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queeg

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    The 5X3 Cage review - Norco, SuperMicro, iStarUSA and Icy Dock

    in Hardware

    Posted

    Thanks so much for all the detailed pictures. 

    I was actually suprised a bit by the Norco being so blocky in the rear.  And it's trays are somewhat massive compared to the Icy Docks and the Supermicros.  I hope they are aluminum?  And the individual walls between slots are very interesting. 

     

    I'm sure I'll be looking at the pictures many times during the next week as new questions pop into my head.  :)

     

     

    The Power Supply Thread

    in Hardware

    Posted

    It varies, and it can be hard to determine exactly.  Here's how I figured out the above number of drives that each PSU can support:

     

    Say the PSU has 30A on the single +12V rail.  Estimate green drives at 2A and 7200rpm drives at 3A each.

     

    30A/2A = 15 drives, subtract 2 for some overhead, result is support for 13 green drives

    30A/3A = 10 drives, subtract 2 for some overhead, result is support for 8 7200rpm drives

     

    These are crude calculations, and I'm probably leaving a bit more overhead than is actually necessary (especially since some green drives use less than 2A, as you mentioned), but better safe than sorry, right?

     

    That's an interesting way to calc Raj.  Just subtracting 2 drives.  That leaves 4A on the first calc and 6A on the second for overhead.  The 4A feels a little bit tight to me.  I'm shooting for 8A to 10A for overhead on a 15 drive server with green drives so I'd be choosing a 38A to 40A psu for that.  Do you think I'm being too conservative?

     

    For a 13 green drive system I'd use a 34A psu.  And drop down to the 30A for 12 green drives.

    Re: preclear_disk.sh - a new utility to burn-in and pre-clear disks for quick add

    in User Customizations

    Posted

    Joe, it would be great if the /tmp/precl* output filename could include the serial number of the drive.  I copy the files to a central location and right now I have to edit the filename so they don't overwrite prior preclear logs.

    I don't even find the device shortname (sde) is useful but maybe someone else does.

     

    Something like /tmp/preclear_report_sde_serialNumber* where the serial number is enough to identify the device.  Maybe an option to have the serial number instead of the device shortname would work.

     

    Thanks

     

     

    Pimp Your Rig

    in Unraid Compulsive Design

    Posted

    Looks great queeg! What are the dimensions?  That is one cramped case, looks like even the Biostar board barely fits!

     

    Dimensions(L x W x H) 15.00" x 7.50" x 13.80"

     

    It looks cramped but really it's not.  It was easy to work inside the case.  The camera doesn't show the depth of the case very well.  The sata cables are above the cpu fan by 3 inches.  There's lots of air movement, no fans are blocked.  I haven't see the drives go above 36c in the Icy's.  It's very quiet, quieter than the case I migrated from.

     

    I used the Biostar A760G M2+ (8.6" x 7.9" ) but I think my slightly bigger Asus M4A78L-M (9.6" x 8.8" ) might have fit.  

    Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 AMD Mainboard

    in Motherboards and CPUs

    Posted

    If you have a collection of ISO files on one or more hard drives you can mount those drives in the unRAID system outside of the array and transfer disk to disk. 

     

    Sorry - what would the benefit of that be from a speed perspective? Is unRAID a little slower or would I be able to use Dual Lan outside the array?

     

    I was talking about transferring any existing media you might have.

    Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 AMD Mainboard

    in Motherboards and CPUs

    Posted

    Is there anyway to do some kind of LAN bridge that you are aware of? Seems that this is the bottleneck currently. I was hoping this might help me side step it...

     

     

    It might not be the bottleneck you are concerned with.  How are you planning on using unRAID?

     

    For home use. As a general NAS and for use with a distributed Media centre.

     

    I am using LinuxMCE http://linuxmce.org/ and currently have 2 media directors that may be drawing HD content from it at the same time.

     

    That should all be fine with a single Gbit connection though. Mainly I wanted Dual LAN just to make transferring large files / ISOs across a little quicker.... :)

     

    If you have a collection of ISO files on one or more hard drives you can mount those drives in the unRAID system outside of the array and transfer disk to disk. 

    Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 AMD Mainboard

    in Motherboards and CPUs

    Posted

    Gigabyte motherboards can potentially cause a big corruption problem.  It's known simply as HPA and it occurs when they backup up the bios to a hard drive.  The HPA is a small partition created by the motherboard on one of the data disk or even on the parity disk. 

    Thanks queeg. I noted that in the other post I referred to above, but assumed this could be turned off in BIOS. I guess I better make sure that is the case. If it was off in BIOS - this shouldn't be an issue right?

     

    I'm a big fan of gigabyte.  Just not for raid systems.  What happens if the bios battery dies?  The best advice is avoid the problem altogether.

    cache_dirs - an attempt to keep directory entries in RAM to prevent disk spin-up

    in User Customizations

    Posted

    A little testing and here is what I see.  It seems that even though explorer defaults to Tile it actually does request file info unless you manually set it to Tile.

     

     

    Open explorer

    browse top level folder: works

    browse any subdir: spins up drive.

     

     

    Open explorer

    Change view from Tiles to List

    browse top level folder: works

    browse any subdir: works

    change view from List back to Tiles

    browse other subdirs:  continues to work.

     

    In any case, cache_dirs is working correctly with the added -a parameter so I'm happy and thanks Joe.

     

     

    cache_dirs - an attempt to keep directory entries in RAM to prevent disk spin-up

    in User Customizations

    Posted

    Actually, the ability to add arguments is built in with the "-a" option.

     

    An example:

    cache_dirs  -a '-noleaf -name Steam -prune -o -print'

     

    Or, if you have more than one directory to exclude:

    cache_dirs -a '-noleaf \( -name Steam -prune -o -name data -prune \) -o -print'

    Your example would be

    cache_dirs -a '-noleaf \( -name "*old" -prune -o -name packages -prune \) -o -print'

    No need to hack at cache_dirs at all.  It was designed to be flexible.  When using the -a option you need to use the -noleaf at the beginning of the -a option argument, and -print at the end to get correct syntax.  The entire -a option argument is enclosed in single quotes as in -a '-noleaf ....... -print'   Individual shell wild-cards "*" can be enclosed in double quotes as in the "*old" example above.

     

    Not too difficult...

     

    Joe L.

     

    That sounds easier.  I had added a new -x parameter but trying to put it into all the find's get me tangled up.

    This is what I'm going to use.

    /boot/cache_dirs -w -u -d 3 -a '-noleaf \( -name "ftproot" -prune -o -name "lost+found" -prune -o -name "iTunes" -prune \) -o -print'

     

    cache_dirs - an attempt to keep directory entries in RAM to prevent disk spin-up

    in User Customizations

    Posted

    What about -prune option?  Would that work to exclude sub dirs?

     

    EDIT: 

    Here's an example that I just figured out.  It prints everything except the packages directory.

    find /boot/config \( -name packages -prune \) -o -name "*" -print

     

    And one that prints everything except subdirs ending in "old" or the packages directory.

    find /boot \( -name "*old" -prune -o -name packages -prune \) -o -name "*" -print

     

    Cool.  I'll try to integrate this into it.

    cache_dirs - an attempt to keep directory entries in RAM to prevent disk spin-up

    in User Customizations

    Posted

    I'm apparently a noob or something because I can't get this to exclude a directory.

     

    /boot/cache_dirs -w -e "Steam" is in my go file. It still caches my Steam folder.

     

    Location of the folder:

    \\SERVER\Other Files\Steam

     

    Please help, this folder has around 350,000 files in it and takes around 30-40 minutes to cache.

    Only "Top level" directories can be excluded using the -e option.  I never wrote it to be able to exclude directories further down the hierarchy.

     

    Use

    -e "Other Files"

     

    or you can edit the program at around line 372 is this:

    dir_list=`build_dir_list`

    change it to

    dir_list=`build_dir_list | grep -v "Steam"`

    and then you don't need to use any -e options, unless there is an additional different top level directory you wish to exclude.

    Make sure you use an editor that is linux friendly and does not add carriage returns to the ends of lines. 

    (edit the file using "mc" and you'll be fine)

     

     

    Doing this still only excludes top level directories - right?  I'm looking for a way to exclude non-top level directories.  I tried hacking the script a little but didn't get too far.  What's actually keeping the directories in memory?  Is it just the find command causes them to be cached when it runs?

    cache_dirs - an attempt to keep directory entries in RAM to prevent disk spin-up

    in User Customizations

    Posted

    I'm apparently a noob or something because I can't get this to exclude a directory.

     

    /boot/cache_dirs -w -e "Steam" is in my go file. It still caches my Steam folder.

     

    Location of the folder:

    \\SERVER\Other Files\Steam

     

    Please help, this folder has around 350,000 files in it and takes around 30-40 minutes to cache.

    Only "Top level" directories can be excluded using the -e option.  I never wrote it to be able to exclude directories further down the hierarchy.

     

    Use

    -e "Other Files"

     

    or you can edit the program at around line 372 is this:

    dir_list=`build_dir_list`

    change it to

    dir_list=`build_dir_list | grep -v "Steam"`

    and then you don't need to use any -e options, unless there is an additional different top level directory you wish to exclude.

    Make sure you use an editor that is linux friendly and does not add carriage returns to the ends of lines. 

    (edit the file using "mc" and you'll be fine)

     

     

    Ahh, that answered something for me as well.  I have multiple backup folders and iTunes folders and thought  -e iTunes would skip them all.  But what I see is "No iTunes directory found" or something like that anyway because it's not at the top level.

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