JP

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Everything posted by JP

  1. Thanks. I only have 3 4TB drives that are RFS so I'm probably good there. My swap drive will be 4TB, which is essentially my backup drive that I always have sitting off to the side in the event a drive fails. One question though, once I complete this full process, I'll then have one extra formatted (blank) 4TB drive sitting in the array. I could follow the steps to remove it from the array and then take it out of the server. This would essentially put me in the same exact spot I was before I started this process. However, and what might be better (and I suspect others probably do), is keep the drive in the server, but remove it from the array and have it "at the ready" in the event a drive does fail. This would just save me the time from having to install the drive again, should a drive fail in the future. My question is, what is the best way to accomplish this and where is the best place to put the extra backup drive? I would not want it drawing power from the power supply and I do have UNASSIGNED DEVICES installed. Would it be best to remove it from the array, somehow move it to UNASSIGNED DEVICES, and then spin it down so it doesn't draw any power? Thanks again.
  2. Geesh...thanks for this. I was way off when it came to how I thought this process was supposed to work. I see now that you copy data from the RFS Data Drive to your XFS Swap Drive and then after the copy sort of "trick" the OS into thinking the XFS Swap Drive (now having identical data) is now the Data Drive and the RFS Data Drive is now your swap drive. Great advice on writing all this out first. I don't have a ton of drives, but I can see how it could get very confusing. Thanks again.
  3. Thanks. Some of this is a little over my head, which tells me I just need to learn some more. Reading through this topic in a number of posts, they refer to some documentation in the WIKI, however, the links always lead to the home page of the WIKI. I can only assume that topic has been moved or something like that and that is why it defaults to the home page. BUT when I look in the WIKI, it does have instructions around how to complete the file conversion, but they are really high-level. Things like rsync aren't even mentioned. Is there possibly a more detailed WIKI entry I'm missing somewhere?
  4. I'm trying to digest everything that needs to take place here. It seems best (or maybe required) to disable all DOCKERS while going through this process as well as any VMs. But I don't see any mention of MOVER. Do you need to disable MOVER as well for some reason before starting a process like this?
  5. Thanks for this. I guess I need to bite the bullet and find a way to get away from REISERFS. These instructions should help me. Thanks again.
  6. Thank you! Yes, High-Water is selected for all my shares.
  7. So if I'm reading this correctly, my Disk 2 has 2 TB of free space. Half that is 1 TB. Once Disk 1 reaches 1 TB of free space it will start to fall over to Disk 2. Is that accurate? If that is accurate, then I guess this is all normal, which is awesome news.
  8. I just received a utilization warning for Drive 1 from Unraid. I don't think I've ever had one before. I took a look and as you can see below, something doesn't feel right. All data seems to be loading up on Drive 1 and I can't figure out why. I've had Unraid I think running for over a decade and I'm sort of stickler for leaving everything at default. Basically, I'm not going into Unraid and asking it to put specific data on a specific drive or anything like that. I've always let Unraid decide that for me. Is this normal, and if not, is there something I should do to resolve it? tower-diagnostics-20230106-1206.zip
  9. My 11-year old unraid server recently died (MB, CPU, or RAM failure) so it seemed like a good time to upgrade. Put together a new system with an I5-12400 CPU, 32 GBs of RAM, and an Asrock Steel Legend Z690 MB. Works great and happy with it for my basic needs (i.e. media / general storage, transcoding, etc.). As meager as this server might seem to many people here, it is actually the most powerful PC we now have in the house. Most of the tasks on my computers aren't demanding and I'm not a gamer, but there is one thing I do where I could use the extra processing power, that is, 4K video editing with Davinci Resolve. Most of the time this is for family videos. Having only basic knowledge of VMs, I have a few questions before attempting to pursue this: Would this even be worth the trouble? I could buy a GPU to help with 4K playback and scrubbing the timeline and I know by doing the VM, I'm probably going to take a 5-10% hit on processing power by doing it through a VM, but again, it is still the most powerful PC we have in the house so I'm trying to take advantage of it, if I can. I thought about testing this first without purchasing a GPU to see how it works, but I see some other posts referring with issues leveraging the IGP. Is that possibly a non-issue or am I likely to run into major issues attempting to get the IGP to work with a VM and I might just better off getting the GPU and starting from there? Now for a big newbie question. I see others using a VM for gaming. I'm worried about lag when attempting to edit a 4K video via a VM. Is that a legitimate concern? Are gamers connecting monitors and peripherals directly to the server or are they accessing the VM from another PC and playing games from a distance? I would think the lag issue might really be prevalent when attempting to access the VM over the network, rather than directly connected to the server, but I just don't know how this is being leveraged by most. Any insight would help. Thanks again for any help, recommendations, and/or guidance.
  10. Wow @hellasus0001. Amazing information and thanks for all the detail. I'll admit, some of what you are speaking to is over my head, but I get a lot of it. Ultimately, for me, I took @peterg23 advice and got an I5-12400. I paired it with the Asrock Steel Legend Z690, 32 GBs of G.Skill Ram, and put it in a Silverstone CS380 case. I haven't built a PC in ages so my troubleshooting was a little rusty. Bad RAM and a bad HDMI cable (how?) had me scratching my head for a bit, but eventually figured it out. The only other hiccup was high temps for the hard drives, but I expected that after so many people had complained about the same thing with the CS380. Replaced the stock fans with 3 cheap Arctic P12 PSM fans and completed a full parity check without any hdd getting too hot. It all works great and just blows my mind how stable the Unraid software is. Move to entirely new components and it just works. Amazes me. Anyway, I have meager needs right now and the I5-12400 seems to crush it. Holding media and some transcoding here and there, it seems to handle it just fine. The only thing I haven't dipped my toe in yet is VMs. I'm not a gamer, but I would like something that I could do some 4K video editing (family videos) with using Davinci Resolve. Render times aren't a big deal to me since I just leave it alone when I'm rendering. But having enough "horsepower" for scrubbing the timeline efficiently with 4K videos is something else. As I understand it you need a pretty decent video card for that. Maybe an AMD RX 6600 XT coupled with the I5-12400 is enough? Not sure, but I'm trying to understand more to maybe give it a try. Anyway, all the best and thanks for the info.
  11. I thought I would just jump in to provide my own experience with this case. I almost didn't purchase it because I saw so many negative reviews about heat issues. It does leave you scratching your head when you look at it. The vent from the outside of the case covers up 1/2 of the fans against the hard drive cage. Then those fans are blowing against almost all metal with only small slits available for the air to get through. Regardless, I still bought the case because I didn't want to pay a much more expensive price for a server case, but really wanted the added luxury of being able to get directly to my drives without opening the case. So, I took the risk. First, I tried the case as it comes. I have 7 of the 8 drive bays filled. Started a parity-check and it didn't take long. After about an hour I was getting notifications that one of the drives was exceeding 45 degrees. Not good. So, I read through this post and saw all the mods people were doing. Additional fan on the bottom of the case, duct tape at some locations, expensive replacement Noctua fans, etc.. I decided to start pretty simple and see where that got me. I bought 3 relatively cheap ($9 each) Arctic P-12 PSM fans to replace all 3 120 mm fans in the case. Fired it up again and voila. 10 hour parity check made it through just fine. The "hot" disk got up to 41 degrees, but that was it. All the other disks were below 40 degrees the entire time and a couple of these disks are really old and tend to run hot. So I'm really happy with it. I just thought I would mention it in case it helped others.
  12. No, I just noticed in some of the instructions for unraid somewhere that the process you should go through when upgrading your motherboard is ensure that the drives are allocated as they were before (i.e. parity and data). I had a pretty strong feeling that unraid was correct once I booted up the server, but since the instructions said to be sure, I thought I should probably do so for good measure. Ultimately, I didn't have definitive information, but enough that I felt confident unraid was correct so I just started the array and everything went fine.
  13. Thanks. So if the "flushing RAM" had more space, I would probably have more time and data that gets passed before it bottoms out...correct? I have 32 GBs of RAM now. I'm thinking if I double that, it might be money well spent. I do leverage a cache drive, but that is only for data that isn't terribly important for me.
  14. I just built a new unraid server and everything appears to be working fine, but there is one issue I had with my previous 11 year old unraid server that has made its way to this new server. That is, when transferring data across the LAN my Unraid server will accept data at very fast speeds (to me at least), around 140 - 300 MB/sec depending on the source. However, almost always, at some point, if I'm transferring a significant amount of data, the transfer will bottom out and stall. After 15 - 30 seconds maybe, it will pick things back up. This is not due to waiting on a drive to spin up since I've also tested this from a cache drive to a single drive that is connected by USB. They were both spun up. What is the culprit here? I've done these transfers and watched my CPU and RAM. Both are practically untouched with the CPU not even getting into double digits and the RAM having tons of space remaining. What am I missing? This screenshot is a good example. It transferred at amazingly fast speeds and then bottomed out to 0 bytes / sec. In case it helps, the new server I built has: CPU: Intel i5 - 12400 Motherboard - Asrock Steel Legend Z690 RAM: 32 GB (dual channel) G.Skill
  15. Thanks everyone. In hindsight this was a little reckless of me, but fortunately, it all worked out. I found a label document I used to label all my drives inside my previous case so I could quickly determine what was what in the event of a HDD failure and just to keep things organized. The last entry was the Seagate Drive with its respective serial number that matched what UNRAID currently thought was the parity drive. That made so much sense that I started the array and everything looks good. Now, if I would have had a brain in my head, I would have simply pulled all the drives (easy to do in this new Silverstone CS380 case) and using those labels it would have been obvious there was only one parity drive and which one it was. Feeling pretty stupid that I didn't think of that, but oh well, moving on. Thanks again for all the help. I do appreciate it.
  16. That's a relief. I'm sorry to get so granular here, but I don't want to mess something up, especially when I think I could just probably start the array as-is and it would be correct. I guess what I don't understand about NEW CONFIG is wouldn't starting the array now without going through NEW CONFIG essentially accomplish the same thing? Basically, we only want to know where the parity drive is, right? So if I start the array now, and all the disks are assigned to somewhere, the only thing that would happen is if the parity was assigned to a data drive slot, then it would ask me if I wanted to FORMAT it...right? That would be the tell-tale sign. If nothing asks to be formatted then I think you can assume everything is in its place just as it was before my recent crash. Does that make sense?
  17. I am very sorry. I don't know what I was looking at, but I do have a CONFIG folder. However, I don't have a file in it called DISK_ASSIGNMENTS.TXT (see attached). I understand the steps you have outlined with the NEW CONFIG, but what about setting up the other disks in the array basically whereever I see fit? I thought those needed to be back in there same spot as before (i.e. Specific Western Digital Drive = Disk 5, etc.). Are you saying that it doesn't matter where the data drives are allocated, as long as they are indeed in the array somewhere. Obviously, you wouldn't want one to be allocated to PARITY. Parity does need to be specific, but it sounds like the other data drives don't matter where they go as long as they are indeed flagged as data drives...correct? I'm half inclined to just start the array as-is. Something tells me UNRAID has it correct. I just don't remember flagging a SEAGATE drive as parity, but it is likely I did.
  18. No, I actually do not see a CONFIG folder at all on my backup. No, I stopped the health reports since I only setup notifications to tell me when something was wrong, but the information passed in those emails does not show all the disk assignments (lesson learned). Is there any other place it might be on the flash?
  19. Thank you @Hoopster! That did it. One last question if you don't mind. Since I made a backup of my USB UNRAID FLASH is there a place I can go to find what my latest drive assignments were? I haven't started the array since the parity drive it has listed isn't what I thought it would be. It might be accurate, but I would feel better knowing that all the drives are where they should be before starting the array. Thanks again.
  20. Oh, I should mention that the BIOS does see the UNRAID USB Flash drive as well. It just won't boot to it. Again, it boots to a Windows USB Flash drive just fine. Confused. Upon boot, it just continues to go to the BIOS screen, rather than booting the UNRAID Flash. It does see it in the boot priority list as being first.
  21. My old Unraid motherboard / cpu / ram died on me a few weeks ago. I think it was about 11 years old so I didn't bother to troubleshoot much. I knew I needed to upgrade anyway, so I did. I got the following: CPU: Intel i5 - 12400 Motherboard: Asrock Z690 Steel Legend (has 8 SATA ports) RAM: G.Skill Trident Z RGB Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin SDRAM (PC4-25600) DDR4 3200 CL16-18-18-38 1.35V Dual Channel Desktop Memory Model F4-3200C16D-32GTZR Everything seems to work ok. It posts and I can boot to a USB Windows 10 flash drive (to install Windows if I wanted) just fine. All the parity, data drives, and cache drive are recognized in the BIOS. However, the motherboard won't boot to the UNRAID USB Device that I took from my previous server. I did plug the UNRAID USB Flash Drive into another PC and all the files are there (made a backup of them as well). I've looked through the BIOS and nothing is standing out that I need to switch. It is confusing since it boots to the Windows Flash drive just fine, but not to the Unraid flash drive, which I know was working in my previous server. Any thoughts on what I might be missing here? Thanks for any help.
  22. @Hoopster - Can you expand on the mods that you specifically did? Was it exactly what this post reflected or did you possibly do something different? Still can't believe I might spend $225 on a case that has cooling issues, but I guess that's where I'm at.
  23. Very good point. Thanks for explaining it so well.
  24. I think this might be what you were referring to. I really thought after so many years there would be options available, but it seems that you are either going to play an overpriced amount to fit the criteria here or the option doesn't exist. As I mentioned above, because of that I started looking at Tower cases again and had just about planned on the Silverstone CS380 until I saw all the heat issues and the mods you have to do to get it to cool properly. What a mess by Silverstone. So, as much as I didn't want to, I'm giving a lot of thought of just staying with my old Antec Sonata II case. This thing is something like 18 years old, but keeps all the drives cool and I guess I can save money here. I just hate having to open the case to get to the hard drives. Oh well. Thanks again for all the recommendations and guidance.
  25. Yea, either I'm really missing something or there are just some weird idiosyncrasies with this case. So I can see where the module of 4 HDD bays do pull out as one from the front, but that doesn't do you any good when you have to open the case and disconnect power and SATA connections from all four drives to do so. All of a sudden my antiquated Antec case isn't looking so bad.