lionelhutz

That board should work. Others are using 780g chipset boards successfully so there's no reason to believe the ECS version will have a problem. There is also a Gigabyte 740G motherboard in the same price range as the ECS board. If you purhase it, set-up the data hard drives first without connecting the parity because it seems that board will add a HPA block to one of the drives. If it gets added to the parity then the parity will be smaller than the data drives and not usable as parity. Give it the chance to add it to the data drives first. Also, go into the bios and hit I believe Shift-F1 and look for the option to turn this off - it will be something about backing the bios up to the hard drive. Peter

This one is 4 ports and a little cheaper than the one you linked - this assumes you have a PCIe x4 lot available. http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132018&Tpk=N82E16816132018 Peter

WD Green drives; Power Dissipation Read/Write 5.91 Watts Idle 4.9 Watts Standby 0.66 Watts Sleep 0.66 Watts Remember, idle is spinning with no access. Standby/sleep is when spun down. There are equivalent Seagate LP drives. So, 3-4W when spun down is not correct. Peter

If Tom supported S3 sleep then unRAID and your server specifically would have had S3 sleep included and enabled by default. These are considered user support forums. So, it is unlikely to the point of no chance that he will provide answers here for how to use S3 sleep. It would be nice to see Tom at least get his servers set-up for sleep some day. Still, sleep requires more thought than just turning off - Do you wait until other devices are turned off? Use an external "sleep" command? Sleep after a certain time? Sleep at a certain time of day? Then - How do you wake the server up? The server is more or less the equivalent of being turned off - it can not monitor for network traffic requests like it does for disk spin-up. So, this requires something like a magic packet to be sent from another machine which is more set-up and user understanding. Can I point out; WD Green drives are about 0.66W idle x 5 = 3.3W, not 20W Fans are about 2.5W full-voltage for a 120mm fan and the power drops with lower voltage - 5 x 120mm fans with voltage control should be <10W You have to watch some of these "estimator" numbers because some are quite high. I'd even question the disk controller cards - 8W is likely high considering the IC's that are on those cards without heatsinks. Peter

That's why I did both tests. MyMain is operating on the server and using Windows Explorer is operating over the network. In my case, it's not the spin-up of the drive causing the problem but something to do with either accessing a certain amount of data on the drive or something to do with the networking - I would agree that the likely suspect is Samba. I'll try to telnet to the box and access a spun-down drive to see what happens. Peter

Here are my devices; pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 (sda) ata-WDC_WD15EADS-00S2B0_WD-WCAVY0684188 pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-1:0:0:0 (sdb) ata-ST31000340AS_9QJ1MB5Y pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-2:0:0:0 (sdc) ata-ST31000340AS_9QJ1GL28 pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-3:0:0:0 (sdd) ata-WDC_WD10EAVS-32D7B1_WD-WCAU48166213 I should not get a studder looking at this list. If I spin-up a drive using myMain a HD test video will play through the spin-up every time. I can spin-up and down drives as fast as the interface will go wiithout a studder. If I try to access a directory or file from my windows explorer the same HD video will studder almost every time. So, there must be more to the studdering video story than pairs of disks on a shared SATA controller. Maybe it's something to do with how Windows works? Peter

The Coolermaster 590 case is fairly similar and about 1/3 the price. It comes with vented and filtered 5.25" covers. Take the plastic piece off the 2 drive adapters and they'll fit behind the front of the case. It also comes with 4 into 3 adapter very similar to the ones you are listing. I use one - not a bad case for the price. A more expensive one might be made with heavier steel but it works fine and looks good. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119152&Tpk=cooler%20master%20590 Everything else looks good, the motherboard will support 6 on-board with spin-down and add the controller above for another 4 drives. Peter

Your 300W sounds way too high. I would also recommend you just buy a Kill-a-Watt type meter. They're cheap enough. I think my server was something like 55W with the disks spun down and about 90W during a parity check. That's with 4 drives 2x WD green and 2 x Seagate 1T. It was measured with a crappy old PS that I have since replaced with a 80+ supply so I should measure it again some time. Peter

Gigabyte often uses Shift-F1 to get more BIOS options. Peter

You'll have to run a check on it and hope it recovers. You can't recover disk1 if disk 3 is gone. unRAID allows for a recovery from one failed disk. I don't know if you can recover disk1 now. From your description it sounds like you have done some "Restore" button presses and likely have tried to rebuild parity and who knows what else. I can tell you that you have no chance of recovering disk1 from parity unless every other disk is in the array and working properly. Your post of what you did suggested you replaced 2 data disks and started the array. Then, you stopped it and pressed the restore button but never formatted. Then, with no further description are we to assume you stopped and posted? You have suggested you've removed the drives from the unRAID box and attempted to access them on a windows machine. The problem is that this description of events makes no sense. You can not change 2 data disks and then just "Start" the array. The array can only be started if one data disk is missing or changed. Peter

Something sounds wrong in your description. You changed 2 disks at the same time? This should not be done. But still, that should not cause 2 other disks to fail. Running the reiserfsck on those new disks is pointless. They are not valid disks yet. It sounds like you have done a bunch more things besides just change 2 drives and attempt to start the array. I doubt you can recover disk 3 unless you can get the origional disk to work again. Put all the disks back like they were before you began to mess with it. Unassign the parity disk. Try to get the drives to all work so you can assign them and start the array. Run the reiserfsck on the drives that have issues. Hope that the origional disk 3 problem was just a cabling or connection problem. Let us know how you make out up to that point. Then, we can provide some possible suggestions for recovering the disk3 if it's still not working. Peter

That's such a pretty graph compared to the last ones. Nice speed boost too. Peter

Rob; Does NTP only do a small correction each time it fires? If so, a clock way way out would take a lot of little adjustments to correct, right? In any case, it's just normal messages so I don't see the problem either, other than the syslog having a lot of the messages. Peter

What is it going to hurt by just leaving it? Peter

Your motherboard clock does seem to be drifting well over 2 seconds every 5 minutes so it probably won't get any better. You could try just one time server though and see if anything changes or if it at least does fewer updates. Peter

Since you're making multiple threads for the same question I'll copy my answer to the other one here, Maybe make sure the min free space setting is about 2 times times larger than the largest file size you are moving to the array. So, if you are moving 5gig movie files try something like 10 000 000 for the value which should be 10Gbytes. Otherwise, all your settings look correct so if that's not it then I don't know where the problem is. Peter

Maybe make sure the min free space setting is about 2 times times larger than the largest file size you are moving to the array. So, if you are moving 5gig movie files try something like 10 000 000 for the value which should be 10Gbytes. Otherwise, all your settings look correct so if that's not it then I don't know where the problem is. Peter

Oops, that's correct the disks are complete unmounted. They'd have to be mounted first to do any file work outside of the array. Peter

OK, think of a drive that has been in use for a while. When you delete a file unRAID does not zero out the actual media of the drive. Remember the drive basically just removes a file from the allocation table when it is deleted. So, if you write to the drive again you could be writing to a cleared area or to an area that is not longer cleared. This happens below the unRAID control level so unRAID has no knowledge of this. The reason to clear a new drive is that a drive with all zero data will not affect the parity calculation. If you create a brand new array and add say 5 data and the parity drive it will not clear the drives but rather just do a parity calculation. The clearing is only to add a new drive to an existing arrar without breaking parity. Peter

Just to add a little more. If you stop the array, then the parity will not be updated during the move and it will be bad once you re-start the array. The move will go much quicker but you will not have any parity protection during the whole move process. You would also have to do a parity check after you start the array to get the protection back. So, it's not really an invalid option but rather just has consequences - you will get a faster move but lose the protection until the parity check is completed. Peter

Yes, do as you described. You can use <alt> F1 - F6 (I think it's <alt> key) to get to different login windows or just telnet twice so you can do two preclears at the same time. Once parity is calculated and the 2 new drives are precleared then stop and add them. I think you will get a checkbox under the start button you have to click first before starting the array but then you might be able to just start. I'm not sure about adding multiple drives at once so you might just want to add one drive and start and then stop and do the next drive. In either case it'll just take seconds to add the drives. Peter

Interesting that the fluctuations appear to be a result of the gige being able to fill buffers on the server and then the pause while the buffers clear. On my 100Mbps network I can get a flat line at almost 100% during a large file transfer. Peter

Flexraid FAQ - "FlexRAID™ Basic is suited for data that you only change a few times during the day" It's kind of on the website but it doesn't make it clear that the data you lose will not necessarily be from the file you edited. I bet if you asked 20 average users of Flexraid there wouldn't be one who knows that editing a file in location "A" puts some of the data in location "B" at risk. Peter

Ya, that doesn't make sense. Parity type protection relies on the remaining data and the parity to recover data. Say I have 2 drives of data and 1 drive of parity there's no way I could recover from the simultaneous failre of both data drives. Say I have 2 x 1T full data drives (or folders or whatever) and create a 1T parity drive (or folder or whatever). The parity drive can not hold the same data as both data drives. If it could, then why would we use 2 data drives to store 2T of data and not use whatever method the parity drive used instead? After all, that would allow us to store twice the data in the same amount of space. Say I have 10 X 1T data drives and 1 x 1T parity drive. By your logic, the 1T parity drive would hold enough data to recover all 10 data drives at the same time??? Oddly enough, the theory that you could recover every drive (or folder or whatever) from parity without having any of the other drives (or folders or whatever) also came up as a feature of Flexraid on the AVS Forum. This goes directly against what is listed on the Flexraid website. The Flexraid website says that if you have 5 data drives and 2 failed at the same time that you'd still have the data on the remaining 3. It says nothing about recoving both failed drives from the parity (using a single parity set). I hate to say it, but I think your test method had a problem and it may have left you with a false impression of what Flexraid is capable of doing. This also shows the problem of just doing some simple tests as suggested. I'd bet that Flexraid read the blocks on the hard drive which would still contain the data even though the file system had marked the files or folders as deleted. Same way unRAID has to clear a drive to no break parity. Sure, a "ls" of the drive will show it is empty but there could still be random "1" bits left on the drive which would break parity. Same way you can undelete a file after you accidentally remove it. It's still left on the physical media even though you don't "see" it. Peter

I honestly think WD, Seagate and Samsung are likely all about equal in terms of reliablility. I've read bad stories about WD drives failing and how the WD RMA process is a pain in the ass. I've read about the Seagate's being crap every drive dying from one person and then read about them working great from another and about the easy RMA service from a third. I don't read much about Samsung but then they aren't nearly as popular. Peter