mifronte

Luckily the powerdown script worked and the array came back up. Everything looks fine except the one disk that failed the copy is not listed in the unMenu file browser. I can cd to it from the command line, but if I tried to copy files from Windows 7, everything freezes. Hopefully someone can give me some hints what to try.

The preclear are in the Post-Read 75%. Would the disk be recognized as precleared if I powerdown the server? Would this cause any damage? The unRAID main page is reporting stopping, but I can no longer issue any commands on /mnt without freezing another tty session. I am completely stuck and may resort to just powering down the machine anyway I can and hope for the best.

I was in the process of writing to the array (copying files) when my workstation lost networking. I tried stopping the array but the disks cannot be unmounted. I followed the WIKI to manually kill the process that is hanging each disk (all disks there was the cache_dir process and the sleep). Then I issued the manual umount command for each disk. I then ran this command again fuser -mv /mnt/disk* /mnt/user/* to see if there were any more hung processes, but the command froze my terminal screen. I tried control-c to break out, but no luck. Only the unRAID web screen is responsive but it is just displaying Stopping..., unMenu is dead. I have IPMI and so can open another terminal session. In addition, I have two preclear process running. What can I do now to restart the array?

I plan to only install the OS and applications on the SSD. Data will remain on my unRAID server. So the wort case is have to install the OS and applications again. Once I am done tweaking, I will create an image of the disk as a backup. As far as the disk no longer being recognized by the BIOS, this happened to me too, but it turned out to be the boot order in the BIOS. With the drive, a lot of people are probably using a recent motherboard were the BIOS is still a work in progress. In my case, all of a sudden, the BIOS did not like multiple devices in the boot list. Everything was fine when I only had the SSD listed in the boot list. I am now contemplating getting a second SSD to setup a RAID 0 system drive to double my throughput...

The results I posted is not the max IO version. It is the regular Vertex 3 version. The max IO version was released a few days after I placed my order.

I purchased my OCZ Vertex 3 from NewEgg. If NewEgg put them on sale, I may get another one since they worked out great with the Intel P67 SATA III controller.

The drive is about $300 at NewEgg plus shipping. I figured this is my first SSD and since I was using a P67 motherboard, I might as well spend a little more to fully utilize the native Intel SATA III port from the P67 chipset. It took less than 10 minutes to install Windows 7 64-bit from a USB flash drive. Booting into Windows 7 is fast (12 seconds?) with most of the time attributed to the BIOS.

The SuperMicro PT3DLR motherboard had dual 10/100 LAN which I disabled and installed an Intel Gigabit PCI card. This boosted by transfer from 11 MB/s to 40-45 MB/s. Since it did not have any onboard SATA ports, I had to install a PCI-X 66 MHz SATA controller. My guess is that the PCI bus where the Gigabit LAN card was installed was the bottleneck. It is now regulated to running educational programs for my two year old.

Another benefit of this new workstation is that my network file transfers went from low 40's MB/s (from a Supermicro PT3DLR motherboard) to low 90's MB/s when copying files to the cache drive, a Samsung 1TB 7200 rpm HD103SJ. The source disks (various 7200 rpm drives) were moved from the old Supermicro PT3DLR dual Pentium III system to the new Asus P8P67 deluxe i7 2600K system. Looked like the old motherboard was the bottleneck.

For about $100 more you can get the OCZ Vertex 3 running on the Intel SATA III port of an Asus P8P67 Deluxe:

Finnaly finished building my system with a Vertex 3 as the system drive on the Intel SATA III port of a Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard. Here is the HD Tune results:

Well I pulled the trigger and purchased my very first SSD, the OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB. I am building a new tower workstation using the Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard and will be using the SSD as my system drive connected to the P67 native SATA III port. I guess the next best thing would have been a PCIe based SSD like the one mentioned my Whaler_99. Oh well, I will have to settle for now.

Where you actually able to get he $25 off of $124.99 for the OCZ drive? I tried the same thing for some G.Skill 8 GB DDR3 for $124.99 but I could not get the $25 to apply because it appears that would drop my total below $100. Either that or because there was a free 2GB Kingston USB drive included with the RAM as a promo and so I could not stack the $25 discount on top.

NewEgg has the 2 TB Hitachi 5K3000 for $69.99 after coupon code HARDOCPX413A and $5 mail-in rebate.

I am still using Windows XP Pro and is itching to build a tower workstation using a P67 motherboard with an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU and the OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD as the system boot drive. From what I have been reading, SSDs on the native SATA II and SATA III controlers of the P67 will perform much faster. Heck, I could probably go with an OCZ Vertex 2 SATA II drive and still be impressed.

I know this drive is probably not too applicable to an unRAID server, but still, one can appreciate a good drive. OCZ Vertex 3 240GB

Thanks. I will be monitoring this case to see if the price go below $40.

Anyone know of an inexpensive (below $100 USD) tower case (mid or full) that can accommodate an extended ATX motherboard. I would prefer a full tower with good ventilation. All the one that I can fine are too expensive.

Thanks Joe. I will give your suggestion a try.

Here is my directory structure that I am caching: Media |_____Movies |_____Shows |_____Pictures |_____Videos Command I am invoking: /boot/cache_dirs -d 3 -m 3 -M 5 -p 10 -w -i "Media" It is working when I browse starting from the Media share. However, I also have shares, via smb-extra.conf, that points directly to the sub-folders. It appears that when I start browsing from the sub-folder shares, the directory cache is by-passed. Do I also have to add the -i "Movies", -i "Shows", -i "Pictures", and - i "Videos" if I plan to map to the sub-folder shares?

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB at NewEgg for $77.99 with code 24HRSALE29L. This ends 11:59PM PST on 02/09/2011

I almost bit yesterday, but refrained. Now the bait is a lot more tempting. Just to re-confirm, these are AF drives?

I will skip my step 8 and preclear the disk prior to assigning it to the array. It is a 2TB drive and I can't have the array being off-line that long. Since the old cache drive is not an AF drive, I will be using sector 63 option. I am a little confused on how unRAID would format this drive if I use the sector 63 option on preclear and have my Partition Format set at 4K - aligned? Also, what about the new cache drive? It too is not an AF drive. Should I preclear it too? I may just reset the Partition Format back to MBR - unaligned for this case since both drives are non-AF.

I would like to swap out my current cache drive with another drive and then use the current cache drive as a data drive. Do I just: 01. Stop array. 02. Unassign cache drive. 03. Power down. 04. Replace current cache drive with smaller drive. 05. Insert current cache drive in free drive bay. 06. Power up. 07. Assign new smaller drive as cache. 08. Assign old cache drive as data drive. 09. Start array. I am running 4.7 with Default Partition Format set to 4K aligned. A. Is this the correct procedure to follow? B. Will parity still be valid? C. Will old cache drive, now data drive, need to be preclear and/or formatted? If so, it is not an advanced format drive, will I be OK?

OK this is what I plan to do, please advise if I missed something: 01. Create a /boot/custom/bin directory 02. Create a script file, /boot/custom/bin/spinup_drives.sh, to spin up the drives as follows: #!/bin/bash /root/mdcmd spinup 2 /root/mdcmd spinup 3 /root/mdcmd spinup 4 /root/mdcmd spinup 5 /root/mdcmd spinup 6 /root/mdcmd spinup 7 /root/mdcmd spinup 8 /root/mdcmd spinup 10 /root/mdcmd spinup 11 /root/mdcmd spinup 12 /root/mdcmd spinup 13 03. Add the following lines to the end of my go script: #Schedule daily spinup of drives # Extract root's crontable. Removing any prior spinup calls. crontab -u root -l | grep -v /boot/custom/bin/spinup_drives.sh > /tmp/crontab.root # Append new entries to root's crontable cat <<-EOF >> /tmp/crontab.root # Daily Automatic /sbin/powerdown 00 19 * * * /boot/cutsom/bin/spinup_drives.sh EOF # Update root's crontable. crontab /tmp/crontab.root -u root rm /tmp/crontab.root 04. Currently the permission on the /boot/custom/bin/spinup_drives.sh is 777. Should I change it to something else? 05. I would like to add something so that an entry is made in the syslog to let me know that it is scheduled and when it is executed daily, unless the mdcmd spinup will automatically log an entry.