Jlarimore

Spoke too soon. Auto booting successfully currently seems to be incredibly intermittent. (Rarely works) Mostly still just hangs on a black screen. Maybe I'll roll back to the old firmware where it definitely can function properly.

That pesky Legacy USB Support needed to be disabled. Of course! So intuitive!

So, upgraded my RAM and decided to risk a firmware update on my z690-i Asus motherboard to increase the odds the newer RAM would work. I remembered getting the machine to run headless wasn't easy. But, I did it once. Now that the machine lives in my crawlspace, im highly motivated to get it working again. Surely I can, right...? Problem is now that I'm having trouble getting the machine to boot headless as it was doing with the BIOS from a year ago. I have a feeling this has something to do with the UEFI settings. If I just let the machine post without intervention, it gets to the bios screen and then immediately proceeded by a black screen. If I enter the BIOS and manually select the UEFI USB drive to boot from, Unraid starts just fine. If I switch the boot security mode from Other OS to Windows UEFI I am prompted by a scary red Secure Boot Violation error instead of the black screen on next boot. Am I trying to enable or disable UEFI? Is there any way I can tell which path I chose a year ago by inspecting my usb drive with unraid on it?

Thanks for the info. A 5700g would be an extremely simple update to an existing PC for me. So, it's a consideration. And, I'm glad to hear that the processor can support 3 additional drives instead of the 1 that the hyper m.2 compatibility list claims. I suspected that was incorrect with the way the bifurcation works. But, I'm glad to hear confirmation. The downside with that solution is that enabling the igpu on a 5700g not only uses 4 lanes, it also locks the remaining lanes into PCIe 3.0 speeds. And, I really like elegant future proofed solutions. And, that is a bit of a slap in the face to say... not only are we not future proofed, we aren't even present proofed. From what I understand, every 7000 series processor comes with an igpu so there is no longer a need for a G series. And, with the addition of PCIe 5.0, it seems that there are now plenty of additional lanes for the integrated graphics without interfering with the x16 slot.

About a year ago I built myself an all NVME Unraid NAS with a 12900k + z690i + a 7540 Highpoint Technologies AIB and am slowly filling that up with 8TB NVMe drives. It was a huge success. Low power. Small form factor. Lightning fast. It has been such a success that another family member is interested in following suit and has enlisted me for guidance. The problem here is that not everyone is willing to throw down a fortune to make this happen, and at the time there wasn't a great way to do this inexpensively as you basically needed an expensive AIB in order to keep the machine small. Intel had, and continues to have, terrible bifurcation support. AMD was better in that department, but if you had an iGPU, (a necessity if you are building ITX form factor) it tended to hog PCIe lanes and cause bifurcation problems too. It seems in my cursory research that the ASUS x670e-i and b650e-i + 7000 series AMD chips may be an elegant solution to this. They seem to have 4x4x4x4 bifurcation support with the iGPU enabled. Can anyone confirm that I should be able to get 6 m.2 NVMe drives running on these motherboards without a problem before I invest. And, is there any reason why the x670e might be superior for this purpose than the b650e if I intend to use this as an Unraid NAS? Would the additional PCIe lanes be of some use down the line if these drives were eventually replaced with gen 5 drives? (I know one would be stuck at gen 4 speeds) My thought is set up a machine with one of the ASUS Hyper m.2 cards and a few 1 or 2TB NMVE drives and then point the family member towards the Highpoint AIB and larger drives if they want to replace/expand their storage beyond 6 disks.

Well, parity achieved 24 hours too late. Next time I'll be ready.

It sure does. I can't get it to be recognized at all in any machine. Unless it miraculously shows back up in the morning, I guess I'm giving up on it. Second question: My array was made up of two drives. When I first noticed the problem, I could tell that the files from drive 1 were still intact on my network shares while the files from drive 2 (the failed one) suddenly disappeared. That makes sense since each drive holds files independently. But, now I cannot start up the array because "too many wrong and/or missing disks." How can I get at the other half of my files?

OK. So, relative noobie here. Been playing around with Unraid for a while now trying to get things figured out before I set things up for real. That means I haven't set up a parity drive yet. Nothing I may have lost is mission critical. But, enough stuff has slowly piled up on the missing disk that recovering the data on it would save me a considerable amount of time and energy. So, I'd like to try. I pinky promise that I'll put a parity drive in once I resolve this. I had a drive go missing today. I received an error that there were read errors on the drive and took a quick look at the log before rebooting and trying to debug. The log showed that my security camera was failing to write to the drive. And, when I tried scanning the disk from within Unraid, it just piled up non stop read errors. So, I rebooted the server and the disk completely disappeared. I turned off the machine, reseated the drive, still nothing. Moved the drive to another M.2 slot. Still nothing. What would you do next? Move the drive to another computer? Should I see if one of my Windows machines can see it? This is a fairly new 8TB Sabrent nvme drive I am using for storage. (less than six months old) It's possible it's faulty. I now realize it would have been helpful to save some of the diagnostics before rebooting. But, any suggestions on what to try?

Also an Unraid noobie attempting to get an UHD 770 passed through from a 12900k. I have no clue where to even start.

I too have been spoiled by good software fan controllers. Just try Argus Monitor in Windows for a week and you will never let your BIOS control your fans ever again. It would be nice to have the equivalent within Unraid.

On my new motherboard wifi 6 is faster than the onboard network card. So, I want it because it's the fastest way in and out of my machine. It's an ITX board where I'm using the 1 pcie slot for storage. (8x nvme drives) I can't be wasting it on network cards.

On my new machine, WiFi 6.0 is significantly faster than my wired connection. There's another reason to support it.

Ooh got it! Pinging it made me realize my blunder. The two computers were on different networks.

Hmm. I tried dropping all pretense of security in Chrome and I still get nothing but a blank, white, empty webpage. Is there any way I can verify this thing is actually on my network? (like figure out its IP address) Update: Ooh did get it to change the error message. Now says "This site can't be reached. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN"

Yes. I get to a login prompt and I believe I just typed "root" and it seemed happy. I did get to the blue screen and tried both safe mode and normal boot. Both GUI options demonstrated identical behavior. Good to know that I don't need 6.10 to be able to use the web interface. Now I just need to figure out how to access it from my other machines. http://tower.local just brings me to a blank web page that says. "not secure." Should I learn enough Unix to figure out what its IP address is?

Alright. Not having a very fun time trying to get going. Just a little background: Not a confident Unix user. Background is almost entirely DOS/Windows. (Although experience with Home Assistant) The sooner I can get into a GUI, the better. New system with a 12900k + ASUS z690-i motherboard. First problem is that the system will not boot into the UI. A bunch of bootup configuration text scrolls down and then I am dumped to a blank screen with a flashing cursor. OK. This seems to be a common problem. Maybe something to do with running on an Intel integrated graphics chip. Alright, I guess I will run the thing headless straight out of the gate. Seems like I should be able to connect to the machine via my Windows machine and configure it through the web client. But, I am having no luck connecting to the machine. Any tips on how to get going? The guide says connect via the web client. But, it also says "works on version 6.10 onwards." How do I get version 6.10? Seems like 6.9 needs to be running in order to download a prerelease. I'm stumped.

I guess if all of the input/output channels out of the computer are slower than 1GB/s it doesn't much matter for most use cases. In my case it looks like my wireless transfer rate is fastest (Wifi 6) which I think would be a little over that rate. I guess I will debate whether it would be worth using one drive as a cache disk.

Thank you for tempering expectations. I do hate let downs. I'm assuming those are gen 3 NVMe drives. So, roughly 3.4GB/s reads are to be expected. Yikes. Only reading like 35% of expected speeds. Are you telling me it might actually be beneficial to use one drive as a cache drive even if my cache and array devices have identical read/write speeds? Seems silly. But, okay.

Sweet. I think that's probably the route I will eventually go. I think I'll slowly collect these expensive 8tb drives and once I'm about to exceed 4 of them, I'll switch to a PLX board and slowly go all the way to 10 drives with 1 or 2 being parity. Hopefully at that point a pcie 5.0 variant of the PLX card will exist. It looks like that 8 drive 4.0 card would just narrowly fit in my Ghost S1 ITX case. That's a boat load of lightning fast, well protected storage in a tiny, tiny space.

I had seen these types of cards before. I was trying to get by with direct bifurcation mainly because I have made some assumptions that it would be harder to manage the drives if I have to deal with them being obfuscated behind a layer of drivers and software. Would information about the 8 drives be passed along to the machine? Like could I keep an eye on individual drive temperatures and pool them however I see fit in Unraid? Before I lay down like a grand for one, I'm curious about the pros and cons of a card that has its own bifurcating logic on it. Obviously, one advantage is this could take me all the way up to 10 drives on the machine... And of course now I'm getting greedy and wanting a PCIe 5.0 one to double the bandwidth.

So you're telling me to build a real server? I guess I could. But, I fear the cost would have me so pot committed that it'd be hard to ever update it. Cramming 6 NVMes in a tight ITX space (you know... flexing their advantage over magnetic storage) is a lot more challenging than I thought it was going to be. Looks like all the AMD apus are limited to pcie 3.0 for power consumption reasons. Poking around my BIOS, it looks like my 5950x could do this. But, then I have no graphics output whatsoever... I hadn't considered that. Is it possible to build a computer with no graphics output at all? (Maybe swap the graphics card out for the nvme card after getting unraid set up and managing the whole setup remotely)

Well, I guess Alder Lake is out. (Unless I want to be limited to 4 drives instead of 6) That destroys this build idea. Was really hoping to use DDR5 RAM to get at least a little ECC protection. I guess the alternative is falling back on an AMD apu.

I'm seeing some scary threads out there implying that the CPU may only bifurcate to 8x 8x. I guess we'll see soon enough.

So you're telling me there's a chance...

So, my eventual goal is to build a mini ITX NAS with 6x8TB NVME drives for storage. (Once the Rocket 8TB TLC drives release) I am well on my way to collecting the parts to create this build. But, I am starting to worry about PCIe bifurcation wonkiness that might limit the number of drives I can get to run simultaneously. As I understand it, NVMe drives require 4 PCIe lanes each. My plan was to build this on the ROG Strix z690-i mobo with the 12900k processor. (major overkill i know) The main idea here was to use a processor with onboard graphics to leave open the 16x slot for an 4x m.2 splitter card. (ASUS Hyper m.2 gen 4) I guess I was expecting with ASUS pushing bifurcation support so much that their two devices would almost surely be fully compatible. (unable to tell from existing documentation) But, it seems like with a little back-of-the-napkin math, the CPU supports 20 lanes and I am asking for 24 lanes worth of drives. Are the two m.2 drives built into the mobo sharing 4 lanes or something? It'll be another week or so before I can tell if this mobo supports 4x4x4x4 bifurcation. And, even if it does, I won't immediately have the drives to verify functionality. As I understand it, sometimes some of those bifurcated branches can be disabled at a hardware level if the lanes are being shared elsewhere or something. It also seems like AMD might be much more on top of bifurcation support than Intel. If that is the case, and an AMD build is going to be a lot less of a headache, I do have a recent x570 build I could easily pivot to be this machine. (would need a new CPU with integrated graphics support) Repurpose the 12900k to my main machine and turn the AMD machine into the NAS. Anyone know if the Intel build will work? If not, will the AMD?