wsume99

I've got my unRAID box up and running with a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H MB. I've been through numerous reboots so I want to know what needs to be in my syslog for it to get level 1 certified? I need to remove a drive that I've been preclearing for RMA, so I'll reboot again tonight. Do I just need a parity check after rebooting? FYI - HPA is not a problem for me on this board. The BIOS option is disabled by befault on my board.

I've RMA'd to Newegg before and it was really easy. No experience with WD - hence my post. That's what I figured so I was already thinking Newegg was probably the best option. Good to know. I seem to remember hearing that once before but I had forgotten. Maybe I should RMA my 160GB drive to see what kind of an upgrade they give me .

I've got a new WD20EARS drive that is throwing a lot of read errors and spitting out pending sector counts during the preclear runs I've performed. I've never had to send a drive back before. Looking for feedback on the preferred method. I ordered it from Newegg and I'm still within the 30 day window to RMA it. Is it better to RMA thru Newegg or go to the OEM (WD)?

Bob, I actually just ordered a USB drive from Newegg as well (4GB Sandisk Cruzer) and they did the same thing. I've seen that other times as well and IIRC every time they used the 4-7 day eggsaver shipping it was via USPS and not UPS, but I could be wrong. So the 4-7 day eggsaver is not a new thing and in my experience is limited to just small items like a USB drive, SD memory, or a single SATA cable. And even with eggsaver shipping it's still better than std. shipping from Amazon. Ironically I was at Wal-Mart the day after I ordered that USB drive (~ 2 weeks ago) and they had the exact same item on sale for $10. So I bought another one .

Wow i guess I shouldn't have ignored newegg's facebook site. My packaging was different than what was displayed on that page. It wasn't a cardboard sleeve that was open on the ends but an actual minature box with a lid that closed. I guess the important thing here is that Newegg is finally starting to listen to the customer and addressing their packaging of OEM HDDs.

Is there a way to tell other than trial and error?

Why not just get a cheap pci grapghis card. Heck you could even run headless and just skip the video card altogether.

I don't think I order enough stuff on the web for prime to pay for itself. As it stands today I can usually find what I want for little to no shipping cost at Newegg with UPS 3-day delivery which is usually 2 for me and they are usually the lowest price. Also then I would be basically locked into to ordering from Amazon and I just don't like their site. Newegg has way more info about their products (the detailed info on Amazon for PC stuff is a joke) plus better customer reviews. However I do prefer Amazon for TVs. The seem to have the best prices around.

mbryanr, I'm unable to connect to the link you provided. I get the following message "The server you are attempting to access has refused the connection with the gateway. This usually results from trying to connect to a service that is inactive on the server."

Oops, sorry about that. I just did a quick search on Newegg for LGA775 and 6 sata ports and forgot to include DDR2 memory. I checked and there are multiple options available that include DDR2 but not sure about unRAID compatability. Anyways my primary intrest was the difference between onboard sata and pci express based sata? Althought you may not have a choice if you are going for a larger server i.e 6-8+ drives.

How do you know that he's adding a 2TB drive? My WD20EARS cleared at an avg rate of 72 MB/s for a total time of 7:38:57. I saw another user post his info from clearing the exact same drive and he got 88 MB/s for 6:18:42. I guess I got a slow drive :'(.

I'm wondering about ohlwiler's suggestion to get a board with 6 sata ports. Why wouldn't that be a better or more preferred option? Like this ASUS board. You'd basically be trading 2 additional sata ports for one less PCIex1 slot. It costs $5 more that the Intel board you posted but it saves you from having to buy a PCIe sata card which is definitely more than $5. So as a more general question to the experts, what is better 2 more onboard sata ports or an additional PCIex1 slot? Is there any difference between the performance of an onboard sata vs. PCEe?

Ahh they got you with sales tax. Thanks for reminding me why I never buy from Dell. Newegg is just about the best I've found for online purchases. From time to time Amazon might have a slightly lower price but I absolutely HATE HATE HATE their shipping process. Case and point - three weeks ago I ordered a cable TV splitter/amp from Amazon on a Wednesday. The next day I ordered a HDD from Newegg. I received the order from Newegg on the following Monday (stupid UPS doesn't deliver on Sat) one day before my order from Amazon was even shipped. If I order from Newegg before 3 pm EST I have always had the item shipped that day. Great service and I don't have to pay sales tax either. Just my 2 cents, but you do have a point about getting drives from different batches. I'd rather just space out my purchases from Newegg rather than order from Dell or Amazon. I've also noticed a dramatic improvement in the packaging of HDDs by Newegg. The last three drives that I bought (all shipped from TN warehouse) were inside an anti-static bag wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap placed inside a small form-fitted cardboard box that was inside a larger box filled with paper packaging. Hope it continues.

Well the third run is complete and there were no additional errors reported - so a total of four sectors had errors. Ironically the current pending sector count went down from 8 to 2. Still no reallocated sectors. Maybe my prayers to the HDD gods are being answered. I swapped the power connection with one from another drive just to see what happens. I also checked and I don't know how but the IDLE3 timer was set back to the factory default of 8 secs. That would explain why the load cycle counts were incrementing between preclear cycles. I again disabled it using WDIDLE3 /S0 command. Rebooted and verified that head parking was indeed disabled using WDIDLE3 /R and it was. Perhaps I do have a power issue as the load cycle count went up by two during the last preclear cycle. On the previous two runs it only changed by one, which is what I would expect. I launched another preclear cycle and I'm interested to see what happens with this one. I'll find out in about 30 hours.

I'm pretty sure, in fact I'm positive, that I did a power cycle. I know I did because I put the DOS bootable USB drive in the place of my unRAID USB drive to change the setting. After changing the IDLE3 setting I powered down the server, swapped USB drives, then powered up in unRAID. But just to be sure I'm going to check the setting again tonight. If that doesn't work I'll try the WDIDLE3 /D command and see how that works. I tried that the first time but it did not report that head parking was disabled (as the command is supposed to) just that it was a really long time (~64 minutes).

The WD EADS drives are actually an older vintage than the EARS drives. The EARS drives are a new advanced format drive using 4Kb sectors instead of the standard of 512 bytes used on the EADS drives. In order to achieve the best performance with unRAID you need to be using a drive with 512 byte sectors. If you install a jumper across pins 7&8 on any WD EARS drive it forces the drive to act like it has 512 byte sectors. Since the EADS drives natively have 512 byte sectors you don't need the jumper. Bottom line, EADS and EARS (w/ jumper on pins 7 & can be used in unRAID without any problems.

You might see them under $90 before then. You can catch them on a deal for around $93-94 now and it's been trending down over the past few months.

I went back and did some more analysis of my syslog. On the first preclear run all of the errors were isolated to two sectors (1682918047 & 1683029711). It's a little strange that the post-clear SMART report showed a raw value of 3 current pending sectors. The second preclear run produced errors on five sectors (1682918047, 1683018743, 1683029711, 1683035192, and 1683062151). So the two suspect sectors from the first pass repeated and three new ones were added. This time the post-clear SMART report showed a raw value of 7 current pending sectors. Again not sure why it saying 7 when there were errors on only 5. The third preclear run is not completed yet (about 50% thru the post read process) but so far there were errors reported against four sectors (1683018743, 1683035191, 1683062152, and 1683090639). No errors reported yet against the repeats from the first two runs, maybe they've been reassigned. Also one repeat of a new sector from the second run and then three new sectors. But the funny thing is that the SMART report at the beginning of the run showed 8 current pending sectors when it only reported 7 at the end of the last run. How can that be? This drive is not assigned in my array so it should not be read from, so how could more pending sectors be identified between preclear runs? Another strange occurence. Before starting the precelar process I used the WDIDLE3 utility to disable the head parking feature on this drive. I used the WDIDLE3 /D command and got a response that the head park time was set to something like 64.7 minutes - IIRC. Then I tried the WDIDLE3 /S0 command and got a response that said head parking was disabled. Well looking at the results it is clearly not disabled. The load cycle count started the first run and 8 and ended it at 9. In the hour and 25 minutes betwen preclear runs the load cycle count went from 9 to 96. It ended the second run at 97. In the 3 hours and 17 minutes between the 2nd and 3rd runs it wend from 97 to 295. So clearly it has not been disabled eventhough it reported that it was. I'm really beginning to not like this drive.

It really comes down to whether or not you are going to run your server 24x7 or not. If you are and your energy useage/cost is important to you then you should plan on using green drives.

Good point Joe L. I'll try another connector after the third cycle is finished. Although I'm not holding my breath as the power connector that is currently connected to that drive was previously connected to another drive which did not have any SMART problems at all. But I suppose that there is a chance it could be flaky so better safe than sorry. Should I switch the sata cable also? The sata cable I'm using is new so it could be bad as well. Could it cause the types of errors I'm seeing?

klipsch, you have a good point here. Althought I doubt that most users are reading from their array anywhere close to the max speed of the array. You'd have to be streaming A LOT of media before you approached the max read speed. Now writing could be a different story but probably not a big issue for most users. The bottom line is that many users do not leave their servers on 24x7 but instead utilize s3 like you mention (I know I do). This whole discussion simply reinforces just how great unRAID really is. It is so flexible that you can take just about any conglomeration of drives and throw them together into a case and turn them into a relatively low power/cost media server and the drives don't even have to be 'green'. By spinning down drives when not in use and utilizing s3 sleep the traditional benefit to owning green HDDs is largely minimized. When I purchase a hard drive I look at (in order of importance to me for my unRAID server) upfront cost, reliability (via user feedback), warranty, performance, and finally operating cost. Operating cost is last beacuse if I'm going to use it in unRAID I know that for my situation (spindown + s3) power usage is just not that important and lately I find myself spending just a few dollars more to get a drive with a longer warranty (i.e. WD Cavair Black is 5 years vs. 3 years for WD Cavair Green).

Do you mean try a different sata power connector on my current power supply or an entirely new power supply?

Here is the syslog from the second cycle. syslog-2ndcycle.txt

I'm currently running my third preclear cycle on a new WD20EARS (about 60% complete on the preread). The raw values for raw read error rate and current pending sectors are increasing. As well you can see a lot of reported read errors in the attached syslog, which I assume is driving the changes in the SMART reported raw values. FYI - the attached syslog only includes the results from the first preclear because there were so many errors that the file size was too large to be attached. I'll attach the results from the 2nd cycle on another post. I guess that's not a good sign either. But the changes are limited to only the raw values and not the normalized values. I'm wondering what the community thinks about the drive so far? Should I consider a RMA for this drive or is it too early to tell? It's not the fact that there are errors being reported that bothers me as much as the fact that they are increasing. Doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the drive will last. syslog-1stcycle.txt

Good value at $0.05/GB. Just ordered mine. I have the 1TB version of this drive in my array right now. This is an advanced format drive so you'll need to add the jumper on pins 7 & 8 for it to work properly with unRAID. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514 Now if the WD2001FASS 2TB Cavair Black would go on sale again I'd be set!