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

Thanks for the tip. You are right, using it at cache for after the fact might be a better solution. My original problem with no disks showing is that the drives I was using were 80gb Raptors that were that smaller form factor that were installed inside a larger, finned heat sink. They have the built in controller and then the drive casing extends the SATA and power (to make them fullsize HDD enclsoures). These are Dell OEM drives, I have several of them and they work in all the other situations I have tried. I put in 'regular' fullsize Raptors and the SYBA card sees them, allows me into the SATA card BIOS and allows me to setup JBOD, RAID0, etc. However... unRAID doesn't see the drives. If I got to devices the only thing listed are the 4 WD drives that are not attached to the SYBA card. Any ideas? I will attach the lastest syslog if someone can take a look (see some suspicious things, but I don't know how unRAID reacts to varying hardware devices normally... so I am not much help to myself). syslog.pdf

SYBA SY-VIA-150R PCI SATA / IDE Combo Card is on the approved card list. I ordered the reference link from NewEgg, the card GOT was a IO Crest XXX but the chipset and the sticker on the back say VIA 150r. Now, my intention was to use this as a hardware RAID 0 (via the BIOS on the card) to put 2 Raptor drives (80gb, 10k) together for a cache drive to use for my initial data load. Problem is, it doesn't see any drives. None. I can get into the BIOS but nothing shows up (says no drives attached). I have had this in the MB bare, no other SATA cards, with on/Board on, in different slots, etc. Nothing. It's not broken, broken, it doesnt cause the machine issues and the BIOS is there, but no drives. It has Windows drivers, but of course, no good to me right now... Just realized that I haven't let it come into unRAID all the way, to see if the drives show up there -but 99% sure that if it doesnt show up at post (meaning: it shows drives attached) it's not going to pass them off to whatever OS boots after that. Anyway, I can send it back to NewEgg.com but I wanted to see if anyone here has had any issues. Aside from that, does my idea of RAID0'ing some faster drives via hardware on the card AHEAD of unraid booting hold water? Physically, it seems like it should take those two 80gb and make them 1 160gb, but I have learned to not hold my breath, re: unRAID. Any suggestions on a DIFFERENT card that would work in this capacity? I don't need regular PCI, but that would be great since I am running a PCIe OEM intel NIC which has given me good performance in that slot and the pciE or whatever slot has the 8 port SATA card in it. Any suggestions? Thanks

unRAID will only see it as 160GB if it is a TRUE HARDWARE RAID-0 card. If it needs any level of support from the OS, such as special drivers, then all bets are off. From my experience with my old 74GB 10K RPM WD Raptors, they were outperformed by newer 2TB 7200 RPM SATA drives for the tasks I perform daily. The data density on those ancient (by today's standards) Raptors sucks in comparison. Also, since you're hanging them off the PCI-bus, the fastest theoretical speed you will ever see from them for local operations not going across the network is 133 MB/s. Even if you had a giant RAM-based drives plugged into that RAID card, you will not see more than 133 MB/s. You are limited by the ancient PCI-bus. Thanks for the tip BRiT, I might give it a shot for the initial data loading, since I have the 80GB drives already. If I find I need the cache drive after the initial data load I can look into a 2TB 7200 drive.

I have a bunch of 80gb wd raptor drives (10k) and those were doing sustained writes at 100mb+ from 7200 rpm clients over GBe. Those particular drives are small, but fast and quiet. In my case (pun intended) the other drives, fans, etc all add up to so much noise that a quieter drive wouldn't make that much difference I am finally going to get my data onto my unRAID (TB's of data currently on other HDD's and DVD's) and I was wondering if this would work: I have a PCI card coming that does RAID 0, it just runs 2 drives but if I put 2 80gb 10k raptors in a RAID 0 will unraid see that as 160gb? That as a cache setup for my initial data copy would work to 'speed' it up for me. 1) if I copy, say, 340gb of data in an evening to a share will it stop at 160gb of cache and then write that at 3:40am? What happens to the extra data? I would just 'drag and drop' and walk away for the evening. 2) could I set the cache copy script to run multiple times a day on a schedule? What about the script running while the drive is being written too? I figure there would be slow down, but I wonder if it could be copying to the storage drives while taking on new data? 3) an 80gb (or 160 if I can do RAID 0) would be great as a cache drive for my daily use... perfect actually. BUT I am looking to give a kick to my initial data loading... Any suggestions?

I haven't pre-cleared any drives yet, but it does seem to read and write ok from the AOC card. Strangely, the key seems to be the INT13 setting on the card. I disabled that and the r/w seems to be better. The suggestion came from the feedback on NewEgg and specifically mentions unraid and disabling INT13... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101358 I also added a 10/100/1000 Intel Pro PCIe NIC and a 4 core AMD Phenom (?) proc a friend gave me (only two running at the moment, the heatsink is for a one core and it gets a little to warm with 4 cores going). Putting a 10k rpm drive as a cache drive I could WRITE at 100mb+ from a 7200 rpm HDD over Gig ethernet. Direct copying to the 5400 rpm green drives would hover between 20-30mb. Read was 40+ easily enough off the green drives once the data was all the way written. Yet ANOTHER WD EARS drive died on me, that makes both drives from the same order as failures in under a year with really no use (precleared, thats it). Probably switch to Hitatchi or something else as get new drives. what makes me most angry is that WD makes you pay for shipping to them for RMA's. I got pretty irate with the CSR, it makes no sense. I spend X number of $'s on a product, it is warrantied for X number of years. It fails, but I have to spend money (increasing the original cost) to get it fixed??

Thanks Prof. I will poke around and see if I can find those cables at a decent price. It may come to just replacing those... Cy; On this link: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=13822.0 Reply #13 from me has a syslog of a slow performing pre-clear while on the SuperMicro card if you want to take a look. Thanks guys, s

I posted this on the general forum (sort of have this going in two places). Update: Cleared 4 new WD 2TB EARS drives with the onboard SATA. Two individually, two at the same time. Average speed was 100Mb/s even with the two going at once. Final run time was in the 28 hour range for the two at a time and 26 hours for the two going by themselves. No errors on either drives and I would say they work fine. BIOS on the ASUS board is 802 (or 8.02, however they designate it) which is the latest according to ASUS - late 2010, when I bought the board, actually. SuperMicro card is .21, which is the newest BIOS for that. I reseated it and reattached the cables. I have a ton of 80gig 7200 rpm drives and 5 or 6 340gig drives as well. I think I will get this thing setup on the built in SATA ports, make my shares, etc and start using it. I can experiment with the SuperMicro card and the smaller drives at that point and see if I can replicate the issues. Unfortunately I think the two sets of 1 to 4 SATA cables were $20 each (anyone know some 'good' ones, high quality?). I am weary of ordering more just to test but I may have to. I have a 2-port card for the final SATA drive (#15) and that one clears fine. So even if the AOC, for some reason, can't preclear but reads/writes fine I may just use #15 to clear drives as I get them (a ways off from that, I can run 4 2TB and two 340gb drives on the on-boards for awhile). AHCI was setup correctly for the on-board. Does anyone familiar with the SuperMicro card know if you need to adjust that BIOS in any way???

Update: Cleared 4 new WD 2TB EARS drives with the onboard SATA. Two individually, two at the same time. Average speed was 100Mb/s even with the two going at once. Final run time was in the 28 hour range for the two at a time and 26 hours for the two going by themselves. No errors on either drives and I would say they work fine. BIOS on the ASUS board is 802 (or 8.02, however they designate it) which is the latest according to ASUS - late 2010, when I bought the board, actually. SuperMicro card is .21, which is the newest BIOS for that. I reseated it and reattached the cables. I have a ton of 80gig 7200 rpm drives and 5 or 6 340gig drives as well. I think I will get this thing setup on the built in SATA ports, make my shares, etc and start using it. I can experiment with the SuperMicro card and the smaller drives at that point and see if I can replicate the issues. Unfortunately I think the two sets of 1 to 4 SATA cables were $20 each (anyone know some 'good' ones, high quality?). I am weary of ordering more just to test but I may have to. I have a 2-port card for the final SATA drive (#15) and that one clears fine. So even if the AOC, for some reason, can't preclear but reads/writes fine I may just use #15 to clear drives as I get them (a ways off from that, I can run 4 2TB and two 340gb drives on the on-boards for awhile). AHCI was setup correctly for the on-board. Does anyone familiar with the SuperMicro card know if you need to adjust that BIOS in any way???

W/o looking I will assume the PSU will have between 4-6 standard SATA power connectors and then several of the old-school ones. You would need adapters (monoprice.com is good) to convert those to SATA power connectors) http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=sata+power+adapter&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=12718698424387615123&sa=X&ei=gwI3Tri1FcbkiAK_peHoDg&ved=0CHcQ8wIwAQ The link is for a one to one connection but you can multiple the molex/4-pin power to 2,3 SATA connections. I think it depends on your PSU, but 650 should be enough. If you are using cages/swappable drive bays you might find that you need more of the 4-pin connectors than then the SATA type, my cages used up all the 4-pin from the PSU plus I had to convert two SATA to 4-pin for the final cage.

It's interesting that it picked back up... and again, this is preclearing on the AOC and not on the onboard? I have mine rigged to send me emails to my gmail account along each step of the way. When I was pre-clearing on the AOC card I would get the notice, then basically nothing - let it go a day or more. UnRAID was still going but the pre-clear sessions seemed frozen (didn't look at the unRAID syslog, foolishly). On the onboard, those same two drives were on post-read at 108mb/s each (both at same time) based on the last email I got. Are these DVR's for security systems by chance? I got some piecemeal system (something like 'Homeland Security' brand) used a year ago to record by my garage out back and I am unable to login remotely via the webinterface, but the keyboard/mouse/monitor hookups work - wonder if there is a way to reset the PW. Can't even find the manual online anywhere - it seems to be an off, off brand ... I have seen pics online of other systems that have the same case, etc, just branded different.