captain_video
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Posts posted by captain_video
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If you're looking for an inexpensive setup to get you started, I built mine based on a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard. It allows booting from a USB flash drive, has onboard video, and has both a PCI-E x16 and x4 slot, both of which can support a Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-port SATA controller. With the 4 ports on the motherboard, this gives you up to 20 SATA ports. The motherboard is a couple years old but you can probably find one on ebay dirt cheap. They were inexpensive even when new (around $50-60, IIRC). Toss in a couple of gigabytes of RAM and an AMD CPU with an ample power supply and you'll have a nice unRAID server that won't break the bank. Mine has been running strong for over two years and counting.
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I had issues with the 1.5TB versions of the EARS drives. They worked fine when used without the jumper, but when I tried to install it with the jumper I couldn't even get the array to boot up. I tried to perform a preclear but the server would just hang and never finish booting. I ended up performing a low level format on the drive with the jumper installed.
I was able to get one drive formatted using the Windows version of the WD Lifeguard Diagnostics and an external SATA to USB drive bay but the 2nd drive wasn't even recognized. I had to use the newer Acronis diagnostic software downloaded from the WD website and run it from a boot disc. After that I was able to preclear both drives and get them up and running in the array.
I would highly recommend trying to install only one drive at a time and not two at once. It's going to take you longer to complete the setup but you'll probably have better luck getting it going.
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Does the AOC SASLP MV8 work with the latest release of unRaid?
If the case includes a SASML backplane with SFF-8087 connectors can one just use an 8087 to 8087 cable?
If you know for please tell me as I am about to make a purchase if you are not sure but about to try that would also be interesting to know.
Yes, it does work with the latest version of unRAID. I would venture a guess that the type of cable you mentioned would work, but I'd check the websites for both Supermicro and the backplane manufacturer for accurate info. Either of them should have a support link where you can ask the question.
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I was using this card along with a Promise SATA300 TX4 card, both in PCI slots. I had four drives connected to onboard SATA controllers with all eight of the AOC-SAT2-MV8 slots occupied. The remaining two drives out of a total of fourteen were connected to the Promise controller. Parity checks typically ran on the order of about 36-40 hours, with the largest drives being 1.5TB (six, including parity). The rest of the drives were all 750GB.
I have since switched out both the AOC-SAT2-MV8 and the Promise controller for a Supermicro 8-port PCI-E controller and an Adaptec 4port PCI-E controller. I'm down to thirteen drives total with a 2TB parity drive. The twelve data drives are all 1.5TB. Parity checks now run about 6-1/2 to 7 hours.
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I don't think so. Here's one that will work:
You've got to make sure it's the forward breakout cable and not the reverse breakout.
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It comes with the low profile bracket installed. If you have a normal case then you'll have to swap it with the regular bracket.
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I've got two of the 1.5TB EARS discs. I originally installed one without the jumper and the array seemed to work fine except that it would hang on large file transfers and then crap out. I tried it with the jumper installed but unRAID refused to boot. I then tried to perform a preclear but I couldn't get the array to boot even with it in an unassigned slot. I ran a low level format on the drive and then it let me preclear it. The 2nd drive precleared with the jumper installed right off the bat.
When I installed the 1st drive in place of a smaller one the array refused to start. The 2nd drive replacement went like clockwork. I've run the diagnostics on the 1st drive and it passed so I'm at an impasse with regards to using it in the unRAID array. I'll probably run some more tests and hope it actually fails so I can RMA the darned thing.
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Tivo has been using this type of cable in their series 3 and newer models for over three years now. I'm surprised their popularity hasn't taken off. It's definitely more convenient than having to plug in two cables on a hard drive, especially if the working area is a bit tight.
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Neither did I. It looks just like the "R" cables I bought. The referenced listing is from the Australian ebay site.
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I just went back and checked the thread that listed the compatible cables and it does indicate that I need a forward cable. I didn't look closely enough at the part number to realize it had an "R" instead of an "F". I just assumed that as long as the cable had an SFF8087 connector at one end and four SATA connectors at the other I was golden. That's what I get for being in a hurry to order the cables.
OTOH, it's a good news, bad news scenario. The bad news is obvious (i.e., I'm out $30 plus shipping for the cables I already ordered). The good news is that there's still a chance that the controller could work in my PCI-E x16 slot with the right cables. I want to use a 4-port Adaptec 1430SA controller in the PCI-E x4 slot so I can take advantage of all 16 drives (which was recently bumped up to 20 drives in unRAID). If it works and I decide to expand to the full 20 drives at a later date then I can replace the Adaptec card with another Supermicro 8-port card and an additional backplane that I can set up external to the PC case.
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That cable won't work for me, its a reverse breakout. I'm going from the card directly to SATA drives so apparently I need forward breakout. I see eWix also has the cables (forward breakout) fo r$14 so I'll get them there as well.
I am also going from the card to the drives, although I'm connecting to the drives via a SATA backplane. Are you saying that this cable won't work with this controller? I just installed the controller using these cables and the PC and card are not seeing any of the drives that are connected to it. What's the difference between a forward breakout cable and a reverse breakout cable?
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I just ordered one of the Supermicro cards and here's a cable that is reported to be compatible with it:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190337728394&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT
There's another thread here that discusses this card with links to similar cables that will also work. I've seen then in either 0.5m or 1m lengths as well as some that have different lengths for each of the four cables.
I don't know anything about your mobo so I can't help you there. I'm in the same boat as you because my current mobo has both a PCI-E X16 and a PCI-E X4 slot and I want to add both the Supermicro 8-port card along with an Adaptec 4-port controller to replace my two PCI cards.
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Thanks for the insight and recommendations. Both the Promise 4-port card and the Supermicro 8-port card are running off the PCI bus, which is undoubtedly bogging it down. I'm going to replace the 8-port PCI card with the newer Supermicro 8-port PCI-E card, reducing the number of drives on the PCI bus to just four. I'll also be replacing all of the SATA cables connected to the 8-port card with a pair of breakout cables required for use with the PCI-E SATA controller. I've got lots of extra SATA cables still in plastic bags so I may go ahead and swap the rest out while I'm at it. I'm not sure how to get the syslog but I'm sure a search through the forum will reveal the process.
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I'm pretty sure that's the way I have the parity disk connected. The first four drives are connected directly to the motherboard SATA connectors and the parity drive is showing up as drive sdb. I just ordered a Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-port card that connects to the PCI-E x4 slot so I'm hoping that will improve my speeds during parity checks and data rebuilds.
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I haven't had a chance to try the recommended tweak. Instead, I reinstalled the original 750GB drive and then let it rebuild parity. I just tried to boot with the WD15EARS jumpered drive installed in an unassigned slot but when it checked the drive during the last phase of booting it just kept resetting in an endless loop. I tried to insert the drive in the hot swap bay after it finished booting but unRAID would not recognize the drive, which is about what I expected. I wanted to run the preclear_disk.sh script on the drive but it won't even boot up with the drive installed. Any idea on what I can do to get it to boot up and run preclear on the drive?
FWIW, I had an identical drive that I installed without the jumper that integrated into the array with no problems. The issue I had with it was that I couldn't transfer any large files to it without it resetting and losing connection with my PC. When I installed the jumper, the array simply would not finish booting but simply got stuck in an endless loop with a drive not ready error. This happened with the original 1.5TB drive that had data and the jumper was added after the fact as well as a new drive being booted for the first time.
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I haven't really visited this forum all that often, mainly because my unRAID array has been up and running fine for the past two years or more. I just recently had some issues that I'm working out and after reading some of these threads I'm starting to feel that my array isn't running as well as I originally thought. Here's a screenshot of my array while it's rebuilding parity. As you can see, the estimated speed is well below what most others are reporting for their arrays.
My configuration consists of:
Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU
2GB RAM
Promise SATA300 TX4 4-port SATA card
Supermicro AOC-SATA2-MV8
14 hard drives shown in the attached image
Antec Nine Hundred case
3 Supermicro 5-in-3 SATA backplanes
Corsair TX650W PSU
I believe the Supermicro SATA card only allows the drives to work as SATA1 devices so could that be why I'm not seeing the same kind of speeds that others are seeing? If that's the case, are there any recommendations for a PCI-E 4-port card that would server me better? I have a 2nd Promise card that I never installed but I only have one PCI-E x4 slot and one x16 slot available as the motherboard only has two standard PCI slots.
Aside from the long times to rebuild parity and restore a drive to the array (36+ hours for each process) I am still able to stream Blu-Ray movies to my HTPC with no glitches and totally smooth playback.
P.S. I just ran across the thread for the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 - 8 8-port PCI-E SATA controller card. This looks like it would be a great replacement for my AOC-SATA2-MV8 and it is apparently supported by the latest version of unRAID.
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I've got two of the WD15EARS drives that I'm trying to install in my unRAID server in place of two existing 750GB drives. I had initially installed one of the 1.5TB green drives and left off the jumper. The drive seemed to work fine as it rebuilt the data from the drive it replaced via the parity drive. When I attempted to transfer a large file (18GB Blu-Ray rip) to the server, I kept getting an error message about the tower not being found as it was apparently being disconnected and terminating the transfer. After a nightmarish situation which cost me to lose about 1.5 to 2TB of data (a story told in another thread), I was able to rebuild the array. Unfortunately, the problem still persists. I tried adding the jumper but the array would not start up. After a bit more reading I came across this thread.
Do I need to pre-clear the drive and then re-install it? If so, what's the process for performing the pre-clear? What's the best way to integrate the new drive into the array as replacement?
P.S. A little more searching found me the preclear_disk.sh thread. I'll read up some more and see if I can figure this thing out.
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I've finished the data recovery and final parity check and took inventory as best I could on the data that was recovered. It looks like about 75 DVD and Blu-Ray rips got trashed, resulting in the loss of about 1.5 - 2TB of data. There were two drives that were a total loss and just had the Lost & Found folder. I just deleted whatever was in the Lost & Found folders because they were mostly a collection of disjointed and miscellaneous files and not worth the effort to try and sort them out. There's nothing that can't be replaced so I'm not losing any sleep over it. I try not to get upset over things like this because it's all part of the learning process. I learn more from my mistakes than my successes (and I've learned a lot
).Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I have replaced one of the remaining 750GB drives with another 1.5TB drive and the array is currently in the process of rebuilding the data. Hopefully this upgrade will go smoother than the last one.
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Update: I'm down to processing my last 1.5TB disc and so far I've had mostly good results as far as I can tell. I did have one disk that listed just a Lost & Found folder after performing the recovery. I went through most of the L&F folders and just deleted the contents since they were mostly scattered files. All of my Blu-Ray rips were stored as iso's and my DVD's were ripped as files. I had some HD-DVDs and some transport stream files saved from Tivo recordings but at this point it's hard to say just how much was saved until I try to take some kind of inventory. Considering the possible outcome I feel that I got off lucky.
When I get up in the morning I'll delete the final L&F folder and initiate a parity check to backup the data. Once I've done that I'll take another crack at upgrading a second drive. Wish me luck.
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E-mail sent to Lime Tech this morning. So far my recovery process appears to be going well. I'm down to two 1.5TB drives and two 750GB drives left to process. One of the 1.5TB drives is being working this morning and I expect it to be completed by the time I go home for lunch. I'll get the other two 750GB drives done by this evening and run the remaining 1.5TB drive overnite. I'll then have to map to each drive and delete the Lost & Found folders on each drive and then start a parity check.
If all goes well I'll take another shot at replacing one more 750GB drive with a new 1.5TB unit, except this time I'll know not to panic if the drives are listed as unformatted. The weird thing is that I've been running unRAID for about two years now and I've never seen this problem before now, which is why I reacted the way I did.
I don't know if I mentioned this but I had restarted the array after having difficulties completing a file transfer. All of the drives appeared normal once I was able to connect. It wasn't until after several more aborted attempts to transfer the file that I discovered the drives were listed as unformatted. The array had been up and running for quite some time (at least an hour) when this occurred.
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Your thread title is kind of missleading... I think "4.4.2 had an error and I accidentally wiped over 7TB of data" would be much better.
Pressing format on drives that have data is a user error, not really an unraid error. There are countless threads and I think it's even in the FAQ to never press the format button if the drive has data. It's pretty much the #1 cause of data loss in unRAID.
I hope you get your data back, but I would really recommend reading the top 10 causes of data loss on unRAID, and the unRAID FAQ. This whole thing could of been avoided, and hopefully next time you will know what to do.
I'll definitely check the FAQ before I take any drastic measures in the future. Pressing the format button was definitely a dumb thing to do. I'm still not sure why I did it, but it was probably a panic reaction since I thought the data was already lost to me. Fortunately, I'm having success recovering the lost data as well as lots of files that had previously been deleted. The reiserfsck function creates a Lost&Found folder where it places recovered files that had been previously deleted.
My previous time estimate for the recovery process was way off. I thought the recovery process was working on a 1.5TB drive when in fact it was only a 750GB drive. The time to process a 1.5TB drive took about five hours and maybe a bit more as I let it run overnight. I did another 750GB drive this morning and it took about 3-1/2 hours. I think it depends a lot on how much deleted data is on the drive as well as data that was there prior to doing the reformat.
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That is very encouraging news... Are you running the reiserfsck on the /dev/md? devices? or the raw disks /dev/sd?1 ? ? ?Good news to report. I just finished running the recovery program on the first drive and it appears that everything recovered intact, at least upon a cursory glance. I haven't tried to play back any of the DVD or Blu-Ray rips yet but all the folders and files seem to be there. Since none of the drives have been written to since I installed the upgrade drive I expect I should be able to recover everything (knock on wood).
If you are using the former (/dev/md??) then parity is being corrected as you recover the files. If using the latter, then parity will be out of date and you will need to press the "Check" button to have it get back in sync.
Good luck with your other drives. I hope you are as successful with them in recovering your files.
For future reference, how large are your disks? and how long did the scan-entire-drive take? ? ?
Joe L.
Here's the command I'm using after stopping samba and un-mounting the drive:
reiserfsck --rebuilt-tree -S /dev/md1
The entire drive is being scanned without any additional commands. I got a couple of error messages about free space being reported improperly following the scan but it indicated that the errors were corrected.
I've got about an equal mix of 1.5TB and 750GB drives. I'm gradually replacing the 750GB drives with larger ones as more space is needed or I see a great deal on a larger drive. The 1.5TB drives are starting to drop below $100 with no rebates so they're starting to look more and more attractive. Of course, if I'm less successful recovering the data on the remaining drives then I won't have a need to upgrade any drives for quite some time. Here's hoping I can max this sucker out.
I haven't timed it but I'm guessing it takes about 2-1/2 to three hours for a 1.5TB drive, give or take.
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Good news to report. I just finished running the recovery program on the first drive and it appears that everything recovered intact, at least upon a cursory glance. I haven't tried to play back any of the DVD or Blu-Ray rips yet but all the folders and files seem to be there. Since none of the drives have been written to since I installed the upgrade drive I expect I should be able to recover everything (knock on wood).
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I'm trying the recovery method on the first drive. We'll see how it goes so wish me luck.
The format process didn't take very long to accomplish so I'm guessing it just does a quick format similar to what takes place on a Windows drive where it just rebuilds the FAT table (or whatever they use for NTFS) rather than doing a read/write of every block for a full format. If that's the case then the data could very well still be intact on the drive.
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Need a non-Corsair PSU recommendation
in Hardware
Posted
Why not try one of the other Corsair models? I've been using both the HX and TX models in both my server and HTPC for years and they're dead quiet. If you have any plans on adding more drives to your unRAID configuration at a later date you may find the 450VX may be borderline or simply inadequate for running up to 16 drives. Then again, it all depends on which drives you use.
Personally, I won;t use anything but a Corsair PSU or one of the other Seasonic variants. If you really don't want a Corsair then check out Seasonic. Seasonic builds the PSUs to Corsair's specifications so they're not exactly clones of Seasonic drives. They also make some PSUs for Antec, hence the recommendation you received.