meep

Hi I would be interested in the read/write speeds you're seeing to your unRaid storage drives. Also, can you get the drives to spin down? When I tried this 12 months ago, I found disk i/o in VirtualBox to be a real bottleneck making the setup unusable. Peter

I was actually thinking of UnRaid as a solution for the backup system, not the production server. The most tragic part of this is that the backup system was silently failing and gradually over-writing older data with newer. More of a process than technology issue from what I understand but unfortunate nonetheless. Also interesting that the entire asset library and source files for movie came in at 11GB.

This may be old news for some but I just came across this today; http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/ During production of Toy Story 2, someone wiped the production servers of all data AND the backups didn't work. If only they'd had UnRaid, eh? Watch the video close to the top for the short version!

Influencer I share many of your concerns and I'll be doing a power comparison test & post sometime soon.

I've just completed a series of performance tests where UnRaid running on much older hardware stands up very well to Windows Server 8 Storage Spaces with parity protection. Read all about it here http://mediaserver8.blogspot.com/

Hi stephenm00 1. Interested in Hyper-V virtualization that's available on the server. Also, server supports the new ReFS file system, dedupliction and good monitoring tools. 2. Any size discs can be added to any defined storage pool. However, there is a bug reported in Server 8 Beta whereby if any smaller drive in a storage pool fills, the remaining space on other drives becomes unusable/inaccessible. I expect this will be fixed in final release but for now will be using equally sized drives in pools. I have 5x more 1TB drives in UnRaid at present and will be moving these to the MediaServer once I'm happy that it's stable. (I have several 500GB drives that will find a home in UnRaid system for backups & archive).

I'm investigating Windows Server 8 as a potential centralised media storage and playback solution. I've started a blog here that will doubtless include many comparisons to UnRaid that people might be interested in; http://mediaserver8.blogspot.com/ I've been using UnRaid for a couple of years now and it's a great system. However, it's got one significant drawback in my particular environment: I cannot achieve my objective of having a single box to manage all media storage & playback. The plug-in architecture of v5 is great and I've got Sabnzbd, Sickbeard, CouchPotato, SqueezeServer & Plex Media Server all running happily. However, the big issues for me are; 1. No audio/video playback capabilities 2. Poor virtualization support (required recompile on each version release) I'm fully aware that the above are not in any way features that could be expected from a system like UnRaid - it does its job of providing protected parity storage exceedingly well. However, for me, this means I'm currently running an UnRaid box, an iMac for video playback (Plex) and an old Dell PC serving as whole house audio system. I'm hoping to consolidate everything into one box. Will I be lured to the Dark Side? Time will tell. In any case, I'll be keeping my UnRaid system going but putting it out to grass in an easy retirement acting as storage for archive materials and backups only. Wish me luck!

First, this does not appear to be a plex-related issue so I'd be grateful if it could be moved back to general support where it might get some attention. Looking into this a little more, it seems the problem is the creation of the 'Application Support' directory in /mnt/user0/plex/ When I telnet into the server and try to manually mkdir that directory, I receive the error 'No space left on device' Now, I had created the share 'plex' with the 'use cache disk' set to 'only' to allow me configure this application on cache but not have the mover script move it (I'd previously been using .plex on cache for this application but there was a memory leak/bug issue having it run from a hidden directory). So, in summary, I have a cache-only share named 'plex' which us showing up in /mnt/user0/ and in which mover/rsync seems to want to create a sub-directory but cannot. Any helpful ideas? Thanks

Thanks for responding Here's the output; root@SERVER:~# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 7806930 584196 7222734 8% /boot /dev/sdc1 488371640 24461404 463910236 6% /mnt/cache /dev/md5 976732736 44838036 931894700 5% /mnt/disk5 /dev/md4 976732736 369587960 607144776 38% /mnt/disk4 /dev/md2 976732736 466379676 510353060 48% /mnt/disk2 /dev/md1 976732736 369589172 607143564 38% /mnt/disk1 /dev/md3 976732736 369521928 607210808 38% /mnt/disk3 shfs 4883663680 1619916772 3263746908 34% /mnt/user0 shfs 4883663680 1619916772 3263746908 34% /mnt/user

Hi I run Plex Media Server on my unRaid box using one of the plug ins. I had the problem with Plex shutting down every 24 hours and came across a post indicating that this is possibly linked to configuring the plugin to store library/temp files in hidden folders. I therefore set up a cache-only share for plex and moved my library/temp files into it and reconfigured the plug-in to point to the new paths. This seems to have worked but has resulted in the following error being generated multiple times (as part of the mover process, I think); Jan 24 04:57:42 SERVER logger: cd+++++++++ plex/Application Support/ Jan 24 04:57:42 SERVER logger: rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/mnt/user0/plex/Application Support" failed: No space left on device (28) Jan 24 04:57:42 SERVER logger: *** Skipping any contents from this failed directory *** Jan 24 04:57:42 SERVER logger: rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1042) [sender=3.0.7] Jan 24 04:57:42 SERVER logger: ./plex/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Scanners Jan 24 04:57:42 SERVER shfs/user0: shfs_mkdir: assign_disk: plex/Application Support (28) No space left on device I'd appreciate any insight on this and how I might resolve? I find it odd that I'm getting a 'no space left on device' error as all drives have lots of free space. The plex share is set to most free allocation method, min free space is 0, split level is 999 and only one drive is set as excluded (have 4x other drives in server) running v5.0b14. Syslog attached. Thanks in advance Peter syslog.txt.zip

Been using unRAID for about a year now and it just keeps getting batter & better It's now pretty much at a point where it does everything I need. In the past 12 months we've seen the addition of timemachine support, PLEX and now SqueezeServer, essentially everything I need to run storage and media serving in my house. Thanks to Limetech and everyone else who's working hard to make this a really great solution. Peter

Since updated to 5.0 beta 10 and now this beta 11 (from beta 6) I have noticed a significant slowdown accessing unRAID shares over AFP from OSX Clients (Snow Leopard). AFP was a little slower than SMB previously but now there is a 15-20 second wait from clicking on a share / sub-directory to the file listing displaying. Peter

How will this work with Plex updates?

Got this working in 5.0b6 thanks to all the tips here & now have SqueezeServer running in TinyXp VM (yeah!). However..... On reboot, neither unraid-web or virtualbox appear to be installed. It's necessary for me to installpkg both (and VB pkg takes some time to install!). Here's my go script: #!/bin/bash # Start the Management Utility logger -t "$0[$$]" "##### STARTING GO script. #####" /usr/local/sbin/emhttp & logger -t "$0[$$]" "##### SETTING SYM LINKS. #####" ln -s /mnt/cache/.Plex/Library /Library ln -s /mnt/cache/.Plex/Library /root/Library logger -t "$0[$$]" "##### LOADING TO CONF. #####" echo "/mnt/cache/.Plex" >> /etc/ld.so.conf ldconfig logger -t "$0[$$]" "##### STARTING PLEX. #####" cd /mnt/cache/.Plex/PlexMediaServer-v0.9.2.8-34480ac #./start.sh >> /Library/Logs/Plex\ Media\ Server.log 2>&1 & ./start.sh cd /boot/packages && find . -name '*.auto_install' -type f -print | sort | xargs -n1 sh -c vboxwebsrv -b -H 127.0.0.1 --logfile /dev/null >/dev/null (please excuse the logger lines, I'm trying to debug) Any advice? Peter

let us know how you get on - I want to do this soon.... Would be great if you could update the how to for 5.x if you find any differences.

Guys, This thread resurrected an idea I've had for some time: an online tool where people can store details of their computers, components, a/v gear, cameras etc. The original idea was around the notion of having a database of serial numbers for insurance purposes. You know, if your house goes up in smoke (along with the spreadsheet of equipment you have in the filing cabinet) you have an online record of your equipment to help in making the insurance claim ;-) Thinking about it, it could be so much more. So far, I've come up with; -Users store info about their devices (PCs, cameras, TVs etc.) -Users store info on components (video cards, hard drives etc.) and assign them to devices -Components may be reassigned at will for all of us serial upgraders -Components/Devices may be transferred to other users for when they're sold/swapped -Users can use the system to track current equipment or 'Dream Purchases' -Users can discuss specific systems, ideal for 'I'm thinking of buying this spec' type discussions -Open XML interchange format to allow online vendors provide buttons which users can use to directly import components from online stores -Export links to allow a users current system be linked to 3rd part forum signatures (sigs will always be up to date) -Buy and sell devices & components The idea has legs beyond computer users and can be used to store a/v gear, photo equipment, video equipment etc. Essentially anything electronic. I've built the core of the site over the past couple of weeks and while it's pretty basic at the moment, is almost ready for beta testing. I'm going to offer free lifetime membership to people who help out with beta testing. Given all the help I've had from the unRaid community and how the site (I think) would be of great benefit to unRaid users in tracking their systems, I thought I'd offer people here the opportunity firts. I'll be ready to do a closed beta of basic feature set in the next two weeks. If you're interested, please PM me to get on the list and I'll send you site and access details when we're good to go. If you have any thoughts on features you'd like to see on such a site, I'm all ears! As is the nature of these things, this is a side project and will see development in fits & spurts as I have the time and inclination. Peter

While I don't particularly keep track of disks, now that I think about it really hard, the disk came out of a Freecom External Network Drive. As such, it might have had some NAS specific partitions? I know I would have formatted it with ReiserFS either before or in the UnRaid server. It's also VERY likely that this disk did not go through any unRaid formatting OR the preclear script - I've discovered the joys of that particular process only recently. That's all I know. Maybe as such it's not much help in debugging the unRAID issue? Peter

Commands run under each system. mbr_unknown_data.txt

Joe Do I need to do that under 5b6a or can I do it under 5b4? Peter

So I got an MBR:Unknown today I'm running version 5b4 on my server. (config attached) I needed to find the GUID for a new USB drive so I downloaded 5b6a from limetech and booted my system. All drives were fine showing up a 4K aligned except for the SAMSUNG_HD501LJ_S0MUJ1FQ114794 which is my cache drive. It reported MBR: unknown. I retrieved the GUID I needed, shut down and restarted with my b4 drive. All was well (except for having to reassign the drives as per the know issue with this version). I have the b6a drive sitting on my desk. I haven't plugged it in to any other system since. IF any files are needed off it, I can supply. I don't know the precise history of this drive but I do recall manually formatting it as reiserfs via linux command line at one stage as unRAID didn't seem to want to use / did not offer to format it when assigned to cache position it but I can't remember the exact details Peter

On further reading, it transpires that it's not so much a complete removal of support for smb, just that Samba won't be bundled and they're writing their own implementation of the protocol. Panic averted. Move along now, nothing to see here.

AFP support has arrived in unraid just in time, it appears. This report indicated Samba will no longer be distributed with Mac OSX client or server starting with the upcoming Lion; http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_x_10_7_lion_server_apple_replaces_samba_for_windows_networking_services.html

Well, a full server restart fixed it. I was reluctant to do that as I suffer from the 5b4 bug where all drives get messed up on reboot. Thanks for the attention. Peter

Joe thanks for quick response. I now have a total of 4x 1TB data drives, 1TB parity & cache. I added the 4th data drive and would expect 4TB available space. unraid is showing only 3TB space. Log attached as well as some screengrabs Peter http://www.meedja.ie/images/unraid_main.jpg[/img] http://www.meedja.ie/images/unraid_shares.jpg[/img] Mod Edit: changed the pic sizes for easier viewing log.txt

Hi Running 50b4 with 3x1TB data drives, a 1TB parity and 500GB cache with about 600GB of data and 4x shares with no include/exclude restrictions. I added a precleared 1TB drive as disk 4, restarted unRaid and formatted the drive. It appears fine in the 'MAIN' tab but on mounting one of my shares (either SMB or AFP from my mac), the drive reports a capacity of 3GB (2.4TB available). I would have expected it to report 4TB? Looking at the shares tab, all shares report 2.4TB free, would have expected 3.4TB. Is this normal? Do I need to restart the entire unRaid machine? Peter