One2go

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Everything posted by One2go

  1. It is for this reason that after researching this site I decided on an Asus AMD board. I have never seen such a smooth operation. It is not the time worth futzing around with all this different tech features that are not used by UnRaid. Hope you get to a decision that will give you peace of mind.
  2. I know I could have fit more in the case using 5 in 3 cages but I liked the inexpensive ($ 4 in 3 cages from Scythe ("Hard Disk Stabilizer x4"). No fan and solid, but only 16 drives plus 1 on the bottom. Plus when I planned it Unraid didn't support as many drives as it does now. In addition keep it cool and quiet was an additional desire of mine. With eventually 32 TB of data or 30 TB and 2 parity drives if that ever comes, I am set for awhile.
  3. Well here we go on our way to level 1 testing. Installed the Adaptec 1430SA into the 16x PCI-e slot and connected the new 4 Samsung 2 TB drives to it. Installation went without a hitch. Adaptec card went into configuration by typing Ctrl-A and then in the setup I disabled the BIOS. Rebooted and the 4 drives became visible. Weirdest thing though happened. Since the existing 4 drives were ID /dev/sda to /dev/sdd I expected the new 4 drives to become sde to sdh. But NO the new drives became /dev/sda to /dev/sdd and the old drives are now /dev/sde to /dev/sdh. Man you can wipe out a whole disk of data if you don't read carefully and perhaps blink. When I ran the preclear script I was happy to see the message "Drive does not seem to have a valid partition". Anyhow preclear is on its way and hopefully some 24 hours later these 4 drives come on-line bringing the total to 14 TB. Thanks for all your hard work Joe. Things have been just so easy without any hitch that I am anxiously waiting for the shoe to drop. It just can't be such a breeze with no problems. I do also appreciate the excellent efforts that went into version 4.5, haven't updated to 4.5.3 yet. I really hope that eventually we will have a system with 2 parity disks. Summary so far this mobo has been nothing but fantastic and with the new 8 port controller a total of 21 disks running of PCI-e should be possible. For me adding the 8 port controller will be the end. The mobo has one additional part that I either will use for an additional data disk or should it ever happen a second parity disk. Total of 17 disks max out the Antec 1200.
  4. Just did a scan on the reviews @ newegg.com and I now see what you mean about new technology. Does UnRaid take advantage of this new tech or does it not matter?
  5. Damn, that was fast UPS dropped them of this evening. Tomorrow it is preclear time and installation. Then of we go to Level 1 testing I hope.
  6. I am a newb at this UnRaid thingy myself, but I used 2TB Samsung HDDs. Installed them in the Antec 1200, hooked them up with 10" cables to the mobo ports, pre-cleared them and that was the last that I had to worry about drives. Why in this day and age do you have to jumper drives. I was toying with the idea of introducing a different brand of HDDs but after reading your experience I think I stay with 2TB Samsungs for all 16 drives.
  7. If you order the Samsungs from Newegg, use BING it gives you an additional $3 off per drive. So instead of $149.99 it is $146.99. Not bad.
  8. Thanks for posting this, just ordered 4 more of these. I purchased 4 in December for the same price and they have been nothing but fantastic. This should now enable me to do the level 1 testing with my mobo and the Adaptec 1430SA controller that I have yet to install. For a total of 8 drives with 14 TB on-line way to go. I thought I remember reading somewhere to disable the on board BIOS for the controller, any suggestions on that? Thanks O2G
  9. I am not sure. I do have an Adaptec 1430SA that is still in original packaging and has not been used because of lack of additional drives. I want to get more of the 2TB Samsung drives (5* on Newegg) but I am not willing to pay a $30 premium per drive from what I paid in December. So once I get additional drives I'll also get this new card which will give me 12 ports on two PCI-e cards and 5 ports from the mobo. This will fill the space for the 17 drives that I have in the Antec 1200. Sorry for not being able to not be more helpful but so far this combination of hardware has performed flawless, with excellent writing speeds both from my i7 950 HP elite and my QNAP NAS TS-239 Pro.
  10. Check out what I used http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5102.0 this mobo will do 17 drives with 2 PBI-e x8 and 2 PCI-e x2 slots. With the GigaByte boards and others you have to be careful and see if the 2nd PCI-e socket does not disable 2 of the PCI-2 x1 sockets. Here are some picks of my rig which gas almost the same parts. I am using 2TB Samsung drives, so far I have 4 used and as soon as they get lower in price I'll add more. I am also using the Adaptec 4 port controller having to use what works with the Unraid software. Side View: Back View: The Drives: The Mobo: Command Console:
  11. Finished and nothing suspicious in the syslog nor on the screen. Below is a sreen shot after the parity check finished.
  12. Thanks for the excellent tips. Well it is off and running and doing a parity check. Let's see what will happen 6 hours from now.
  13. Copied 185 Gig to the array and did my first parity check. Accordingly to the log it took 7h & 45 minutes but accordingly to my watch only 7h & 30 minutes. Well 15 minutes is not the world. Will the parity check time increase as the array gets fuller? So far I am very happy with the combination of hardware no hiccups unless someone else can spot them in the Syslog. I searched and researched the forum and wiki for a simple guide for setting up for the first time the shares, or an example of when finished building the box and the array is on-line what next in Linux newb terms. I ended up creating the User Shares Bits and Bobs, Documentaries, Movies, Pictures and TV Shows. I wanted to have Movies & TV Shows on Disk2 & 3 while the others on Disk1. But the disk shares showed that all the directories where created on Disk1. Eventually I deleted and manually created the directories on the Disks, then the User shares worked with the parameters Fill-Up, Free Space=31457280 (30Gig), Include Disk1, Exclude Disk2,Disk3 and vice versa for the Movies & TV Shows shares. Any idea why that is the case? Spent too long of a time trying to figure out how to use smbmount to copy from a QNAP NAS to the tower. Did it via windows explorer & TeraCopy. Got between 28 & 40 M/sec. Maybe Next time I try smbmount. Feb 4 01:45:29 Tower kernel: mdcmd (856): check CORRECT Feb 4 01:45:29 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread woken up ... Feb 4 01:45:29 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread checking parity... Feb 4 01:45:29 Tower kernel: md: using 1152k window, over a total of 1953514552 blocks. Feb 4 01:58:01 Tower ntpd[1189]: synchronized to 72.52.190.26, stratum 2 Feb 4 01:58:01 Tower ntpd[1189]: time reset -0.202804 s Feb 4 01:58:20 Tower ntpd[1189]: synchronized to 72.52.190.26, stratum 2 Feb 4 02:04:36 Tower ntpd[1189]: synchronized to 69.164.197.199, stratum 2 Feb 4 02:07:36 Tower ntpd[1189]: synchronized to 72.52.190.26, stratum 2 Feb 4 02:10:03 Tower ntpd[1189]: synchronized to 69.164.197.199, stratum 2 Feb 4 02:55:15 Tower ntpd[1189]: synchronized to 72.52.190.26, stratum 2 Feb 4 03:00:10 Tower ntpd[1189]: synchronized to 69.164.197.199, stratum 2 Feb 4 09:12:18 Tower kernel: md: sync done. time=26810sec rate=72865K/sec Feb 4 09:12:18 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread sync completion status: 0 syslog-2010-02-04.txt
  14. FWIW there are a few other parameters to consider. 1st how long will you keep the data on-line, the longer you do, the larger the HDDs will have to be. Will you store TV shows, or view them and then delete that will also determine your total size. In my experience I tried the HTPC (Shuttle) approach with external SATA enclosure that lets you hot swap drives. I stored the drives in enclosures made for HDDs similar to the VHS cases. When my collection hit 14 drives I decided a different approach is needed. Keep the 14 drives for archiving and buy the 2TB drives to build a server. I will never have to second guess myself, damn should have bought the 2TBs now I am in need of space and Murphy's law might come into play as you replace the smaller drive with a bigger one. Since most of my drives are Samsung 500 Gig & 1TB and I have had yet a failure, I stuck with the 2TB from Newegg when they were offered for $149 for a few days, bought 5 max allowed. Another factor to consider is how much do you value your data. Do you have content that is no longer available or was a onetime HD airing and is not available on optical media. Obviously this will effect for how long and where you store it. Finally the best reason for having an unRAID server is the ability to have all that content displayed not in file format but in thumbnails and other artwork that is easy to navigate. Boys like their toys and the bigger the boys the bigger the toys.
  15. I looked at that but the linux newb I am decided putty was easier Here are my entries from the log: Minor issues: Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ACPI Warning: Incorrect checksum in table [OEMB] - 7D, should be 74 20090521 tbutils-246 Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata1: applying SB600 PMP SRST workaround and retrying Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata4: softreset failed (device not ready) Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata4: applying SB600 PMP SRST workaround and retrying Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata2: softreset failed (device not ready) Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata2: applying SB600 PMP SRST workaround and retrying Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata3: softreset failed (device not ready) Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ata3: applying SB600 PMP SRST workaround and retrying Errors Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: atiixp 0000:00:14.1: simplex device: DMA disabled Jan 26 18:22:52 Tower kernel: ide1: DMA disabled Jan 26 18:22:53 Tower kernel: xor: automatically using best checksumming function: pIII_sse Any comments on the syslog. I guess since I don't use IDEs the DMA disable doesn't matter. syslog-2010-01-26.txt
  16. My Samsung 2TB will take about 31h to 32h to finish all the tests. But I'll say better safe then sorry. It's a whole new experience to get back into unix syntax. As once a wise man said Unix was invented by space aliens.
  17. I did read the compatibility chart and that is where I got some ideas of what mobo to go for from. At present the server is preclearing four 2TB Samsung drives and it is taking quite some time. To make it worst after 30 hours and being 76% into the post read process my PC with the 4 telnet sessions open decided to restart after a windows update, will not happen again. So at present I am going for the second time through a preclear process. Damn 2TB is a lot of data to read and write to. Once I have the 4 drives on-line I'll try to follow up on the level 1 test and once the shares have been assigned and content has been copied I should have some idea how compliant this motherboard is. On a side note, how do you start off with a clean syslog and when running a preclear from the console will activity be logged in the /var/log/syslog or where do I look for logged reports? It has been a very long time for me since fooling around with VAXs and using vi.
  18. Like many others here, I was searching for a motherboard that was not old but actually could be bought from on-line retailers. After searching the forum here and checking with a few other sites I decided to give the ASUS M4A78-E motherboard a try. I trusted that the AMD chipsets would work from the different comments that I researched and sure enough I believe this mobo could be a winner. The cheapest on-line retailer was Zip Zoom Fly but they were out of stock so Newegg it was. Here are the details: North Bridge AMD 790GX South Bridge AMD SB750 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 (Single x16 or Dual x8) 2 x PCI Express x1 SATA Ports 3Gb/s 5 Onboard Video Chipset ATI Radeon HD 3300 GPU Video Ports D-Sub + DVI HDMI 1 x HDMI Max LAN Speed 10/100/1000Mbps USB 1.1/2.0 6 x USB 2.0 IEEE 1394 1 x IEEE 1394a eSATA 1 x eSATA 3Gb/s Form Factor ATX I installed the board with an Athelon X2 (AM2+ Socket), 2 Gig of OCZ DDR2-1066 Mhz that I had, Corsair TX750 PSU, Antec 1200 case, 4Gig Patriot Memory USB key and 4 x Samsung 2TB hard drives to round off the unRAID server components. I followed the instructions for installing the unRAID OS and powered up the Tower. After making changes in the BIOS, like booting of USB key, memory voltage 2.1 to get the OCZ to run at 1066 MHz plus AHCI mode for the Hard drives I rebooted the server and voila we are go. After more reading and consulting I installed the preclear script and I am almost done with burning in the drives. After 30:54:55 we are 76% complete of the post-read process. Next step for me is creating the shares and I guess doing some more tests to see if this will become an excellent motherboard. With the PCI-e slots available and the on-board SATA ports the potential is to have 17 drives hooked up. Any suggestions on where to go from here to make sure that this motherboard will measure up to the requirements set by the other reference boards?
  19. I am also considering this mobo and was ready to pull the trigger. Since in the the thread it has been mentioned several times regarding the PCI-e x 16 slot and its uncertainty for running a PCI-e SATA card, can I implore one of the owners to please check if a x1 or x4 card works in this slot. For me it is a deal breaker as I want 16 drives to be supported. This is from the manual: 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16_1) (Note 4) (Note 4) If you are installing a PCI Express graphics card, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16_1 slot for optimum performance. 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4 (PCIEX4_1) (Note 5) (Note 5) The PCIEX1_2 and PCIEX1_3 slots share bandwidth with the PCIEX4_1 slot. When the PCIEX4_1 slot is populated with a x4 card, the PCIEX1_2 and PCIEX1_3 slots become unavailable.