sonofdbn

I am planning on moving my unRAID to a Supermicro X10SDV motherboard and install a flashed Dell Perc H310 controller card. The mb is limited to 6 SATA connections, while the H310, which will sit in a PCIE 3.0 x 16 slot, will support 8 SATA drives. I'm intending to have 2 parity disks, 5 data disks and perhaps 2 SSDs for a cache pool. Will it make any difference whether I connect disks to the mb or the H310? My main objective is to minimise the time for parity checks. So, for example, would it be better to share the hard drives between onboard SATA and the H310, or to have, say, all the hard drives on the H310? Or would it not make any difference? Is there anything else I should consider when allocating the drives and SSDs to the onboard SATA and the H310?

Thanks, that gives me some reassurance. Thanks. I have your various helpful posts to thank (blame?) for choosing this hardware (ECC, Passmarks, comparing Xeons, etc.)

I'm finally upgrading my unRAID machine. The current one is running 6.19 and I'd like to upgrade to 6.2 (mainly for dual parity). I'm debating whether I should upgrade to 6.2 first and then migrate to the new machine, or shift everything to the new machine first (and make sure it's working) before upgrading. Currently I have 6 hard disks on a Supermicro C2SEA running a Pentium E6300. The new machine will be a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F with onboard Xeon D-1541 and a Dell Perc H310. If I upgrade first, I can't add dual parity because I have no more SATA ports, but at least I'll know that 6.2 is OK on the current setup. If I move to the new machine first, the potential problem is that if there is any hitch with upgrading, I might not know if it's a hardware or software issue. I'm tempted to move first, because the hardware is quite mainstream and it shouldn't be a problem (touch wood) getting 6.19 and then 6.20 working on it. Any thoughts on this?

I'm finally close to upgrading my unRAID setup to a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F with 32GB ECC RAM. The board is limited to 6 SATA slots, so I'm planning on getting a Perc H310 controller, and in total using 7 hard disks and 1 or 2 SSDs. No GPU (no spare slot anyway, after the Perc). I'm guessing a 450W PSU would be enough? Unfortunately I'm not in the USA and I can't get many 450W PSUs that are Gold rated. I'm looking at a Seasonic G-450 (5 year warranty) or Corsair RM650i (10 year warranty). Although 650W is probably much more than I need, unfortunately the only bad PSU I've had to replace was the most expensive one I've bought so far, a Seasonic X-Series, so I'm tempted to look at another brand. Yes, I'm probably just unfortunate, but still... Any suggestions/comments would be appreciated.

(I love unRAID, but the documentation.... ) Since I couldn't find any alternative I rebooted and I'm going through a parity check. FWIW, I'm on 6.19 and the Main screen shows webGui v2016.03.04.

Since powerdown doesn't seem to be, well, powering down, I thought I should look at the Wiki for guidance at http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Console#To_cleanly_Stop_the_array_from_the_command_line. Seemed straightforward enough, but failed at the first command. Wiki says: /root/samba stop My console replies: -bash: /root/samba: No such file or directory After some digging around, there IS a samba command in /usr/sbin but I don't know whether I should use that. I'm at the outer limits of my linux abilities here, and my googling only shows that there are about a zillion versions of linux out there.

This is the webGUI problem being discussed here: https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=51891.0

I've found that I can still get to the command line via telnet using the IP address, and "top" shows that there's still something doing on, but I have no idea whether the array is shutting down or restarting or something else. User "nobody" has a Time+ entry of 70:44.49, and command is privoxy.sh - I'm guessing this means the array hasn't shutdown yet?

Not having much joy here. I ran the commands in my telnet window, but after powerdown -r I was sort of surprised to see the command prompt still there for quite some time. I thought as the machine shutdown I would get some message. So after a while I typed "exit", which gave me the expected "connection lost" message. I think I heard the beeps that tell me the machine is shutting down (I'm near the server) and then I waited about 15 minutes. Now when I browse to tower/, which is what I've been doing to get to the WebGUI, the browser tells me the DNS address can't be found. Trying to ping tower gives me the same result. So I ping the internal IP address, and that responds, so I try to browse to the WebGUI using the IP address (IP address only - no slash or anything else added - should I add something?) and I get a login prompt, which makes me assume that some part of unRAID is running. But after logging in, I just get a screen showing "System is shutting down...". And it's been like that for at least 15 minutes. Am I going to have to do a hard reset? I really don't want to go through another parity check....

I'm on 6.19 and also have this problem. My question is how do I get to config/plugins/dynamix.plg to delete it? And then how do I run the powerdown -r command? I can telnet in (that's about the limit of my techie/command line/linux knowledge) and now I have a prompt....

The disk is at least a few years old and has been running in the array, so I'm not sure where that number comes from. What might be of interest is that I stuck that same disk into a Windows 7 box (native SATA) and ran the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on it, and here's what I got (in the order in which I ran the tests): Quick Test: fail (twice) Extended Test: pass Quick Test: fail Write Zeros (short): pass Write Zeros (full): pass Quick Test: pass (twice) Now I'm not sure what to make of this! Is it possible that the writing fixed the Quick Test error?

I get the disk being rewritten, but wasn't sure about the additional capacity - does the rebuilding of the data onto the larger disk then just automatically clear the additional capacity?

Unfortunately the drive is in the array, so preclearing or anything destructive is going to erase the data on it. I think I might replace the drive anyway with a larger one that I have, and then use it somewhere else (after some testing).

I'm on unRAID 6.19, and one of my data disks failed a SMART test. It's a 1.5TB disk, and I want to replace it with a new 4TB disk (same size as parity). I have already tested the new drive quite thoroughly using WD Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics. Should I still run a preclear on the new disk before using it to replace the smaller one?

Thanks, will replace the disk.

Well, what do you know? Dug out an old Windows 7 PC, ran Full Erase Write Zeros and the HGST drive passed with no errors! Thanks, garycase. I would never have thought that the USB interface would be at fault. I'm calling this drive OK: it's been through two Quick Tests and two Extended Tests and now it's passed the Full Erase Write Zeros test. Valuable lesson learned: test my drives on native SATA.

In my unRAID array I have a 1.5TB data drive that showed some read errors after, I think, a parity check. I finally got round to running a SMART self-test, but don't know how to interpret the results. Near the start of the report it says: === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED Near the end it says: SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 40% 2639 2129605537 Should the disk be replaced? It doesn't have a "red ball"; it's still showing green.

OK, the Extended Test passed again, but the Full Erase Write Zeros failed again - after about 3 hours. If it's a USB interface anomaly, I would have thought that after this it should consistently fail after this point. However, I've restarted the Full Erase Write Zeros test again, and it's trundling along just fine. But still, perhaps using a pure native SATA connection will be the definitive test. I'm going to have to do some fiddling around with old PCs and spare parts, so this might take a while.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll post back here once the various tests are done.

The laptop is set to never sleep. Unfortunately the USB kludge is all I can use without major PC disassembly, but I suppose that might have to be the next step.

No, I don't think I've initialised the disk, and definitely did not create a partition. I just took the disk out of the packaging and connected it to a laptop using a SATA-to-USB 3 adapter. (The laptop is set to never sleep.) I should have mentioned that the write zeros failed when I did a full write zeros test; after that I tried the Quick Erase write zeros test, and that passed. Then I did another Quick Test, which was OK,and now in about 6 hours the Extended Test will be completed. When I ran the full write zeros test, it seemed to run fine for quite some time. I watched it when it started, and then left it to run. I checked it again a few hours later, and there were no error messages. Then I went out for a while and when I got back I saw the error message. The progress bar was about 1/3 to 1/2 way through. So it doesn't look as if the write zeros failed immediately.

I just purchased a 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS and ran the WD Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics on it. It passed the Quick Test and Extended Test, but came up with lots of errors in the Write Zeros test. (I got tired of hitting continue after each error...). So I tried Quick Test again (OK) and am now running the Extended Test again, which is going to take a lot of time. Since the disk is new, I should be able to return it fairly easily. But I'm not sure whether there is a real problem: Should I expect no errors in the Write Zeros test? If the second Extended Test is OK, should I run the Write Zeros test again? If a second Write Zeros test produces errors, what does this indicate?

Thanks, Ashe. Yes, it was a BIOS issue. The Supermicro motherboard/BIOS saw the new flash drive as a USB hard disk, and placed it at the bottom of the list of hard disk devices for booting. I moved it to the top and now I'm up and running again - well as soon as the parity check is completed. Not sure why unRAID detected an unclean shutdown, but I haven't run one for a few months, so probably good to do. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

Hmm, not having much luck here. I copied the files on the current very old flash drive (Sandisk Cruzer Micro, from Lime-Tech in the early days) to a Sandisk Cruzer Blade, which I had done a guick format on (FAT32, labelled UNRAID). I then ran the make_boot as administrator. But the Blade doesn't seem to boot. I see the motherboard logo then just a flashing cursor. It doesn't get to the Memtest option screen. I'm now trying to do a full format and retry the above, although I think that's unlikely to be the problem.

Thanks for the suggestions. When I ran diagnostics I had a problem: I get a mkdir error, saying it can't create the /boot/logs directory. There is a message saying diagnostics file has been created, but when I transfer the flash device to another PC, there is no such file, and there's no /boot/logs directory. I've checked the flash drive for system errors on a Windows 10 PC. Good old Windows tells me there's a problem with the flash drive and that I should scan it for errors, but when I do that Windows tells me there are no errors. My suspicion is that the flash drive is failing. I've tried it on three PCs, and only one of the PCs "sees" it. I think I'm going to have to replace the drive.