mylesw

Thank you for the information. I won't be using any virtualization features, as we have hypervisors on separate platforms. This machine is purely a NAS. That said, can I use 8TB drives with v5 of unRAID? I'm sure there are security advantages of upgrading to v6, but I'm curious if I could use v5 with these larger drives since I'm not going to take advantage of any of the extra features that v6 seems to offer. Myles

That's great news! Thanks. Do you think that there would be any issue with the fact that this Mobo has a max RAM of 4GB? Other than CPU, it seems that this might be a limiting factor? Myles

I have been a loyal unRAID user for many, many years now. I have two servers - one main NAS and one backup that I rsync content to daily. Works great. But its been about 5 years and my servers need more storage. A year ago, I started to add 4TB drives to my backup server. The mobo accepted them just fine and its been working well. Recently I just got my hands on 6 x 8TB Seagate drives. I decided to start to upgrade the main NAS server. This has an older ASUS AN8 Mobo on it, and currently has 6 x 2TB drives in there. They work fine. But on attempting to connect the 8TB Seagate to this server, its not recognizing it at all. So I have decided to just put a 8 port SATA card in there that can see the drives. I had read that the IBM M1015 cards (LSI) seem to be good with unRAID, but are they able to see the full 8TB drives of the Seagate? If not, does anyone have any recommendations on a controller card that will work great with these drives? Or should I just dump the Mobo and replace it with something newer? Thoughts and advice greatly appreciated. Thanks Myles

Solved it. The problem was the amount of RAM that I had installed on the server. After replacing out the motherboard with a new one, I neglected to return the RAM back to 2GB, and had it running on 1GB. Clearly that's not enough. I ended up installing 3GB of RAM in there and its been going like a champ since. Myles

Its Server Pro 4.7. I took a copy of the syslog, but its only from the last reboot. I'm not seeing any errors in there, but that might not be relevant. If you see anything that is a concern, please let me know so I can address it. or if there is another way I can determine why the Parity Check died like that, I'm all ears. My guess is that there is a cron job for the Parity check somewhere and it kicked off after not running for a month, and that caused this problem to occur. Myles syslog.txt

My server has been working flawlessly for years, and about 2 months ago the motherboard in the computer failed and I had to replace it and the CPU. Since then, all has been well and my 8 x 1.5TB drive array has been going strong. Until about a day ago. It first showed signs that SMB shares were no longer active. I was able, however, to get to the web interface and found that it was sitting on 'Parity Check' and acting really slow. The hard drive lights were flashing, so I know something was happening. Eventually (after about 20 hours) it managed to move to about 47% complete, and I thought I'd just let it finish and it will be fine. Nope, that didn't happen. Now its non-responsive to SMB access and HTTP for control. However I can NMAP the server and I see the open service ports, and I can ping the box just fine. The hard drive appears to be going as the light is flashing, but its been about 48 hours now and I think I have a hard drive issue. What's the best way to diagnose this? Last time I force rebooted it, it came back up and the web interface didn't show any obvious issues, however one drive seemed to take a very long time to mount. Is it likely that this is the problem drive? And since it doesn't seem to be able to complete the Parity Check, does that mean I'm stranded if that drive is dead and I need to replace it with another? All advice greatly appreciated. Myles

Quick followup... Looks like this was a dodgy drive. Replaced it with a 1TB Hitachi SATA drive and its flying. About 97mb/s. However with that taken care of, do you know of any 'Live CD' implementation of preclear that will allow drives to be prep'd on a 2nd computer? Although Preclear does a bang up job of prep'ing a disk, if I'm adding 2 or 3 drives at once, it would really help to be able to prep them on a 2nd computer and run this process in parallel. Myles

Just checked syslog and there's nothing there other than my Telnet logins to the box and the odd spinup/spindown from the kernels due to inactivity on the box. I'm going to try and transfer the SATA interface from the Mobo to a separate SuperMicro 8 SATA card I have in that box and see if that makes any difference. Not seeing any errors, but there is definitely something weird about the speed with this drive. The other drives didn't have anywhere near this sort of problem. Myles

What should I see as a 'reasonable' expectation of clearing time? I just cleared a 250GB SATA drive in about 4 hours, and its now online. Then I tried a 500GB WD SATA drive, and its been running for 2 1/2 hours and is only 2% done in the Zero'ing phase. At this rate, it will take about a week to complete what I would consider to be a pretty small hard drive based on today's standards. I can wait for it, I guess, but I have two 1.5TB drives arriving in a couple of days and I don't want to be waiting for months to put them online. I think I read that someone had originally put together a way to clear these drives on a separate computer first? I have a spare machine I can configure for this purpose if it would speed things up. But I have a feeling I'm doing something wrong here. Why would one drive clear in a reasonable amount of time, and the 2nd one take 10-20x as long to do the same thing? The computer I'm using for this is a decent ASUS A8N machine with 2GB of RAM. Its got 4 drives in it currently, with a 1.5TB parity drive in there. Any hints, suggestions, or directions to help speed this process up would be greatly appreciated. Myles