TSM

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Everything posted by TSM

  1. I want to be sure I understand this correctly. My motherboard has 5 regular sata ports and 1 esata port. I am using all 5 of the regular sata ports, and I will soon need to add another drive. Up until recently, my plan when this happened was to just use an esata to sata adapter, and only connect a single drive to it. Then subsequent to that I was going to go down the road of plug-in pci-e cards. There has been discussion in some other threads recently about using the esata port, connected to a hardware raid controller and using that to make a Raid1 or Raid0 cache drive. I didn't think that unraid worked this way. I thought that it would see the drives as individual drives regardless of the controllers raid setting. Would this only work for cache? Could you make a data drive this way? 1 thread talked about setting up the parity drive this way. One of my early experiments with unraid involved an old Promise TX2 pci - ide raid controller. To my knowledge this card is a hardware controller and not a software controller. Regardless of whether I set the card to Raid1 or Raid0, unraid always saw both drives as individual drives. It never saw them as a single entity. Does the hardware raid controller connected to the esata port work because there is something special about the esata port as opposed to a pci slot raid controllers? If thats the case, is this difference something fundamental to Unraid? Or is it something that could change in future versions? How about linux in general? Is it a driver issue? Cause it would seem to me that for the pci card to work properly, unraid would have to know how to use it properly, via a driver. With the esata port, is it not using a driver(other than the sata driver in the kernel that is), and just sort of trusing what it sees? (so to speak) Rather than trying to interpret it? If that makes sense?
  2. Weebo, I see your point of course. I was thinking about SAS for the cache drive. And then using the other 3 ports for standard SATA drives. Earlier in the night, I had came across this thread. Which got me thinking in a cache drive sort of way. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1891.0 A SAS drive would be far less exotic than the Gigabyte RAM card you linked to. And, if you exclude the card's price, because I am going to need more SATA ports soon anyway; its a cheaper solution than the Gigabyte card, once you add in the RAM that would have to be purchased, and I bet it would offer comparable speeds. I know it would offer a ton more capacity for cache depending on the size purchased.
  3. This is a 4 port SATA\SAS card. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816102140 I know that Unraid only supports IDE and SATA, but is there a reason why a SAS drive would work? Escpecially with a card like this?? SAS Cache Drive Anyone? Hmmmm? And, I've used Promise Cards heavily in the past. I've found them to be very reliable.
  4. I've got the exact same board. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1557.0 Only trouble I had with it, was figuring out the settings to get it to boot from the USB. That turned out to be pretty much just trial and error. What other problems did you have?
  5. Weebo, just wanted to tell you that you are a great resource on this forum, and to keep up the good work. Port multipliers are a frequent thought of mine recently, but I dont' really have money to experiment with stuff. If I buy, I gotta buy something I know will work.
  6. Could someone give a concrete example of hardware that would make this work, ideally using the full width of the PCIe bus on a P5B VM DO? http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm.asp Connects to 1 port of any SiI3132 addon card, PCI Express X1. Hi RobJ, thats a unique product you found there. Do you have to purchase an Sil3132 addon card, or could it work by connecting to a motherboard's onboard esata port. Not an SIL chipset port as far as I can tell.
  7. So we all know that more than 1 gig of RAM is not recommened for unraid. Will it recognize more than 1 gig? Is it able to recognize it, but just not use it? What if it would recognize it, but just not use it. Could you set a ram drive and put a swap file on it? Essentially going around the 1 gig limitation?
  8. I would like to understand how to do 2 things. Would someone please explain them to me like I was a small child? Don't leave any steps out, or assume I know anything. How can I setup another flash drive to be used for dedicated swap? How would I setup a hard drive for the same thing? Don't leave out any details please? Thanks,
  9. The card has a raid bios. It will not let you just setup the drives as individual disks. Why does unraid see them as 2 individual disks anyway? Is this something I should be concerned about, or should I just go with it and ignore the fact that that doesn't make any sense.
  10. Well Crap..... You're right. http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=32 So its back to the drawing board for me. I need a card that has at least 4 available ports. My motherboard has 3 x1 slots, and 1 x16 slot and 3 regular PCI. I could get the old standy by SX4 card, or the Supermicro one, but I just can't bring myself to purchase a regular PCI card for this purpose. According to this thread http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=731.0 This card might work. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115029 Has anyone had any luck with another PCI Express card, they would like to tell me about?
  11. Anyone ever used this card? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815280008 Seems like it should work? Others have said that the sil3132 chipset is good for unraid? I've never heard of MassCool before. Thoughts??????
  12. Some of the more experienced folks on here, might disagree. But I would say yes. I don't have dhcp running on my home network, so I had to edit the network.cfg file manually. Try that. Maybe there is just a problem with DHCP, your NIC and unraid. Maybe the NIC would work if you manually assigned an address.
  13. This board worked great. Sata ports and onboard nic immediately recongnized and functioning. Only had to modify 1 bios setting for booting off of flash. Had to make it think flash was a fixed disk.
  14. TSM

    PNY Atache Drive

    I did this, and everything booted up right away, with the same bios settings that worked for the Kingston Drive. Big Thanks. Now I have another problem. The array isn't starting. On the Main Unraid screen, it just says starting in the Command Area. Oh Oh OH! Wait.... Now its checking parity and everything appears normal. Its gonna take 215mins to finish, but now I'm breathing easier. I'll bet people have screwed up their unraids royaly by trying to reboot them just before something like this. I didn't realize it would need to check parity after swapping the flash.
  15. TSM

    SATA Backplane

    I've been successfully using this backplane. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817995001 My case has 9 5.25 drive bays. So I will be able to fit 15 drives into it using 3 of these.
  16. TSM

    PNY Atache Drive

    Anyone ever had luck booting from a PNY Atache Drive? My motherboard is an Intel DP35DP. So far I have been booting into Unraid Basic using a 256mb Kingston Data Traveler. This particular flash drive was given to me at work by a vendor, with his software on it. I have no idea of the history of the drive or what it may or may not have been through. Given that its 256mb, its gotta be at least a few years old, since you can't even buy one that small anymore. But its been working. The only Bios tweak I needed to do, was to make the motherboard think this was a fixed disk as opposed to a removable one. I'm going to take the plunge into Unraid Pro. Now that I've moved all the data off of my old NAS, I'm going to add the disks from this, to my unraid. Since you gotta pay $119 per license for the pro, and this is non-refundable and non-transferrable (which Sorry Tom, thats crap by the way, if you pay for a piece of software, you should be able to move it to another media if the original breaks, even the evil giant Microsoft understands this). Anyway, I was nervous about putting the pro on an old drive, which I don't know the histroy of. So, I bought a new PNY 2gb Atache. I syslinux'ed it. Copied the unraid basic files to it, only so I could boot it and get the GUID. I've tried every BIOS setting having to do with usb devices and booting in general on the motherboard. No combination will boot with this drive. Has anyone ever been able to boot with this drive, or another one by PNY in the Atache series? Thanks,
  17. I'm a complete linux newb. How would I go about hiding all the disk shares?
  18. Is it possible to hide a disk share?
  19. Interesting. I think that is what's happening. I set my pc monitor and my unraid box, so that I could see them both at the same time. Sure enough, when the transfer goes to 0, is when I see the hard drive activity light twinkle.
  20. I just setup an unraid server this weekend with the following configuration. Intel BOXDP35DPM LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Celeron 440 Conroe-L 2.0GHz 512KB L2 Cache LGA 775 35W Single-Core Processor 3 Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB 5400 to 7200 RPM SATA-300 Hard Drives SAPPHIRE 100184L-512HM Radeon X1300 512MB (128MB onboard) 64-bit DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 EPS12V EPS12V 610W Continuous @ 40°C Power Supply 2 Patriot 512MB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model PSD251280081 LIAN LI PC-A16B Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case Athena Power BP-SATA3051B 3 x 5.25" Bays to 5 x 3.5" HD (SATA) Backplane Right now, I'm using the basic version of the OS, and everything seems to be working. I plan on buying Pro when I run out of space on these 3 drives. Network tranfers are fast, but they aren't as fast as I think they could be. I use a program called Online Eye, that does a great job of monitoring the actual megabit speed of network activity. I have a gigabit switch, with Cat 6 cabling, and my pc and the unraid box both have gigabit nics. I see spikes up to 270 megabits\sec. During transfers from my pc to the unraid. But every 10 seconds or so it goes to 0 in the middle of a transfer. It starts back up again, and Windows never misses a beat, and the over all speed is still a lot faster than my old NAS box, which never got over 90 megabits\sec even though it was supposed to have gigabit, but the transfer speed was a lot more consistant. I think unraid is better overall, but this is still an irritating problem.