sonofdbn

I run 6.3.5 with a dual parity setup and 6 data drives. The two parity drives are 4TB and 8TB (so naturally the largest data drive is 4TB), and I want to replace the 4TB parity drive with an 8TB one. Is there anything special I need to do? Here's what I plan to do: 1. Do parity check 2. Stress test new drive (and since this will be a parity drive, there's no need to preclear) 3. Stop array and power down 4. Replace the old (smaller) parity drive with the new larger one 5. Power up 6. Start the array -> rebuilding of new parity drive starts Some questions: a. Can the array be used while rebuilding parity? (By "used" I mean running VMs and dockers and general reading/writing.) b. Is it necessary/recommended to do a parity check after the rebuilding? c. I run the server off a UPS. What would happen if there is a power failure and the UPS triggers a shutdown during parity rebuilding?

I've used the WD Data Lifeguard tool with both HGST and Seagate drives without any problems. (Since HGST is, I believe, owned by WD, perhaps that's not surprising.)

Thanks, that makes sense. Although I don't think some of the possibilities apply to my particular case (the battery is supposedly about one year old), it's clear that LOTS of things might go wrong. I think shutting down as soon quickly is a good approach. That's less inconvenient than running through a parity check (or being tempted not to).

I'm running my unRAID box from an APC UPS (Back-UPS CS650), connected via USB and the server is set to shutdown after running off the UPS after the battery level reaches 25% or there are 10 minutes left. When the power trips, usually from lightning, it usually works as I would expect: everything keeps running off the UPS until power is restored, or else after a while it shuts down cleanly. But occasionally, like today, it doesn't shutdown properly, and the behaviour seems odd. Firstly, there was some lightning and some of the lights went off. I reset some fuses (no more than 5 minutes) and then went to my PC (which runs off another UPS) which was in sleep mode and resumed with no problem, and went to the unRAID GUI. The Main page showed that the array was stopped and there was a message saying that there had been an unclean shutdown and the start button suggested that I should run a parity check, which I'm now doing... only another 20 hours to go.... Why would there be an unclean shutdown when I'm sure there was more than enough battery capacity for the few minutes when there was no power? Can dockers or VMs prevent a clean shutdown? If the UPS battery did run out before a clean shutdown, shouldn't the unRAID box just be powered off and not reboot itself?

Two things that DSM 6.1.2 (and earlier) have that I can't easily do on unRAID: encrypted shared folders and run Minimserver. (And there's something to be said for the hardware: I have a DS414 and installing drives physically is so easy with the drive trays. I haven't found anything as simple for a home-built machine.)

MinimServer is a UPnP music server; I'm trying to install a MinimServer docker (https://hub.docker.com/r/tromatik/docker-minimserver/). I haven't done a "manual" docker install before, but after a bit of reading I managed to download it via the CA tab and fiddled around mapping paths and ports, and in particular setting Network Type to "Bridge". Somewhat to my surprise (and a testimony to the amount of information available here), I managed to get MinimServer running. It required going to MinimServer's http page and accepting a licence agreement, but after that it seemed to be OK, as its web ui said it was running (and the log showed this as well). The problem was that I couldn't access it from any PC on my network. MinimServer is controlled via MinimWatch, which can be installed on a Windows PC. I installed it, and it had no problem finding a MinimServer test server that I was running on a Synology NAS. But I couldn't get it to find the docker MinimServer. (I tried shutting down the Syno server and reinstalled MinimWatch, but that didn't help.) I'm wondering if the problem is with UPnP (which I know very little about) and whether it somehow needs to be enabled on unRAID. I read a thread here on the Logitech Media Server docker which mentioned a similar-sounding UPnP problem. It was suggested there that Bridge mode should be used for Network Type, so I tried that, but it seems to remove (or not require) any port mapping then. So I think I misunderstood what is required. Is something else required in order to enable UPnP? (And is that the likely problem?)

Thanks so much! It was indeed the File Integrity plug-in! I tried various ways to suspend the plug-in and also tried killing the various sha256sum processes, but new ones kept on popping up. In the end I removed the plug-in and bingo! Speed immediately up and now at about 40MB/s. Important note: I was probably not using the Dynamix File Integrity plug-in correctly, as I never spent any time setting it up carefully, so I certainly wouldn't generalise and claim in any way that the plug-in doesn't work properly.

That makes sense. Is there a way of seeing what's causing all the activity? Using a top command and also looking at the Open Files plugin, it seems that most of the ongoing processes are sha256sum - and yes, there are files on at least disks 2 and 5. That might be related to the Dynamix File Integrity plug-in, but it's set to not start anything while parity-checking is going on. Perhaps these are slowly completing (but 9 hours!). Is it safe to kill a process if under Open Files it shows that for that process there are 0 files that "may prevent shutdown"?

OK, I thought parity checking involved only reading data and checking that against the parity. But in any case I realised that the read/write stats are cumulative; after clearing the level of activity is much lower. But surely something is wrong with my setup. I'm 9 hours and 7 GB into parity checking, average speed is 226KB/s and estimated finish is in 402 days' time!

Benson, thanks for the suggestion. I've started a parity check: it's S..L..O..W: I'm getting a speed of around 210KB/s (see attachment Parity_check.png). This compares with my parity check one month ago where the speed was 285 MB/s (see attachment Parity_check_previous.png). Now, I must admit I don't believe the previous speed, but it got me to thinking about my dual parity. (Just saw the RFS question: no, I'm using XFS on all data drives, and no single drive has less than 140GB free.) I've been running dual parity drives for a while, both 4TB. Shortly before the previous parity check, I changed one of the parity drives to an 8TB drive, and I'm reasonably sure the recent parity check was after the new parity drive was installed. So possibly the parity speed calculation was actually using 8TB when in fact there was only 4TB of parity being checked. (And the screenshot for the current parity check shows that Total size to be 8TB.) So "real" speed was perhaps half, which is still not bad, but more realistic. So I'm wondering whether there's a problem caused by having two different sized parity drives. Is unRAID trying to do something extra because of the different sizes? I'm leaving the parity check running for now because I can't think of what else to do. From the Main tab in the GUI I noticed that there are a lot of writes being made to the parity drives. Not sure why that would be the case during a parity check. I have no dockers or VMs running, except for CrashPlan which is paused. I have the Dynamix File Integrity plugin, but that is set to not start any checks while parity checking is being done. In the hope that someone can help, I've also uploaded the latest diagnostics, downloaded while the parity check was running. tower-diagnostics-20170626-1026.zip

Not sure how to check read speed. How would I go about doing that? I'd rather not do a parity check now - or is there some other array check that can be done?

I'm only initiating the move from my Windows PC. The files themselves are already on the array, so the network should not be a big issue (I believe). No VMs are running, no dockers running except CrashPlan, which is paused. But OK, let's check this out: I'm now using MC, same files from one user share to another. After a few minutes, MC is reporting a speed of 1.5MB/s. (I don't think it's because doing it via Windows is faster; I think it's because the array is becoming increasingly unresponsive.)

Trurl, thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought about the impact of having to spin up the drives. BUT: I didn't want to exaggerate the slowness or writing, so I stated 30MB/s based on what I had remembered. So as a test I'm now moving 28GB of files of 20 TV episodes from one user share to another - so everything is on the array, no network. I'm using Windows to do the move and looking at the progress window after about 10 minutes, the speed never reaches even 3MB/s. I suppose there is some Windows interaction overhead, but even so, this is very slow.

My unRAID array seems to have slowed down markedly over the last few weeks. Copy speeds are rarely over 30MB/s and sometimes down to under 1MB/s using MC (and this is copying within the array, not across a network). I always thought I had found a reason (Windows PC backing up to the array, Plex docker doing some indexing/updating, CrashPlan docker doing backup, etc.) but I'm not seeing any consistent cause. I've also tried stopping the various dockers, but write/read is still very slow. I have 6 data disks (mostly 4TB) and 2 parity drives. I have a flashed Perc H310 which has been working fine. CPU is a Xeon D-1541 on a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F motherboard (but I use only gigabit ethernet) with 32GB RAM. I upgraded to 6.3.5 today, but the array is just as slow. I think I must have something setup incorrectly, so I thought I would see if anyone could help out here. I've attached the diagnostics file. tower-diagnostics-20170623-2259.zip

I'm having the same problem. Anyone know how to get back the transfer status?

I saw from the Web UI that a new version of PMS was available, although it said "Please install manually". I'd read somewhere that the docker installs PMS updates automatically when it restarts, so I went ahead and restarted, after which I couldn't get to the Web UI. After a few restarts and searching around, I checked the Plex log from the unRAID GUI Docker tab and saw that the log ended with a message about trying to install the latest version. I tried restarting and waiting a few minutes, but the log never seemed to go beyond that message. In the end I deleted the VERSION variable, and now PMS is working as before. Anyone else having a problem with the update? On the other hand, it's not impossible that I borked something...

For anyone still following this thread... Emby was sort of OK, but doesn't automatically generate folder thumbnails in all situations, and there's nothing in the photo/video thumbnails to distinguish between photos and videos. I took a brief pass at Tonido, but the sharing wasn't quite what I wanted (and it seemed to leave Tonido .db files in every folder). It seems interesting for other use cases, but not for what I wanted to do. So I thought, why not just go back to using Synology's Photo Station? It's not particularly well-documented, but although the Photo Station Uploader gives the impression that it converts uploaded photos and videos, it actually generates thumbnails and alternative resolution videos in addition to uploading the originals. One nice touch is that it can be set to ignore duplicates, but the downside is that there's no logging, so you can end up with empty folders because (correctly) the files are duplicated elsewhere, but if you need to know where those files are, you have to find them yourself. The other downside is that sometimes it thinks files are duplicates when they aren't. For example, if there are two different files named DSC0057.jpg in different folders, it seems to think they are the same, and there doesn't seem to be a way of fixing this. The other downside is that the thumbnail/video generation takes a while and ties up the uploading PC. An alternative is to simply copy the photo/video files into the right folder and let the NAS do the thumbnail/video generating. Unfortunately with my DS414, the CPU is quite limited, so this takes a huge amount of time compared with using the uploading software on a PC (which is already quite slow). Part of my original objection to using Photo Station was that this meant having to keep another copy of my photos/videos on the DS414, but the positive angle is that I can think of unRAID as keeping the backup copy of the files. While I was waiting for Photo Station Uploader to finish another batch of files, I idly googled Plex again and found a forum thread where it was mentioned in passing that Plex does in fact now handle photos and videos in the same folder. (I couldn't find any reference to this in the Plex documentation.) And it turns out that this is in fact the case, and it works beautifully. I installed the Plex docker on unRAID and set up a library of photos and videos very quickly. (To be fair, the unRAID CPU is much faster than the DS414 one, and also I think Plex is not generating videos in alternative resolutions.) I need to do a little more playing around with Android clients, but for now Plex seems like a good solution.

Well, after a little more hunting around, it seems that Emby might work. I saw in the Wiki for Emby that there is a content type called "Unset (mixed content)", but it turns out that this is not photos and videos, but perhaps TV shows and movies (based on some quick and not definitive googling). Just as I was about to give up on Emby, I noticed that in the content type options there was one for "Home videos & photos". A quick test showed that it seemed to work as expected, and now it's trundling through my photo/video files. Let's see how that turns out.

Before I resuscitated my unRAID server, I got a Synology DS414, which has a package called Photo Station. This lets users browse photos AND videos stored on the Syno, using IOS and Android apps. It works beautifully with my folder structure, because I usually take photos and videos on my camera and import them into folders that are named by date plus descriptor. So, for example, the family knows that 2016-12-20 Holiday has the holiday photos and videos from that date, and they can easily browse there via a Syno app (DS Photo) and see the photos or videos, and the thumbnails are shown quickly, so it's quite a smooth experience. (However, the uploading part is clunky, but my guess is that this is in part to generate the thumbnails while uploading, so it doesn't have to be done on the fly.) I now have my photos/videos on the unRAID server, and would love to have similar capabilities without having to copy everything across to the Syno. I thought at first that the Plex would work, but a) it seems it can't handle folders with both photos and videos and b) even just browsing photos is for some reason quite slow, with some people speculating that this is because of thumbnail generation. So my question is whether there's anything I can run on unRAID that will give me similar functionality. I've read some of the comments on these forums on Photoshow, Piwigo, Lychee and possibly others, but they seem to handle only photos. Any suggestions?

OK, problem solved: I was using Chrome as the browser. I switched to Edge and the cursor was there. Apparently Firefox can also be used: https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=44708.0

I'm trying to install a VM for the first time. It's a Windows 10 VM and although I eventually got it more or less done, I have a problem with the QEMU window that opens when I click on VNC Remote on the VM dropdown. Whenever I move the cursor over the QEMU window it disappears, so I have to use keyboard input to do the install, which is a pain. I'm running the install from my Windows 10 desktop, and there is nothing attached to the unRAID box in terms of mouse or keyboard, and there's no GPU passthrough. The keyboard input is coming from my desktop keyboard, but my desktop mouse cursor is not showing up. In the gear wheel settings icon in the top right of the QEMU window, there is an option for local cursor, but I'm unable to select that (or any of the other check boxes). How can I get the cursor to show up in the QEMU window?

I had the same problem using the downloaded Windows 10 iso, but I typed "exit", which took me to the BIOS and I selected the EFI DVD Rom drive (or something like that - it was the first boot option) and the install started.

In the end I went with a Corsair RM650X. One thing that I hadn't thought about was the number of SATA connectors that provided on the cables. There are 3 cables x 3 connectors, so I'm just OK for 5 data disks, 2 parity and in future 2 SSDs for cache/VM. But because of cable routing, it would have been nice to have another cable for more flexibility. I could do something with splitters or molex-to-SATA connectors, but the tidier solution would have been another SATA power cable. I was tempted to grab one of many (unlabelled) old cables from old PSUs that all seem pretty similar, but fortunately I read the thread here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=53341.0. Looking back, I realise now that smaller PSUs may well be more efficient (in terms of power provided to power needed), but they often come with fewer SATA connectors. How do other users connect their drives to the PSUs once they exceed the connectors provided with the PSU cables? I've read reports of poor quality splitters - are there any recommended brands?

Yes, it's been done before, though different Qnap model. https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=50432.msg484485#msg484485

Thanks for the advice; didn't know about this possible TRIM issue.