oconnellc

https://support.plex.tv/articles/201426506-why-are-iso-video-ts-and-other-disk-image-formats-not-supported/ Basically, no. Plex doesn't support those structures.

So, I figured out what is keeping my disks spun up... I have my Plex docker on a disk in my array. I don't remember what I did to put it there. How can I move it? I have a cache disk and so I have the configuration files there, but the docker.img file is still in my array. If anyone could point me to some instructions for moving, that would really help me out.

I have a disk (and the parity) that won't spin down. I try to spin it down and it starts back up. It just occurred to me that I have a Plex Docker on my system and the disk that won't spin down is the disk where I have the config data/etc. for Plex. Is Plex keeping this disk running?

I don't. I'm fine waiting for the Lime docker to get updated. I don't have any issues with my current installation and there isn't any functionality (that I know of) that I'm eager to start using. I'm happy with the current level of 'service', especially given that it was free to me. I guess I'm just curious to know if someone is maintaining the Lime version of the Docker? Eventually, there will be a security patch that I should have or something else equally important and I want to know if someone is, even if it is moving very slowly, maintaining the Docker. Thanks for your help!

I just logged in to the Plex Server interface and I see a message that there is an update to my version of Plex Media Server. I assume that I should ignore that and keep using the 'Check for Updates' button on the 'Docker' page of my Unraid server admin, correct?

@tdallen Thanks. Yes, NAS plus I'm going to start looking at setting up some Dockers. I'm probably overkill on RAM and CPU if I just decide to stick with using it as a NAS. As far as the hardware goes, I can afford to spend a few bucks on 'reliability'. I've got three little kids and just don't have the time to tinker, so I kinda want to just set this up and forget about it for the next 3-4 years.

So, I decided that in order to circumvent the expected massive failure of my hardware (my current build is about 10 years old), I'm just going to upgrade a bunch of stuff at once. I have the Cooler Master Centurion case and I'm going to re-use that. I'm replacing my CPU, Mobo, RAM and power supply. Also buying a HotSwap drive bay, as I don't want to mess with the hassle of taking everything apart in order to replace drives/etc. My array is currently 4 disks, 1 parity and 3 X 3TB drives and I don't foresee needing any more disks (I have about 5TB of stuff and I figure that drives are getting bigger faster than my need for storage) So, if anyone could let me know if they see a problem with any of my components, let me know... CPU Intel Core i3-7100 7th Gen Core Desktop Processor 3M Cache,3.90 GHz (BX80677I37100) $119 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NCESRJX/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER MOBO MSI Pro Series Intel B250 LGA 1151 DDR4 HDMI USB 3.1 ATX Motherboard (B250 PC MATE) $89.90 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N4LCX2D/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER RAM Ballistix Sport LT 8GB Kit (4GBx2) DDR4 2400 MT/s (PC4-19200) DIMM 288-Pin - BLS2K4G4D240FSE (Red) $60 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F4Z4OPW/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER Power Supply EVGA 500 W1, 80+ WHITE 500W Power Supply( 100-W1-0500-KR) $40 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H33SFJU/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER Hot Swap Drive Bay ICY DOCK Black Vortex MB074SP-1B 4 Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Backplane Cooler Cage with 120mm Front LED Fan in 3x 5.25" Bay $70 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LICRE8A/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1GQQIQD0YQTUY Thanks in advance for any help! Chris

@ashman70 thanks for the reply. Honestly, if I didn't have the three little ones who take up all my time, I would absolutely go for a used server. But, at least for this iteration of the server, I realize that I need to go with a 'low touch' solution. Heck, that is why I'm going for something with hot swap drives. Having to pull out the chasis (even for a tower), take it apart, etc. etc. even to do some little maintenance on a hard drive is more than I'm willing to commit to right now. I don't think I can sign up for knowing that the next few years will consist of failed fans, power supplies, indicators, etc.

I've decided to build myself a new server and looking to put this one in my rack. I was originally looking to buy something on ebay, but I realized that I was looking at machines with CPU's that were end of life in 2010. The reason I'm rebuilding is because I want to stay ahead of the anticipated failure of my current 8 year old machine. Getting something that is already older than that seems like asking for trouble... I've got a wall mounted rack that has about 18" of depth. I've found some racks that will fit, but they all tend to have a fatal flaw. For example, I found one chassis that had room for an optical drive. That meant that the HD in front of that didn't get much airflow... I think that if I have 4 hot swap drive bays, that should be enough. I currently have 3 3TB data disks at about 50% capacity. I figure that upgrading to larger drives will give me all the space I need (as opposed to needing to add drives) as I go forward. Anyway, I'd like to find a chassis that will fit in my 'short' rack. I could do a 2U or 3U (but for some reason, a 4U chassis just feels like it would be egregious). Again, I don't want to have to take the thing apart to work on the drives, so hot swap capability (even if I end up powering the whole thing down to swap out drives). The machine is in a closet in the basement, so I don't care about noise. I don't do anything with the machine, other than stream some media and backup some laptops and photos (no dockers or VM's or transcoding going on). Anyone have a good recommendation?

I've got an unraid server that I build around 8 years ago. Family is happily using it and so I don't want it to die and then have it be out of commission for a month while I get around to building another one. I've got 3 little kids and no time for 'fun'. So, if I could find a pre-built server to buy, I think it might be time for me to just upgrade to some new hardware so I can forget about it for another 8 years Anyone have experience buying one? Where did you buy it? I've got a rack, so I would be happy to move away from the tower that I originally build years ago, but I try to keep an open mind. Any thoughts/advice would be appreciated. FWIW, I went to the Vendor area of the forum and I get some permission errors saying that I don't have access to that content. Thanks, Chris

I'm kinda new to this particular game and so I hope I'm not asking a silly question. I need to buy a UPS. The research I'm doing is a little inconsistent. Some things report that you need a UPS to provide a pure sine wave and other people say it isn't terribly important. Honestly, I'm willing to spend a few extra bucks to get a UPS that will 'just work' and not require much time playing with it. I really only need something that will allow me to set unraid (v6.1.3) to gracefully shut itself down if the power is out for more than a few minutes. This is a simple home application, so I don't need anything fancy. I just want to power the unraid box and maybe one other desktop machine running windows (plus monitors for both). Any reco's would be greatly appreciated. (and, should I bother upgrading unraid to 6.1.8 first) Thanks, Chris

Using the GUI to create a script is pretty easy, it turns out. After you choose your settings, go to the 'Query Editor' tab and click the button to generate the query. This represents the command line arguments to the CLI. Here is a link to the Handbrake page with the parameters: http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/CLIGuide One thing to look out for is that the gui will generate a file with the chapter increments. The flags for this will be on the generated query unless you go out of your way to turn them off. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out if there was a problem with my encoding when it turned out that somehow I had the 'c' setting in there limiting me to the first 17 chapters of a movie. In case it might help someone out, here is the script that I put together for encoding movies for my iPhone (based on the iPhone settings of Handbrake). Note, you may not have your movies in the same place I have mine Thanks again for building this. This is such a great addition to my server and stuff like this is the reason I bought a core2duo with 4G of ram... Chris

Where is a good place to read about how to actually use this? I have the windows version, and I'm wondering if I can have the gui generate a script that would be portable... Thanks for any tips, this is a great tool. Chris

That is nice to hear. I did set up at least on smart status report. I don't remember when exactly, but I'm guessing that that could be what you are referring to. Also, just to make sure (I'm anal and paranoid, a combination that bothers my wife to no end), I'm actually still using the old cable. I just pulled the old cable out of one of the plugs on the mobo and put it into a different one. I'm wondering if the plug on the mobo could be bad? Thanks again for your help. How is it that free support on a board like this is better than paid support for so many products? Chris

So, I bought a new SATA cable, but just for grins decided to give the old one one last try by plugging it into a different plug on the mobo. I set preclear up to run for 4 cycles and it worked. Go figure. However, I get a message when the last cycle ran and I don't know how to interpret it. Does this make sense to anyone? Thanks, Chris

Ok. Thanks for the tip. It is a new drive, so I went into the guts of the thing, unplugged and replugged the SATA cable back into the drive and made sure I pushed extra hard to push it both into the drive and the mobo. Then, for grins, I decided to try again and preclear is now running. I'm 15GB into reading a 1TB drive. So, I should know more by morning. If I'm reading this right, either the cable is bad, or I didn't have it plugged in 'well' the first time. So, for my own edification, I would appreciate if anyone could answer a question or two. If the either of these two is correct (bad cable or badly connected), why did everything other than preclear seem to work. The drive got exported and I could add it to the array. unraid would preclear it (something that took several hours and resulted in many many writes to the drive). I was also able to complete most of a preclear cycle on the disk the first time around. Shouldn't that preclear cycle have failed at the same place (at the beginning, instead of several hours in)? Is this a function of quantity, not quality? Could I have read 1 byte from the drive every day forever, but as soon as I tried to read a 3 GB video file, would I have crashed and burned? Thanks again for your help and the cool utility. Chris

Any ideas why the preclear script wouldn't run? I got a new WD 'Green' drive and tried to run preclear and after typing 'Yes', I got the preclear screen, but it was just frozen and nothing happened. So, I decided to just go ahead and add the drive to the array, to see what would happen. Unraid added the drive, but I had to wait about 4 hours while unraid cleared the disk. No problems there. So, after that happened, I removed it from the array and tried to run preclear again. I ran just fine, until it got to the last step of reading the disk for the final time and froze 88% of the way through. So, I stopped it and tried to run preclear again. This time, it froze and wouldn't run. So, I added it back to the array and I waited for another 4 hours while unraid cleared it again. This surprised me as I figured unraid should see the disk as cleared. So, after waiting the 4 hours, I tried to run preclear again. Again, no luck. So, I decided to do a 'smartctl --test=long /dev/sdb' and so now I have to wait 255 minutes. Any ideas what is going on?

I can't remember if I had to stop parity manually or if it didn't run when I restarted the array. In any case, I kicked it off and it ran just fine. So, now I'm just burning it in with 'preclear'. I'm doing the as the preclear script updates and it looks like I'm reading from each disk at about 100MB/sec as I run preclear on both disks at the same time. That seems like it is pretty fast, but I don't know if this is necessarily a good test or not. Chris

Thanks. I didn't realize that the parity didn't have a filesystem. In retrospect, it makes sense. I just started the array, didn't have it rebuild parity. I've learned a lot from your last two posts, and I'll try to learn more before asking questions next time to avoid wasting your time. Given what I have learned, I will probably start preclear runs on both disks with a count of 5 or 10 just to put them through their paces a bit before starting things up. This is a brand new, first time build for me, so I have been a bit paranoid before starting out. Given how long a singly cycle takes for me, I should have an operational unraid by Monday or so. Thanks again for all of your help. Unrelated... what do you use to turn a screen grab into an image? My only thought was to hit "alt + prtscrn" and paste it into word. If you know of a tool that would let me save it directly as an image that would help. Thanks again.

Thanks for taking a look. Just to make sure I am clear and understand you, 'Unformatted' is alright. However, only the first drive disk had that. The parity disk didn't say 'Unformatted', it just had a "-" character. Maybe parity is "different" and that is what it is supposed to say? I didn't click the button to have unraid format any unformatted drives. Assuming that "-" is not a problem, I will do that and then start a parity check. Sorry I didn't upload the screen shot, but there is a problem with the forum now and it reports an error when trying to upload a file. Thanks again, Chris

Oh, and as for the status of the array. Well, I can't upload anything, so I'll describe it to you. I reassigned the devices to a spot in the array (same place they were in before), then I went to the main page and started the array. Both disks are 'green' and have lots of reads/writes. For the 'Free' number, the parity disk (sda in all my previous posts, the 1TB WD drive) just has a dash "-". The other disk (a WD 750 GB drive) says 'Unformatted'. I don't understand that at all... Since both completed the preclear, shouldn't they both be 'Unformatted'?

So, I got an error trying to upload the files, so here is the actual contents. The only difference I can see between the two is the the last section with the info about the self test log structure. smart.txt and smart2.txt Thanks again.

Ok, I think I am in a better state now. I have run the preclear on both disks and it completed. The 750GB disk finished with no issue. The 1TB preclear looks like this: So, here is a smart report for that disk (smart.txt). I don't know if the fact that "Offline data collection activity was suspended" is a big deal or not. So, I decided to run another smart test, and then I got another report (smart2.txt). I appreciate you taking the time to look at this.

Well, I can't send you either of the logs. I went over to the drive to 'listen' and didn't hear anything. The sides are not attached, so I thought I would slide one off and double check the cables and so I had to move the case a few inches and hit the 'power' button and shut it down. So, I had gone through the syslog and didn't see anything that looked scary, but that doesn't mean anything... So, I restarted the box and for grins, I went to the tower management page and added the two disks back to the array and started it up, and surprise, the management page told me that the drive that had 'frozen' was all right and formatted. The drive that had finished said 'unformatted'. No idea how that happens... So, I'm running a smartctl report on both disks now. I have to go to work, so I'll post the logs when I get home and then maybe rerun the preclear for a single cycle. Thanks for the help. BTW, I'm pretty new to all this command line stuff, so here is the syntax for the smartctl report I ran. There are a lot of options and so I'm not sure which is correct. Where will smartctl write the report? Chris

I ran this for a single cycle against a WD 1TB drive. Got up this morning and the display seems 'frozen'. No errors or anything, but it isn't doing anything. While this was running I also did a single cycle for a WD 750 GB drive which appears to have completed successfully. Here is the display for the frozen drive: I'm not sure if this 'happens' sometimes and I should let it continue or if something horribly wrong has happened with the drive. Any ideas? Thanks, Chris edit FWIW, I just ran 'top' and "preclear" seems to still be doing something, even though it isn't updating the display: