One2go

Don't know if this is the right place to post but, I have been running RC-3 since its release on a HP N40L with 3TB drives successfully it is rock solid for my configuration and Parity Check is speedily. I also have another server with 4.7 who has 2 TB drives and is running without problems. Besides the > 2TB drive support and a better UI, which I like, what else is of significant difference between the 4.7 final and the 5 RC-3 release? Thanks O2G

I am running RC-3 with no problem using the UnMenu plugin as I consider it essential because it gives greater detailed feedback. In addition I am running the cache_dirs user script. Just finished the Parity Check on my HP N40L server having 4 Hitachi 3TB drives and it was excellent: Parity Check Speed: Was between 126 MB/sec & 51 MB/sec Total Time: 592 minutes Sync errors corrected: 0

Total Painless Update from V5.b14 to V5.RC-3 Followed the instructions amd just replaced the bizroot & bizimage files. Powered my HP 40N server with 4 Hitachi 3TB drives up and it started the array automatically no errors and no hassles. Running latest UnMenu as well as the Cach_dirs script. /Mr Burns EXCELLENT. Now to perform a parity check. Thanks O2G EDIT Just started the Parity Check: Total size: 3 TB Current position: 19.11 GB (1%) Estimated speed: 112.99 MB/sec Estimated finish: 440 minutes Sync errors corrected: 0

Did not enter a sleep script and when I did a manual shutdown starting with umount command the fuser showed that sleep process was not letting me stop the disc. This has happened a few times but have no idea why. I am not bothered by getting the server into sleep mode because when I am done I power them down and power them up when I plan to do some watching. Hope you get your issue solved.

OK, we maybe on a different wave length then, I would like my drives to spin down but when the server goes to sleep using Media Browser as the front end it will not wake it up. So if you want your server to go to sleep then I am sorry I posted in the wrong thread. What would be the advantage to have your server go to sleep?

I also like to know how to keep my HP N40L with v5b14 to go from going to sleep. The drives spin down which is fine, but when the last time the box went into sleep mode, I had to kill the processes for sleep & chachdirs and manually shut down the server.

Well I paid for that drive prior to the flood $109 from NewEgg and it was 5 drive limit this is a 1 drive limit. You can tell they are trying to cope with the results of the flood, whether this is now artificially inflated or not is besides the point. Since I am not in a bind to get another drive soon, I'll sit this one out since I know the deals will become better especially since 4TB drives are available admittedly at a super high price.

Most likely the problem will rear its ugly head again. The mysterious disappearance of the network connection has most likely nothing to do with UnRaid nor anything with the network, but it is all Win 7 related. I have participated in many of the discussion here regarding the symptoms you are experiencing and came to the conclusion that it is "green ribbon of death - Windows 7". Search this site for "green Ribbon" and you will get to this http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15845.0 link where some of us tried all kind of different solutions but none worked effectively. I have lost data by moving, it started the move then the error destination no longer available and data was gone. So I do manual copy and delete from Win 7 machines. Also I have found the standard setup on my HP N40L running v5 beta14 to be very stable. I still get the Green Ribbon but it does not go into the death part. I keep my Win 7 x64 machines regularly updated and have not seen the error dialog box in quite awhile. I am using TeraCopy exclusively between UnRaid and Win 7 x64 machines but if you want to avoid any chances of repeats you have to originate from a Linux Source in a Linux session to UnRaid.

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Where did acquire the mesh cover from and do you have a picture of it. Does it fit in the covering slot area easily?

This brings up an interesting question. I have looked into using NFS but because the upgrade for Win7 32bit & 64bit to Ultimate just for the NFS client is in my opinion too steep, does it make sense to run SMB + NFS between a QNAP NAS (Linux) & my two Unraid Servers and SMB between my Win 32 HTPC, Win 64 Editing machine and the UnRaid servers & QNAP NAS, or am I inviting conflicts here? If including the NFS protocol what will be chosen as default NFS or SMB and does it require some special parameters to use NFS? @Roancea There have been many posts about copying speeds and I believe if you originate the copying from the Win 7 machines it will drag everything through the network, then Windows does its green ribbon of death or other idiosyncrasies and then finally copies it with slow speed to the intended target. I believe to get max speed the copying has to be done from UnRaid server either console or Putty session. I am content with my writing speed to the protected array using teracopy and getting speeds in access of 30 MB/s.

Running three 3TB Hitachi drives for TV shows only. I spaced out shows that are currently active, renewed or soon to be aired with a new season over my 3 drives. That allows for room of expansion, once a show is canceled or finished I decide to keep it or not. Just deleted all the Flash Forward episodes 30 Gig because it is dead and I'll never watch them again. Big Bang Theory needs massive room for expansion because once the Blu-ray discs come out the 1.4 Gig Web-DL episodes will be replaced by BD discs. Needless to say I do some moving of folders from discs on HP Micro Server to Desktop PC or other disc on server. You may want to investigate the thread under compulsive design for the HP N40L micro server, it is one dynamite box and it slices, it dices it stores your TV eps.

Running beta 14 on my HP micro server with Intel NIC & 2 port SATA controller plus four 3TB Hitachi Cool Spin drives ($109 from NewEgg at one time :'( ). Absolutely no hassle, furn it on watch TV episodes, copy new TV episodes run Media Center Master for meta Data, watch more TV episodes, turn the beast off. Repeat the next few days until 9TB of data being filled. That has been my routine for the past 4 months and if you search through the posts here you can see my hesitation of changing to v5b14. For all those that are on the knives edge shell out $200+ when a deal comes around on the HP N40L server and swap the drives and settle down with peace of mind knowing your rig is up and running and making you look good.

I was in the boat of "Tom why are you not posting?" but you know what I am running v5b14 on my HP micro server with four 3TB drives doing just fine like clockwork. As far as I am concerned let the man continue on his course to achieve UnRaid stability, there is more to life then an OS that handles content safe & secure, but for the life of me I can't put my finger on it what could be more important. Take it with a grain of salt

Don't know about the indexing, but another suggestion is to change the folder options to always show icons and never thumbnails. Perhaps the problem comes from generating thumbnails but I am not sure, it is a windows thingy.

Thanks for that bit of information had no idea of that terminology. I have read plenty about complains of copying speed but "Green Ribbon of Death" so appropriately describes what is happening. I have lost moving data because it hung on this dialogue box than came with a message that the destination is no longer available and the data was gone. So I quit moving and started copying and then a separate delete. However I have yet to experience the problem with version 5 beta 14. Deep down I always knew that this was a windows problem not playing nice with Linux. But thanks again as now I have a Google term that I can search for. EDIT: Found this in a document and now I know what is happening. It is not UnRaid it is bleeding Windows, so don't blame UnRaid but windows for creating the "Green Ribbon of Death" the cousin of the "Blue Screen of Death".

No the problem has never fully disappeared, however in my case it is manageable and the annoy factor is bearable. I am using teracopy which seems to work better then explorer type copy or move. When you use the copy or move with Windows Explorer the dialog box just sits there and the green progress bar just sits there and indicates it is scanning. When you click the more button the 3 parameters that show size, remaining time and what has been copied just sit there displaying "Calculating". WTF does it need to calculate I don't want to know that just be off copying or moving & I don't care about how much time is left and how much has been moved/copied. It will be done when it is done, stupid idiosyncrasy. Anyhow since the moving/copying is not on the same level as I do on my desktop I can grin and bear it. However I have seen a big improvement using the HP micro server running four 3TB drives AND using version 5b14 with the shares set to public access. The micro server is much better then my other Unraid server running 4.7 having movie, documentary & music video shares. Since the micro server with its TV shares is much more active in copying / moving I can handle my situation at the moment. Hope you get yours sorted, have you tried version 5 beta14, it has been rock solid and a pleasure for me.

I have been running 4 Hitachi 3TB drives now for a few months in a N40L. The 4 drives are in the cages. Have an extra controller in the PCI-e slot and am waiting now for the drives to come down in price. ProStuff please let us know how you get on with the 4TB tests, if I am not mistaken I read somewhere there might be a chip limitation for the 4TB size but I don't remember if that is N36L specific or not. If that is the case any chance to try a separate controller and see if that works as many of us use the Optical bay to run two 3.5" drives.

Similar values here, but then I do NOT write to a cache drive but directly to the array which accounts for the lower speeds as I don't really see the need for sticking a 2.5" drive in there to gain a few minutes of time. The peace of mind knowing that it is always protected is worth it. And I agree that the machine I am sending from does make quite a bit of difference in performance. There is a significant speed increase when transferring from my QuadCore i7 950, 3200 MHz (24 x 133) with 12 Gig of memory versus my QNAP NAS with an Intel Atom Processor 1.6 GHz with 1GB DDRII RAM plus running 2 WD 1.5TB discs in Raid 1 (mirror) configuration. Especially is it noticeable when the NAS is doing other things, like Unraring, Downloading and what have you. And as already mentioned, I did not perceive any real apparent speed increase using jumbo frames, having spent $22 on a NIC it stays there until I need the slot.

Sorry, not enabled as in enabling a setting, but full through as in the max performance that the stock N40L will give to the 4 data drives in comparison to the throttled speed to the ODD. No special mods for BIOS or any other tweaks, just stock setup. I also was shocked that the N40L has such outdated NIC chipset that will not allow for jumbo frames. Search the comments on Newegg for jumbo frames and you will see that others are disgusted also. Search the forum here for jumbo frames and again you will find some excellent comments and I believe in the end jumbo frames should not make a huge difference since we are not out on the Net where it can make a huge difference but on our own home network.

I do not use the hack. I only run 4 drives from the built in controller that has the full throughput enabled. I don't use the ODD & eSata connections. I have a rocket Highpoint 620 two port controller in one of the slots for the additional two drives should the prices for 3TB drives ever come down in prices to a reasonable level. In the second slot I have an Intel NIC that is excellent in performance which also allows jumbo frames and all my equipment, QNAP NAS, 2nd Unraid server, PC1, PC2, Switch can all handle jumbo frames. So I am running my N40L with jumbo frames = 9000. The stock N40L has an onboard NIC that does not allow for jumbo frames, you have to have a separate NIC. My N40L has 4Gig as memory and I am running unMenu as well as the cache_dirs script without any problems. So far I am very happy with the behavior of version 5b14 with my N40L and with the understanding that with the given hardware (processor & disc drives) I probably have reached the max in writing speed. It is not a huge problem for me since the writing of files to the server are only TV episodes and that takes place every other day and takes a few minutes. Running parity check will take 36 to 40 hours with 3TB drives but that is maybe every other month, so all is good and doable.

I likewise have the N40L micro server and the speed depends upon your drives and where on the drive it writes to. I am running Hitachi 3TB discs (5400 rpm) and writing directly to the protected array (No Cache drive) from my PC which is connected to the same switch I get 25 MB/s. From my QNAP NAS TS239 I get less then 20 MB/s also being connected to the same switch. For me I guess it is a combination of how fast the N40L can get served and then the Hardware of the N40L how fast can it write. I tried all kinds of different ways to improve the writing speed nut without any success and the common consensus here is that with Hitachi 3TB drives half full plus writing directly to the array 25 MB/s is about it. EDIT: Just turned on the Write Cache plus reduced VGA memory to 32MB as you did, which improved the write speed from QNAP NAS to N40L for 1.5 Gig file to 30 - 33 MB/s

Do a copy of a file using TeraCopy, it will tell you what speed you are getting during a copy. Without those stats you will not get many answers. I have eight 2TB Samsung drives SAMSUNG_HD203WI & one SAMSUNG_HD204UI. From my desktop machine to the protect array directly I get up to 45 MB/s but most of the times I get an average of mid to upper 30s. On a separate server a HP Micro Server I only get up to low 30s with 3TB Hitachi drives. It varies but I believe the copy / paste method may not be the most efficient for transferring.

Jens, Thanks for that detailed description of your experience with the HP micro server. I also have one N40L model and went a similar route, but rather then using the BIOS hack installed into the one slot a HighPoint Rocket 620 PCI-Express 2.0 x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card plus in the other slot I stuck a Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express Network Adapter just to make sure there are no network bottlenecks plus being able to see if the size of MTU will make a difference. It did not. I have so far installed 4 Hitachi 3TB Cool Spin drives and run 5.b14 and have not experienced any problems yet. The only observance I have had so far is that writing to the protected array is not as fast as my other UnRaid server that uses Samsung 2TB drives. I chuck this one up to the Hitachi drives just being slower. Next for me is waiting for the 3TB drives to get cheaper and then also installing the Nexus adapter for 2 additional drives in the optical drive bay. Thanks again for you write up and this whole thread makes it a lot easier for putting one of these together. O2G

Just to chime in with my version 5.b14 process. I did install license on a new USB key, installed the four 3TB Hitachi drives then precleared the drives and ran a parity check. After those few day operations I had a new server with 9TB of free data discs. Then I copied several TBs of TV shows to the new server. No conversion or update from 4.7 to 5b14, just plain vanilla virgin install of 5b14, then addons like unmenu & cached dirs and a few others using unmenu. Then parity check on the empty discs followed by real data transfers. It gives ease & peace of mind and knowing that no additional baggage or possible difficulties from upgrade/update slipped in.