RockDawg

I am running 5rc10 and have been for some time. For the longest time I had a 2TB 7200rpm parity drive and 18 data drives of various sizes. My parity checks averaged ~8 hours and ~70MB/s. Speeds reported by the GUI during checks would range between 45-90 MB/s pretty much all the way through. About four weeks ago I added a 3TB seagate 7200rpm drive as my new parity and speeds seemed to get weird. Ultimately they ended ~12.5 hours and ~60MB/s, but the speeds reported during the check showed a lot of 20-30MB/s during the check (mostly during the first 50%), but I never thought too much about it. Last week I added a 4TB Seagate 5900rpm drive as my new parity, moved the 3Tb to a data drive and started removing some my slower 500GB drives. I am now down to Parity plus 13 data drives for a total of 20.5TB (including parity). During the process of copying data and removing drives , I've run numerous parity checks and my speeds are still weird. Overall I get ~15 hours and 65MB/s, but the strange part is the the GUI shows speeds in the 20-35MB/s range for the first 50% which takes around 12 hours, shortly after it reaches 50% speeds jump to ~130MB/s and ultimately fluctuate between 90-130MB/s the remainder of the check which takes ~3 more hours. I have seen this repeated each time I've run a parity check. What would explain this? The log shows nothing other than the check being initiated. I know there are a lot of variables, but what is the ballpark I should expect in terms of time? I thought removing 5 slow drives (hdparm -t returned ~75MB/s) would speed things up, but it didn't seem to change anything.

Yah, are you guys running the non-free version of ESXi? My understanding is that vCenter does not work with the free version. Well, from what I understand it will work with the free version as long as you are still in trial mode and have not entered the free license. I would love to be wrong and be able to run vCenter at home.

Did you run the "disk-speed" test script recently posted? (I'll bet you did.) That sounds like the names of the file it creates to test the speed of writing to and reading from your disks. You may remove those files if you are done testing. Yes I did. That must be it. I didn't realize it would create and leave a file on the disks. Maybe I just didn't read about it thoroughly enough. Thanks so much! I'm glad to know nothing funky was going on.

I couldn't. I've been adding and removing some drives in my server over the weekend, so I've rebooted a few times since their creation date.

I just noticed a strange file in the root of all of my disk shares. The file is XXfillerXX.13264 and is 1.82 Gb in size although a couple instances are a bit smaller. There were none there a few days ago, but now it is on all 18 disks and they all show a creation date of this past Friday night. Anybody ever see anything like this or have any ideas what it may be? Google is not turning up anything.

Didn't one of the scripts also work via ctrl+alt+del? Is that still safe?

Thanks! I'll check that out when my current preclear is finished.

...this is true for the X9SCM-F only, not for the -iiF model which comes with two identical NICs, both recognizable by stock ESXi. ESXi will only activate the first during a standard install. You can use the second one when installing a second vswitch. I don't own that board but it has been the same with my X8SIL-F (which also comes with these two NICs on-board). However it should show up in the list as unconfigured, AFAIR...maybe there is a jumper on board to (de-)activate it? That's right. I completely forgot about that. My bad. Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

First off - thanks for unMENU Joe. It's a really useful tool that greatly enhances unRAID. Could you add a button on the Disk Management page that runs hdparm -tT /dev/sda on the chosen drive? Or is there a reason it's not already included?

You have to install a driver for the second NIC. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=17936.0 Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

WeeboTech and BobPhoenix - You guys don't preclear on your production unRAID. What do you do it on? Is it just a second unRIAD machine or VM, or do you do it in a separate OS?

No relevant thoughts on the speed, but you need to do 2 things relatively quickly. Remove the attached syslog from your first post, and change your email password. Then before you update your notification email settings in simplefeatures, turn off the extended logging, or whatever it is that puts your email and password in clear text in the logs. Thanks for the heads up. I actually caught the email inclusion shortly after I made the post and replaced the attached file, but, like a moron, I forgot all about the password. Fixed now. Thanks again!

I understand some drives are just slower, but 300-400 KB/s? That's unbearable. I'll test the speed again once the preclear is completed to verify, but it probably is because of that. I've not had a problem writing to that drive before.

Bob - I am not using a cache drive. The SMART reports look fine to me, but I'm no expert. SMART report for the preclearing drive: SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_ FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 118 100 006 Pre-fail Always - 196324336 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 096 096 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 4 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 253 030 Pre-fail Always - 524116 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 39 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 4 183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 094 094 000 Old_age Always - 6 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 072 071 045 Old_age Always - 28 (Min/Max 24/29) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 8 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 028 040 000 Old_age Always - 28 (0 23 0 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 177485228539942 241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 10614449992 242 Total_LBAs_Read 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 23846290590 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART report for the drive I was writing to: D# ATTRIBUTE NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED FAILED RAW VALUE 1 Raw Read Error Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always Never 0 3 Spin Up Time 0x0027 172 168 021 Pre-fail Always Never 6391 4 Start Stop Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old age Always Never 2660 5 Reallocated Sector Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always Never 0 7 Seek Error Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 9 Power On Hours 0x0032 084 084 000 Old age Always Never 11855 10 Spin Retry Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 0 11 Calibration Retry Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 0 12 Power Cycle Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old age Always Never 233 192 Power-Off Retract Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 222 193 Load Cycle Count 0x0032 194 194 000 Old age Always Never 19559 194 Temperature Celsius 0x0022 122 095 000 Old age Always Never 28 196 Reallocated Event Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 197 Current Pending Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 198 Offline Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old age Offline Never 0 199 UDMA CRC Error Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old age Always Never 0 200 Multi Zone Error Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old age Offline Never 0 Is there anything in my log that indicates any problem?

Thanks I'll try that. Can you run a smart test on a drive that is preclearing?

Not sure what renice and DD are? I think you can do this via top also. No. I've read a bit about them in the past couple days, but frankly I don't understand them and have been afraid to mess with them.

Are the symptoms the same running bare metal? Do the symptoms change with different RC versions? I can't be certain. As I said, I am currently in the middle of a preclear which has been runnning for ~38 hours and has a couple days to go. I don't want to stop that right now to reboot and try new configurations. Plus, like I said, this hasn't happened before although I can't be 100% certain I tried copying files to the server during a preclear. Maybe I should have posted this on the the plain General Support forum? If so, my apologies. Not really sure the difference between the two. I posted here because I'm running a 5.0rc. If it needs moved, that's fine.

I've been trying to copy a few movies to my server and have been having some problems. Here's the scenario. I am currently pre-clearing a 4TB hard drive and have been throughout this problem, but that never caused me any issues before. When I initiate the copy to from my Win7 desktop, it starts as you would expect and I get ~35MB/s transfer speed, but after a minute or two it drops to 300-400 KB/s and mostly stays there. I've seen it bump back up to ~35MB/s, but only for a few seconds and then drop back down. System: unRAID 5.0rc10 running as a VM in ESXi 2GB RAM drives are all running on IBM M1015's in passthrough mode Log is attached. syslog-2013-06-14.txt

I bought these for my RPC-4224 and they work great. 100 for $3.99 shipped: http://www.amazon.com/100Pcs-Laptop-Drive-Caddy-Screws/dp/B00A6JCR0G/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1370627044&sr=8-3-fkmr0&keywords=hard+drive+mounting+screws+flush

That's not how the saying goes! I'll have to check this out later when I get time. Sounds interesting. I'm not up to date on all the cloud sites, but 15GB of space for free is the best offer isn't it?

Welcome! I hope this is a sign of good things to come for unRAID. It's a really great product, but it has so much potential to be even more.

Tom#2? A clone perhaps? :) Not quite a clone but close. More information will be forthcoming, just hold your horses for now. Just so it isn't a clone of a clone. My name is not Steve I like pizza!

Wow! Tons of great information guys. Thanks! Sounds like plenty of options out there and I have a lot to look into. Since I am backing up to FreeNAS with ZFS and it does have the option do snapshots, I've read a little about that today (as much as work would allow) and it seems too good to be true, but maybe I'm missing something. From what I gather, the snapshots take up almost no space, but allow for file recovery. So if I took a snapshot and then deleted every file in the volume, it all could be recovered from the snapshot? And if you take daily snapshots then you essentially havea type of versioning?

Did you miss the part where I said I "realized my backup plan is severely flawed."?

What do you mean "full compare"? What, exactly, do you do? Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2