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Any thoughts on this? http://www.ebay.com/itm/222072289263 Could the builtin LSI 1068E controller be used?

I'm looking to upgrade my secondary server to V6 from V5. I'd prefer not to remove the USB key from the server. As far as I can tell the only reason I would need to is to run the "make_bootable" script. Is there any way to run this from the the V5 console?

Yeah, it tends to get the scraps leftover from the primary system as it's generally not worth putting any more into it directly. With only 8 drives it does not have a speed issue but if I have the processor anyways then why not..

Just buy all 8tB drives and use half as many ... then you can get 100MB/s checks :-) ... or, of course, you could just bite the bullet and upgrade the motherboard/CPU Oh, I've got my eye on a couple ebay auctions. If I can manage a swap for approx $150 as suggested I'll definitely do it.

Great suggestion, at least till they are all 4tb drives.

I'll still keep my eye out for a deal on one of these. Thank you both this has been very helpful.

Agree ... it'll be interesting to see your results. One caveat: The "worst" of my drives have 500MB platters ... most have either 667MB or 1TB platters. Do you know what your "worst" areal density is for your collection of drives? This will also be a limiting factor. I only have two drive models: Seagate ST4000DM000 - per Seagate site: 625Gb/in^2 Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 - for the 5K3000 family it's a max of 411

Not at all => all you need is a beefier CPU. Here's a Core 2 Duo E8400 which would work nicely for $7.98 with free shipping [This e-bay listing expires in 6 hrs, but there are others similarly priced]. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Core-2-Duo-SLAPL-E8400-3-0GHz-1333MHz-6MB-Cache-Socket-775-Processor-1366-/262332086792?hash=item3d1435fa08:g:KYkAAOSwQYZWxjtv v6 will run nicely on the E8400. It scores 2180 on PassMark ... a very nice bump from the 634 your old Celeron scores. It's worth $8 just to find out who is right We shall know in about 10 days.

It's physically impossible to get more than 50MB/s parity check with that board using the current configuration, no matter the CPU used. My media server has the exact same board (C2SEA) with a dual-core Pentium E6300 (PassMark 1700). This is from my last parity check: "Duration: 13 hours, 19 minutes, 32 seconds. Average speed: 83.4 MB/s " Do you have 16 disks going through the DMI? Exactly what I was wondering. Over the years I noticed my parity speed gradually slow down as I added more and more disks.

Very interesting - thank you. I notice this X9SCM-F diagram shows 4xDMI II. While it has 3 PCI-e slots connected directly to the CPU I'm assuming this would help for the onboard SATA ports and anything put in the other PCIe slot? With just this upgrade I should see about a 100% bump in parity check speed and would be ready to upgrade the controller cards if/when I wanted to do that?

I disabled display updates while parity checks are running. I ran the htop utility and for the first few minutes of the parity check it was running from the high 80's to 100% After maybe 5-10 minutes it went down to the 60-70% range with occasional spikes up to or around 100%. It has not been running long enough to really tell but so far it looks to be a few MB/sec faster. I probably won't let it run for the first cycle though as I will want to copy data to it later and I don't like doing that when parity is running. Sounds like I'm kinda up a creek - replace everything but the drives, power supply and case.

Here is the completion time which is my new normal on V6. I had the unRAID UI open for about 2 minutes to check it and take the screenshot.

It's used just as a NAS for Kodi. Files I copy over to it generally transfer at around 50MB/s. I've never had a problem with playback in Kodi so read speeds are good enough. I can't really say that I have an upgrade budget. I'm sure it goes without saying but I'd like to keep it as low as possible. If its a couple hundred bucks then sure why not, if it's more like $500+ then it's probably not worth it. One thing very important to me is low power consumption when no disks are being used as this is the case 95% of the time.

I've been running this unRAID build for a few years now with no real changes other than adding more/bigger hard drives. I don't run VMs, dockers, etc. It's just a NAS and it work great in that role. Parity check speed has never been great but as I've added more and more drives it kept slowing down and most recently it got quite a bit slower with V6. Just prior to the upgrade it was completing in 23 hours and change. With V6 it's getting close to 30 hours. Below is a screenshot of it right now. Once it gets past 2tb it does speed up a bit. This is my primary server and all the specs in my sig are current. I'm a bit concerned because I want to go with dual parity once that's out of beta and as I understand it that will take a nice hit on performance too. Does this look right for the equipment I have? Are there any upgrade which would make sense to get better performance and what speed might I expect to get with an upgrade? Thank you

Awesome! This is what I care about. thank you all for your speedy replies.

For me one of the best aspects of unRAID is that most disks are always spun down. When reading only one disk needs to spin up and when writing only two. How will dual parity affect this?

Already did based on your earlier suggestion.

How will dual parity affect the need to spin up disks? One aspect of unRAID that I really like is that even with a a 24 disk array only 2 disks need to be spinning when I write data to any drive (the drive where the data is saved and parity) and the other 22 disks can just sit there powered down. Will dual parity add more than 1 additional disk (the second parity) that must be spinning for writes? I'm amusing nothing would change for reads.

MC in a screen session

Thank you!

I found a blog post that mentioned this command: fuser -mv /mnt/disk* /mnt/user/* That helped me figure out what was holding the shutdown up and resolve the issue. Looks like I owe cahe_dirs an apology as it was was not the culprit (but it did have a record to support the suspicion )

Can you point me in the right direction of how to install this through a command line since my gui is unresponsive. Also will this plugin help me right now if the gui is unresponsive?

Yes, I believe it is. It's definitely listed under plugins. Problem is that the gui is unresponsive since i selected to stop the array. telnet still works fine though.

I'm trying to stop my array but it will not unmount disks. I'm nearly certain this is being caused by cache dirs and that i need to run the command cahe_dirs -q. Problem is i don;t know where this file is located to run that command. Any help please. Also what do i need to do to make sure this doesn't happen? Thank you

Thank you guys but what you are describing is the normal method. I am specifically looking to avoid the rebuild which I know is most definitely not normal. I'm fairly sure it's possible, I think I've even done it before, I just don't remember exactly how.