drawz

Thanks for the feedback. I have read some of the horror stories, but most seemed to be in the setting of artificial tests, often with virtualized disks for the purposes of these tests. In addition, a lot of the stories are from almost a year ago now and I would think MS has fixed some of the issues. Further, 2012 R2 is now out, although I haven't seen much feedback on that release. As for spindown, my understanding is that drives in a space should be able to spindown if they are not being accessed. If a file is open, the fact that the data is striped means all drives will be spun up, just like any traditional RAID (as well as most other RAID-like solutions). Drives not in the space being accessed should remain spun down though. This potentially gets interesting since multiple spaces of different configurations can co-exist within a given storage pool (i think). This component of unRAID is certainly appealing for media purposes. More importantly, individual drives can be pulled and read with unRAID since they are not striped. I don't think there is any issue linking to another forum if you don't mind doing so.

Glad to hear that PCB swaps are working so far. I seem to remember reading somewhere about replacing these sacrificial TVS diodes on the HDD PCB. Not sure if that would work here or not, but might be worth a shot if you can do some basic soldering. Certainly cheaper than getting replacement PCBs or data recovery.

Are you using the same file sharing protocol on both? Is this an SMB vs NFS issue? NFS works much better on low powered linux devices, like a Popcorn Hour.

Curious to know what issues you ran into? WS2012E with Storage Pools and a combination of parity and mirrored Storage Spaces sounds very appealing - parity for the replaceable things, like media; mirrored for the irreplaceable things, like documents and photos. The client backup features are just icing on the cake (and these worked great in WHS v1 for me).

Almost two months in and I would consider the launch of 5.0 final a huge success. No major bugs have cropped up and many many users have upgraded from 4.7. We also have had significant plugin development and fixes to make them work with 5.0 final as well as some very good new ones. The only disappointment is the lack of progress on the half-functional new webGUI plugin, leaving us stuck choosing between a version of SF that doesn't quite work right and a new webGUI plugin that is incomplete (or the "classic" unRAID interface). I had hoped the move to Github would get more developers involved so that we could get some real progress.

I say the bugs are not so minor. it crushed my machine after install. I have a new upgrade with control panel and updated webGUI. simple features would not load until I installed the SF webGUI plug in and after that all my interface was hosed. I get no main page at all. the top of the screen is a bunch of error text jumble. and the web page looks terrible. when I tried to remove it my machine froze up. will check on it after I get home tonight, but probobly will need to force reboot. please let me know how to get any logs out of it so I can post it here to help you fix this. Did you remove the updated limetech webgui plugin? SF webGUI can't run at the same time of course. I have not yet installed the limetech updated GUI b/c SF is working fine for me.

it works with a few minor (mostly cosmetic) bugs

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=28839.0

Sorry, I can't help, but wanted to give you my support that this would be really nice to get working. Rather than having a free text field, it might make sense to have checkboxes or something similar since the available options are not presented to the user elsewhere. It also might solve your free text field problem!

New to unRaid and these plugins looked great, but I'm getting the same error as ajgoyt. Are we all just out of luck? Any alternatives to some of these? SimpleFeatures plugins don't work with the new 5.0 webgui from Tom. I bet that's the problem.

Would be nice to have this as a plugin.

Something with a GUI... You can make a bootable USB disk with PMagic, that's the swiss army knife for everything disk related. Great idea! Does Parted Magic have something in particular that can be used as a "burn-in" or stress test? Thinking of pmagic made me think about ultimate bootcd as another possibility. Although most of those utilities don't have a GUI, they are usually sufficiently automated that he'd be ok. Maybe.

Traditionally, the `badblocks` command from the e2fsprogs package is used to torture-test new disks. (google linux man badblocks). badblocks -vsw /dev/sdX With the default settings, the final pass will leave the disk cleared to all zeros. On Windows, you could run that command in Cygwin. Still too scary for him I think. I may as well just have him boot unRAID off a flash drive and use preclear. Maybe I should have specified something with a GUI.

Is there anything like preclear or another burn-in utility for HDDs that runs under Windows? Trying to help out my brother who has a new Netgear ReadyNAS. He doesn't have unRAID and no spare PC that he could even temporarily run it on. Besides, any sort of linux command line stuff would scare him away.

Looks like it is having trouble completing the download for crashplan. try a different plugin. since you are suspicious of the USB stick, can you tell us which brand/model/size you are using?

not related to the share issue, but uhhh no parity drive? your data is unprotected.

WDTV Live if you want something preconfigured and ready to go or OpenELEC if you're willing to do an HTPC. The HTPC will be a bit more expensive. An Intel NUC or Zotac Zbox (or similar) are mostly prebuilt and make good HTPCs. OpenELEC is very appliance-like, but may need a small amount of initial tinkering to get it set up to your liking.

Looking even better than before!

Must have woken on the USB signal from the UPS reporting the power outage. Similar to moving your mouse to wake your desktop. Just a guess.

Speaking of scattered plugin information all over the forums....maybe it's time to lock all existing plugin threads and start new ones? Or start a v5.0 plugin subforum. Only actively developed plugins and/or those confirmed to work with v5.0 final would be discussed there?

this would be very helpful!

Avahi is enabled all the time, regardless of the AFP setting, as of one of the later RCs. Avahi is announcing the additional share I believe. There is no way to disable it as it was needed to address a bug. You can hunt through the "5.0-rc issues" forum for more details.

Synology and Drobo handle different sized drives by using smaller partitions as needed. For example, if you have 500GB, 2TB, and 3TB drives, you will have a 500GB partition on each drive joined together in a RAID 5 array. A 1.5TB partition on each of the remaining drives are set up as a RAID 1 array. The last 1TB on the 3TB drive is unused. The two arrays are joined together to look like one big disk. The software to deal with all this with a reasonable user interface is their secret sauce and varies slightly. Synology Hybrid RAID is LVM/mdadm under the hood. Drobo is proprietary. As noted above, unRAID differs from other RAID setups in that it does not stripe data across drives. This fact is what allows files to reside on a single disk, and in turn not spin up the whole array for every access. This is also what allows individual data disks to be removed from an unRAID server and be read individually on any system that can handle ReiserFS. I'm not sure how to create an unstriped RAID 4-like array, but I believe unRAID does it with standard linux tools. Once again, the user interface to deal with all this is the secret sauce. To my knowledge, and I have also looked, there is nothing else out there that does anything like this out of the box with a reasonable UI.

looks great!

5.0 Final will help with this I hope. As will the future plugin manager. Plugins are only semi-officially supported as of now.