lionelhutz

I believe you download the file from here http://code.google.com/p/unraid-powercontrol/ copy it to the flash drive in the root put CTRLALTDEL=yes installpkg /boot/powerdown-1.00-noarch-unRAID.tgz on the end of the GO script. I hope that's correct. WeeboTech or JoeL would be the best ones to confirm this. Peter Peter

You should try installing the power button shutdown script as found in the Power Button Clean Shutdown post in the Feature Requests section. Then, when you hit the power down it will cleanly shut down and also save the log for you. Even if you can never fix the problem this eliminates the parity checks occurring when you don't want them to be. Is the network connection set-up before or after the server is started? I thought starting the server was the last task and if a parity check is being done it appears it was started. However, it could still have had a problem with the network and gave up on the network though. Peter

Has capacity increased more than reliability? Is he not using URE out of context? Say you replace a data drive and another drive (not the parity) fails during the 'rebuild' of the new drive. Can we put the old drive back in and then force Unraid to recognize parity as correct using the restore button and 'mdcmd set invalidslot 99'? Will this not then get us back to a position where the failed drive could be rebuilt? I'd guess the best way would be to move the data off the drive then write 0's to the drive you want to remove. Remove the drive and then use the restore button and 'mdcmd set invalidslot 99' to remove the drive from Unraid. That should keep the array protected during the whole process. Peter

NCIX.com claims to have those in stock. Peter

FYI, I used a ECS A740GM-M board and it worked fine with no issues whatsoever. I just set it to boot from the USB, turned off the serial and parallel ports and it worked. This ECS has the same 740G and SB700 chipsets as your first and 3rd boards. Newegg has the ECS cheapest after $10 mail in rebate. Peter

A write to Unraid has to read the data and parity disk and then write back to the data and parity disk. This is 2 reads and 2 writes for each block of data written to Unraid. What is your read speed? Peter

My small contribution. Personally, I would stop the array and spin down all the drives. Add something that highlights the problem on the main page. I would put a drop down from say 40C to 60C for over temperature or a box you can fill in yourself with limits from 30C to 70C or something similar. Everyone has their own drive temp preferences. Peter

FYI, I'm using a ECS A740GM-M motherboard. Cheap but only 6 x SATA. It's been good with no problems for the 2.5 months it's been running but the southbridge does run fairly warm, to the point the heatsink is at the temp I can just hold my finger on it. See here for port multipliers: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2318.0 But then read here how JonL had some trouble with them: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2442.0 Probably if the server was left off until it was fixed it would have been OK but who knows. This post lists some PCIe controllers, try on the second page: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1871.0 Ya, but they are sideways in the pics and have 10 SATA connectors, 2 per drive. Any idea why? Peter

Yes, that 590 case is very nice for the money. It has vented filtered front 5.25" covers down the front. It also comes with a cage with a 120mm fan that holds 4x3.5" drives and fits in 3x5.25" slots and also has rubber mounts for the drives. So, get another one of those cages and you're about as cheap as you can get as well as fairly low noise and filtered too. If you go with WeeboTech's drive trays then you have to add some 120mm fans to suck air through the case and block any other openings so the air comes in the front. Lots of holes on the case for fans. You could also add something like this with it's own fan http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215048 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215083 I used something similar. They have their own drive fans as well to keep them cool. I never see over mid 30C temps on the drives. With any of these trays, you lose the use of the filters on the front of the case. I've been thinking about pulling air into the side and back holes through filters and then blowing it out through the cages to keep using filtered air. I can tell you those cages are handy to move drives around when you add/change the drive configuration. I have shifted them around to keep the front order the same as the set-up page order. The AB9 Pro is a fairly proven board. I don't believe it can run without a video card though and it was recommended before to update the bios and only use memory from the officially supported list for that board. Go for lots of memory up to 4G. Look for a good single 12V rail power supply. Peter

When you boot the server you can run the Memtest when the flash first starts to boot to test the memory. You can set-up the box to reboot cleanly when the power button is pressed. Look here for some help http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2068.0 You're talking files in the root directory of the disk, correct? ie lots of files in \\tower\disk1 Or do you mean in the first level of a user share? ie lots of files in say \\tower\disk1\Movies Peter

I guess if you use a cache drive then it might work better. Rip to it and then the server will write those files to the hard drives later. You always know you have 1T to work with after the cache drive is cleared. Peter PS. The hardware issues you were having are a pain. Hopefully you find the solution without purchasing too many new parts. The lack of a list of working PCIe SATA cards doesn't help.

Can anyone comment on the Adaptec 3805 or 3085 instead? Peter

I've found that Intel cuts off the onboard but nvidea and ATI should be OK, especially the hybrid SLI capable boards or AMD's version of that. Here's a quote I found "Every NVIDIA IGP chipset since GeForce 6150 (September 2005). I am not sure since when for ATI IGP (as it has an old history since 2002), this applies to at least AMD 690G/780G." Now - is one of these supported? http://www.ciprico.com/Products/RaidCore.cfm Peter

Yes, consider a new board. I'm using a ECS A740GM-M with good luck, and you should be able to find this board for < $60. I have 2x1T and 2x500G drives connected at the moment. If you go up to $100 you can find a number of good board candidates. But, if you want to test it then basically create a boot USB stick and try booting the computer with it. If you can get it booted, then try to access it via \\tower from another computer. If that works, go to the devices page and see if the hard drives show up. If all that passes then you're likely good to go. Peter

FYI, some (most?) motherboards with onboard graphics will disable the onboard graphics if a PCIe x8 or x16 card is plugged into the "graphics" PCIe slot. So, onboard really isn't much use if that is in the plans. Maybe a PCIe 2 port card with port multipliers. Look for a thread called More on Port Multipliers just a few posts down for some PCIe port multiplier hardware. Peter

I just remembered reading this. Maybe your issue is similar to this one; http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2316.0 Peter

To answer first question. There was a post here about a dual core processor no working when installed with an add-in SATA card so dual core processors don't always work. For the second, If you keep track of the parity drive you should be OK. But, I would keep the order of them all if you can. Peter

You can find motherboards with 8 SATA connectors on board. Get a 6 port board at the very least to start - try a G33 or P33 based board for 6 ports. I'm sure there are others too. If you do go with SATA add-in cards then look for a PCI express solution instead of the PCI ones you listed. Peter

I don't see how you'd notice much if any performance gain between 800 and 1066 DDR2 Memory if it's used with a single core Celeron. Peter

Joe - The software must read the old data from the disk being written to and the old parity for that data and then calculate the new parity based on that data, correct? Actually, I should express the speeds more correctly. SATAII is 3Gbps. I also didn't look at the PCIe speeds. A PCIe x1 interface is 2.5Gbps. Also, I believe a x1 PCIe is about 4x as fast as the PCI interface clearly showing why PCI is not desirable for SATA port cards or Gbps ethernet. Anyways, this is just me looking at the various interface speeds. I think either a x1 PCIe and 1-port card or x4 PCIe and 3-port card would get about all you can on the motherboard side. Adding PM's would slow it down further but staggering the drives should still show good performance for about all operations except parity calculation. Of course, I guess when you look at the fact that Unraid is typically connected with gigabyte ethernet then the on-board speeds really don't matter most of the time. Peter PS, I hope I got the speeds right.

OK, so a PM really does bottleneck 4 or 5 drives down into a single 3Gb port. With Unraid, I can see it effecting performance when generating parity and even sometimes when writing data to a drive (since a data write will read all the drives to generate parity). Also, to a lesser extent, when a number of different file accesses on the same PM are happening at the same time. Overall though, it's likely not a big deal for the average user. However, with something like a RAID5 (or RAID0) where the data is striped across the 4 or 5 drives it's got to hurt performance compared to having 4 or 5 separate ports. RAID5 divides the data out over all the disks in the array so every read or write accesses every drive. So, if you have 5 disks on a single 3Gb port then the PM has to be slower than having 5 disks each with their own 3Gb port. Either way, I've somewhat hijacked the thread but the OP seems to have the right idea. It sounds like that hardware will work. Peter

I'm using the ECS A740GM-M motherboard. It's also 6 SATA ports and onboard video but you can find it $30 cheaper. I guess the only fault is it doesn't have the same number of PCIe slots. As already posted, try to find a PCI-E SATAII card. I don't think the one you listed is any use. Peter

Here's a question I always wonder when looking at port multipliers yet never seems to be addressed in the info. Say I put 5 drives on a PM into RAID5. How doe the PM affect the read speed? RAID 5 has the data striped over all the drives so it has to read or write to all 5 drives to retrieve or store data. Since it has to multiplex reading 5 drives over a single SATAII port wouldn't that make it 1/5 as fast as a RAID 5 configuration using 5 different SATAII ports? Well, in theory anyways assuming the ports are all being fully utilized. I'm assuming the PM might slow down Unraid write speed further but since Unraid reads from a single disk at a time it won't really affect read speed, right? But then, if there are multiple read accesses from all the drives on the PM it could then affect overall read speed? Peter

What happens if I purchase a license from someone else after they purchase a 2 pack of pro licenses and then sell one? I will own a valid license but I will not have purchased it myself. Peter

I was just going to post that too. It seems that MB is being dropped because some places list it as not available anymore. But then, it's still on Newegg. To me, there should be a few different options. I found the ECS A740GM-M board listed here in the motherboard section. It was cheaper than an Intel solution and not to bad with 6 SATA ports. You can almost get this board and a processor for what the Asus board costs itself. My server has been working great on this board. One of the motherboard lists, I believe it's the one in your link, had a lot of boards that are not available anymore so I gave up after not finding 3 or 4 of the listed ones. Well, there were some still available but they were more than the ECS (some up to 2x) and no onboard video, which of course has it's pluses and minuses. However, I would have to buy a PCI or PCIx video card for one of these boards since I don't have an old one. So, sure it would be nice to list a known good build but there are a lot of ways to build a working server. Peter