GoZags

It seems stable. Writing to it at 22mb/s (writing TB's of data). Pulling over gig averages 105 or so. Peaks of 120 or so now and again. This is to a Win 7 box and the file transfer speed being reported is probably not super accurate... At any rate, it seems fine as is. Left to do is to bring on the SAS card and a few more drives next week. Of course, I got my 4th disk (already a refurb from WD - it precleared real slow) showing DISK_DSBL and writing errors. Parity, Disk 1 and Disk2 are fine. Can I just pull that 4th and pop in a new one (when I get it)? Is it best to just pull it right now so it doesnt get more data written to it?

Sweet, so mine is faster... I haven't had it lock up or shut down, even when it was slow on the web interface I could log in via telnet or get on the console on the machine and shut it down. Looking online it looks like that its pretty popular chip to run at 3.5+ (even with the standard heatsink). I will resign myself to the fact that it's at least stable from the CPU standpoint, unless someone sees a reason it might be unstable. Here is some info about unlocking and overclocking: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Sempron_140/12.html ASUS as an 'unleashed' option, that's what unlocks the additional cores on certain AMD chip families (gleamed from skimming a couple sites). The clock speed on mine us up though, so not sure what the deal is there. I will investigate more tonight.

Attached Syslogs are with the CPU settings as they were and then with clockspeed, voltage, etc all set as Auto in the BIOS. It seems like the core unlocking is a one-way door? I am not too familiar with OC'n machines and def not the current crop of processors so I am not too sure what is going on there. I basically defaulted everything and then turned off cores 2,3,4,5,6 (only has '2' though I think) in the BIOS. Shows up as the Athlon either way, though I am certain that the unlocked cores are off. Read a little on the chip and it seems like it is one that people mess with, unlocking the cores, raising the clockspeed, etc. - it seems to be able to be pushed pretty far, though it's not needed in this case. Couldn't get a hold of my friend but I am fairly confident that is is not overclocked and if there are more cores unlocked they are off. I remember my friend saying that 2-cores was fine and overclocked those was fine if I put in a bigger heatsink and fan (on it is just the retail AMD one). Maybe someone more familiar with ASUS boards will now what I mean here but when it is booting you see 'Press 4 to unlock cores' and you can hit '4' on the keyboard and it shuts off. When it boots up again the 'Press 4 to unlock cores' is not there and it says something like 'Cores unlocked'. You can then go into the BIOS and selectively shut down the cores. Funnily enough, it always says 4 are unlocked after the initial 'Press 4 to unlock cores' message comes up and you hit 4. The POST screen has a 4(up arrow) icon next to it. Pretty sure it only has 2... Where I am at now: Did the BIOS changes, plus made sure all the audio and unnecessary comm ports are off. Enabled the Realtek NIC and pulled the Broadcom. Pulled the M8 SAS for now, there are no drives on it. Pulled the 2-port that the Cache drive was on. unRAID booted up, I was able to get around the web interface OK. No red in unMenu and all my existing drives were there and the shares were available. Went to my Movies (ISO) folder where I had copied 8 movies... only one was there (though it was a complete file and useable). The errors were probably the cache drive like was mentioned above and it was probably trying to copy from the cache to the regular array but was having issues. Wrote directly to a couple of the disks from a USB 2 HDD connected to a laptop that was connected to the LAN, around 26Mb/s average. When I copied from the HDD on the laptop to the disks it was around 32 or so. Read from the share shifted between 90-105, so that seems about right. Rebooted and started the memtest, which is where it is at now. Feel better about where it is at, given how it was behaving. I will probably add the SAS card and put a different drive on there and ensure that unRAID can see it and add it to the array. Like I mentioned, I don't care about the 15th drive slot at this point so a replacement PCI stat card isn't a concern (though I could try it with some other drives I have). If anyone has info about ASUS boards and the Sempron 140 and where it should be as far as cores and clockspeed let me know. syslog.txt syslog2.txt

Sort of a long story, documented here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15254 Long story short is that I have had issues with a couple drives. First PCI SATA card (2-port, for my 15th drive) was a no go in unRAID (though on the compat list). My second PCI card seemed to pickup in unRAID but I might have a flaky drive on there.

Yes, this is from the invoice with NewEgg: ASUS M4A78LT-M AM3 AMD 760G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - I was avoiding the LE, which had NIC problems supposedly. Correct, and it worked, but I turned it off during a trouble shooting spree and got better performance from the add-in card. And I mispoke, it is a Broadcom and not an Intel. I first put in the Intel 10/100 as a test... just had that in my had that it the Gig one was Intel as well I will give him a buzz, but I can probably figure out how to default it all somehow. Has it already That's the plan I had some off, I am pretty sure but I can do that after the default. No need to run sound, etc, etc. Did that first day and correct on how the board treats the SATA ports as 4+2 Had already done that, and the BIOS is the 'optimal' one (the newest one, I believe) according to several threads I read on here. I will mess with it tonight, maybe see if I can get it up and going and check web interface performance and do some writing directly to disk shares, then start the mem test before I head out the door. Personally, I think the Realtek was fine, but plenty of suggestions came in to try an add-in card (original issues were basically about r/w speed). I just left it in after that. Thanks for the help.

bcb, Yes, a buddy who plays with OC'ing was showing me when we had the Windows 7 install. We put it back, but maybe not all the way. I am not familiar with those settings (I don't bother, normally) but I can take a look at either default the whole setup (easiest, but I am pretty sure I set optimal defaults previously...) or roll those settings back. Just to get a baseline it should be set back to normal, so I will, but I only ever had this working ok after those changes (decent r/w speeds). The 2nd SATA and cache drive should probably come out, problems seem to be tied to that drive. Also, I have the NIC off and am using an Intel 10/100/1000 card (couple years old)... but that seemed to improve things (transfer speed). I will try those things this evening, maybe start a mem test in the AM. I will be interested to see if it's just that push to get that 15th drive slot available that is killing me...

The SAS is the popular choice around here. I am having trouble of different sorts with my build, but my SAS has been't an issue (detected fine, all the channels work, etc). Not sure on running two, but I know people do.

The PDF attached at the top is from /log/syslog after a reboot. Is there another way (telnet/terminal) to get a long version or previous ones? Thanks

Interested to hear what your total preclear times are. WD EARS 2TB drives for me (not the fastest things) took 24-28 hours when it was going 'fast'. Some drives took as long as 48 hours. Haven't figured out what the issue is yet. I had two drives going at one and got 24 and 26 hours and then the 48 hours doing only the one drive - and it was the only thing unRAID was doing. I suggest you do the unMenu and then do some of the packages, including the email one. I start preclear from a workstation (telnet) and have it send me the process updates to my gmail. Works great, just check my phone now and again for speed, temps, etc.

The drive is older, I got a box full of them - so maybe that one is acting up. The RAID card is just a $15 -port from NewEgg (PCI not PCIe). The other one, a SY-VIA-150R based card didn't work for me for some reason (using various drives). It was on the list, but maybe there was a compatibility issue between my board, the SATA card and unRaid (it would show up in post though, so I would lean to unraid). Raj or somebody recommended the one I have now (basically a whitebox item, brandless). It doesn't have jumpers, but it does have a BIOS and it was a little flaky, not seeing the HDD on the first couple boots. Reseated, reseated the sata cable (swapped it) and it came up in POST and then in unRAID. It's actually my '15th' drive - I only put the cache on that card so I could put it in the last drive bay (3 bays with 5 slots). At this point I don't care - 14 drives is/will be enough. Regardless of the cache drive though I have always got terrible preclear times (well 2 went quick, 2 went slow - a couple I did more than once as a test) and that was with the drives on the Mobo ports (using the first 4 of 6 total, haven't gotten to the SAS card) or if I used the SAS card.

Thanks for the responses, guys. Truthfully I was just livid last night when I went to use it and it was all over the place performance-wise. So it is the 80gb acting up then? I have difficulty with the syslog, not all the references make sense to me yet. I can ditch it. I was trying to get fancy so I could (ultimately) do some photo backups and some DVR recordings during the day at quick clip. I will try that next. Is there a way to see what plugins are using what resources?

Thanks for the reply Jim. Your experience is more along the lines of what I was expecting. I am hoping the errors mean something to someone on the forum and they might have a suggestion. Hopefully.

Not sure what is going on. I thought I had the kinks out and the system was running correctly but apparently not. This is my last go at unRAID before I dump it for FreeNAS, Windows Home server or whatever else is out there. I have 4 2TB EARS drives, plus a 80gb barracuda as a cache (only part that works well, R/W to the cache seems fast). All new drives, ordered from two locations, two have been RMA'd because they were slow to preclear and then one had a SMART error. I can order 250 machines from Dell at work (and I do) and not one will have a bad HDD out of the box, but whatever... I have attached the syslog, the errors that stand out are: Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: status: { DRDY ERR } Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: error: { ABRT } Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: configured for UDMA/66 Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7: EH complete Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: BMDMA2 stat 0x686d0009 Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: failed command: READ DMA Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: cmd c8/00:00:f0:56:04/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 131072 in Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: res 51/04:00:f0:56:04/00:02:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error) Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: status: { DRDY ERR } Sep 13 20:14:48 Tower kernel: ata7.00: error: { ABRT } And the fact that going from page to page on the web interface and bringing up unMenu takes anywhere between 10-30 seconds each. After a reboot its quick, for a bit - but then it is back to it's normal slow response. I also attached a screen cap from unMenu that shows some errors. A broader question: Is it always so difficult? I have bought all new gear based off the approved hardware listed. The 'machine' runs fine. Loaded Win 7 on it just to see and everything loaded fine, drivers for my SATA cards went on fine, the drives could be formatted and written and read to just fine, including the ones that took 48 hours to preclear in unRAID. I replaced the SATA cables, relaxed the power being pulled from the PSU by removing empty drive carriages (and their prospect fans) and just ran the 4 drives in my array, still the same issue. In fact all the SATA cables came from desktops that had been in use for years. BIOS on MB and SATA controllers are fine (in fact, haven't even GOTTEN to the SATA cards - the MB runs 6 drives by itself). Confirmed AHCI, etc, etc, etc. Defaulted the BIOS settings, no luck (no new BIOS version, unfortunately). The ONLY thing I haven't done is wiped out the unRAID config on the flash drive or jumped to a beta (4.7)... frankly, all I read on the board are problems people have with beta versions, etc - instead of being on the bleeding edge. How would I go about doing that? My array is useless, in reference to data - still got everything on loose drives, DVD and another box - so I can start over, no problem. Would love suggestions. I think that if I had just tried the 3 drive version I would probably have chalked it up to something that didnt work for me and moved on, but unfortunately I jumped in with both feet and bought the full license. Untitled.pdf

Thanks Raj. Any idea why the VIA wouldn't work? It's listed as compatible. $9 isn't bad though.

Anyone have any suggestions on what to do, re: the drives not showing up in unRaid? Any suggestions on a cheap 1 or 2 port PCI (no -Ex1,x4) SATA card? At this point I don't care if it does RAID or whatever on it's own - I just need to fill that last slot on my drive enclosure (drive #15). Thanks