you don't feel comfortable, just saying that in my case I'm very happy I did.

Is that CPU and motherboard compatible - looks like the processor needs a AM3 board and you have a AM2+ board selected. Might be worth looking into the supported CPU list on the ASUS site. Also even the 8GB flash drive is overkill, 2GB is more than enough...even with all the addins you plan to use.

Thank you for asking this. I am trying to understand how split level will work myself, so Joe's post was helpful I have a clarification though. Split Level question - here is my folder structure: I have 3 shares created: //tower/Movies //tower/TV Shows //tower/Backups Now within Movies I have a folder separately for the language of the movie (I have more than one language in my collection): e.g. //tower/Movies/English Movies/Movie 1/movie1.mkv I have my split level set to 3 because I did not want any of the Movie folders (Movie 1) split between discs - now after reading this I'm confused whether that is the right number, or should I set it to 2. Also what happens when the disk a disc is full, does that affect it at all?

Joe - the file is attached on Reply#10 on this topic. Haven't changed anything on that created the file in Notepad++ and saved it as a Unix script on to the /boot/config folder, the other thing I did install yesterday was simple features, before I rebooted, which is working great.

I am deleting from my windows machine - not command line. I deleted from the windows machine and went back into the BIN folder on the same machine to see if the deleted file showed up there - no file! Also, when I right click and the file and choose delete in the windows machine, it tells me that the file is going to be permanently deleted - do you still want to do this? Is that supposed to be the case? I assumed it would be because it wouldn't got to the Windows Recycle Bin, but to the one we created on the unRaid box right?

Thank you BRiT - that is a great resource by Rajahal. Got most of my questions answered. This topic can now be closed or solved! Thanks for all the help.

Thank you again! I have rebooted after adding the smb-extra.conf file. Everything looks okay and the BIN directory does show up under my shares, problem is I tried by deleting an unwanted file within a sub-directory in the share and it did not show up in the BIN folder - got permanently deleted. Does that mean that the recycle bin is not working as it should? Or is it because it was deleted from a sub-directory and not the main share? Here is my folder tree that is shown on the network: //tower/movies(main share that is mapped to my Windows Machines)/English Movies/Movie 1(e.g. 127 Hours)/Movie1.mkv(all movie and metadata files). I deleted a backdrop (jpeg) file - backdrop.jpg within the Movie 1 folder, and it did not show up in the recycle BIN folder. @ graywolf - thank you very much for the code and the instructions on how to get it added. I haven't added these lines to config/go file yet, thought I would wait until I get the BIN setup right. I do plan to add it on, and yes I am using unRaid Version 5.0-rc3 - so I would add these 2 lines to the config/go file - correct? chown nobody:users /mnt/user/BIN chmod 0770 /mnt/user/BIN Thanks for all the help so far.

Rajahal - I'm impressed with your product range and the website. Very well designed and decently priced. Just had a quick question, noticed that all of your servers have a PRO (USB 3.0) version available, question is does unRaid support USB 3.0 are there any linux specific drivers that needs to be installed for it to work at Super speed specs. My MoBo has USB 3.0 ports and I have USB 3.0 external drives, would be great if they do work at Superspeed transfer rates, would even beat gigabit, and that would be my method of choice it is already on my windows machines.

Thank you all. I am taking your advice and opting to go for a regular drive rather than an SSD. Since the drive I am copying from is an external HDD connected to the Windows machine via USB 3.0, over a gigabit internet, those would be the bottlenecks for transfer speeds and not the performance of the cache drive. So as you wise people said it makes sense to get a 7200 RPM 3TB warm spare. But the bigger question is whether I really do need one? Asking because Johnm said this: That being the case would I really see speed improvements when copying into the array vs cache drive? What are your thoughts on this? Thanks for the help so far.

Thank You - Joe and graywolf - appreciate all the help. I have a disk on which pre-clear is running right now (post read @ 70% when I left it in the morning) , so I haven't yet rebooted the system, will do and post details. @ Joe L. - thank you will create the directory, even if the other script would create it, it wouldn't hurt creating it before -right? @graywolf - Thank you! Love the idea and thanks for the script, but newbie question for you - how do I run it via cron, could you explain or link me some thing that I can read through.

Thank you - already did that. The post was detailing the other copy attempts that did not work well, when they should have - looking to understand why cp or SNAP failed to work - any ideas?

There is already a file by the name smb-extra.conf in the config dir. Do I overwrite that? Also I'm using Notepad++ as the editor and saving the file as unix script file - would that work? Attached a copy of the file. smb-extra.conf

Thank You. Appreciate the prompt response. I have no knowledge or idea how to edit that. I'm completely new to Linux. So till I can learn or even understand it well, I would just be extra careful not to delete anything from the array by mistake. Just built my brand new unRaid box and I'm loving it. Thank you for all the tools and informative posts you have developed and written, appreciate it greatly. Makes life for newbie's like me much easier.

Thank you Joe. What if I am deleting only a few files and not the entire contents of the share, would I need to anything else on the unRaid box after I do the deletion on Windows? Also there is no "recycle bin" functionality right, any ways to recover something that you accidentally deleted?

Hi, The title pretty much says it all. I'm very new to unraid and to linux as whole, but I just built my server got a plus license and have 6 drives (all 3TB 7200 RPM - 5x Seagate Barracuda; 1x Hitachi Deskstar) hooked and running and I'm 70% done copying all my files on to the array, all over a gigabit connection. I have been reading about the benefits of adding a cache drive to this existing setup, but can't seem to decide whether I should invest in one, my MoBo only has 6 SATA ports so this would mean getting a SATA controller PCIe card - like this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124045 and probably an SSD or a small HDD. So totally a little over $125 (with a 120GB SSD)! Any inputs to help me decide would be hugely appreciated - does this make transferring faster - what are the benefits on having one (if there are any)? Would an SSD be a better bet if I decide to add a cache drive? Thanks in advance for your help! - Abhi

Not to hijack this thread - but had the same question, what if I delete it from the shares on a Windows machine, would it be removed from the array as well and space marked as available? Is it advisable to run a parity check afterwards if I do that?

Okay I tried multiple times to copy the data from an NTFS 3 TB drive using the cp command as Influencer suggested below and followed the Wiki from Joe L. linked in a previous post but I couldn't get far. I loaded the NTFS driver and created a directory called HTPC_Data but when I tried to mount the drive I kept getting this error: root@Tower:/# mount -r -t ntfs /dev/sdf /mnt/HTPC_Data -o umask=111,dmask=000 -v mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdf, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so When I tried to check dmesg|tail I got something that said that the disk size was too large and 2TB is the max supported, is the fact that this is a 3TB disk that I was trying to mount that caused the problem? I even tried to mount the partition, in this case sdf1, but again got the same error. root@Tower:/# mount -r -t ntfs /dev/sdf1 /mnt/HTPC_Data -o umask=111,dmask=000 -v mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdf, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so Then I tried to use snap and create a share for the internally connected SATA drive, everything looked good and I did assign the drive (serial number) to a share name as instructed in the post for SNAP installation and creating shares - http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5904 . But after creating the share I never saw the share on the network - everything else was showing - disks, flash, other shares and even other USB devices I managed to share using SNAP, but not this internally connected SATA drive. Does SNAP only work with USB devices or can unassigned SATA drives (connected to a SATA port on the MoBo) be shared as well? So finally since everything else failed I plugged it into my windows workstation and copied over the network, which moved pretty fast and all the data (2.7 TB) was moved within say 15-16 hours. Wonder how much faster the internal move would have been. Can anyone offer any insights on how to accomplish this with a 3TB or larger drive, if I need to in the future? Thanks in advance for all your help. Edit: Forgot to mention that this disk (sdf) that I was trying to copy from was in a windows machine my HTPC (locally stored movies) before this and it had a GPT partition table, I think I saw something on the screen when I started pre-clear on this disk yesterday night about the GPT. Would that be causing the issue? Preclear seems to be running fine and pre read was 90% done when I last check it today morning before I left home. Don't know whether this was related but thought I would mention it.