gorbachev

I've been running an Unraid server for about a decade now without any issues in Unraid, but I'm running into limits on my old hardware and want to modernize the setup. I'm going to move any streaming media (music, movies, tv shows) to new, more capable hardware I'm slowly acquiring as components I want go on sale or otherwise drop prices. I'm going to keep all non-streaming files (backups, data hoarding, misc files) on the old hw. I have 18 data disks, 1 parity and 1 cache drive currently running on 6.8.3. What I want to do is move all disks with streaming media onto the new box I'm building, and leave the rest on the existing one. The split is probably 12 streaming media disks and 6 disks for the rest. I'm not quite sure what's the best way to move the disks to the new box and downsize the current box (remove 12 disks, and remove all music, movie and tv show shares). I'm assuming I can unassign the drives, move them to the new box, remove music/movies/tv shows shares on the old box, do new config on it and recalculate parity. That would take care of the old box I believe. What about the new box? After getting Unraid running on it, what's the process of plugging the old disks on the new box and continue from where I left off? Just assign the data drives, create shares, assign cache and parity, recalc parity? How about moving Plex and other Docker containers? Install Plex docker container on new box, stop Plex, copy appdata from old box to new, restart Plex? I'm at about 95% capacity on my current array. Most disks are completely full with 3 of the newer 16TB ones with about 8TB of free space combined at the moment and I have no empty hard drive bays in my case if that makes any difference.

Turns out this required a change in the syslinux bootloader config file (syslinux.cfg) as described here: Adding pci=realloc=off in the config solved the issue for me. Interesting that merely upgrading the CPU would have caused issues like this with the Linux drivers.

I have two, and no free PCI-Express slots. I'm going to try and see if things work better if I stick a cheap PCI graphics card on the empty PCI (non Express) slots.

I have an Unraid server I've been running since 2011 with no issues using i3-540 CPU (LGA1156). I upgraded the CPU to a i5-760 last night. The server booted just fine, and Unraid software is running, but all of the disk drives connected with a SATA controller (LSI 9201-8i) are missing. Unraid is only seeing the six hard drives connected directly to the motherboard. Again the setup is working just fine with the i3-540 CPU installed, and worked fine again after I installed the i3 CPU back. No other changes were made. Any ideas? Did I miss a BIOS setting I should have tweaked? Or did I get a busted i5 CPU?

I've been waiting to upgrade until I could update my SAS cards to LSI 9201-8i, which I finally had time to install Sunday evening. Upgrade from 6.5.3 went without a hitch. Nice work! The new web interface looks really sharp!

Apologies if this is answered somewhere, I couldn't find the answer with quick searches. How would I go about upgrading my unRAID server to the a version that's not the latest? I'm on 6.5.3 and I want to upgrade to the 6.6.x version. I'm not seeing a way to do that with the upgrade OS functionality. Is this possible? If so, how?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179003 This is the best deal I've seen on large capacity HDDs this black friday. From what I can figure the deal starts in about 2 and a half hours. (12:01AM PST)

$25 / TB = $1000. Hot damn. And consider that you'll need to buy two to begin with to make sure the parity drive(s) are big enough.

Good suggestions. I think what I'm going to do with my rig is to replace the cache drive temporarily for preclearing the new disk(s). It seems like the path of least resistance to me. For longer term I actually have two more SATA interfaces available, but no empty HDD cages. I'll have to get some SATA power cables for the PSU so that I can plug new drives in. I'll have to figure out a safe way to hold the drives during preclearing, but that's it.

How do you guys preclear new drives for systems that are full? My unRAID system is full, my case has no empty drive cages or SATA connectors, so I can't really use it. I'm slowly replacing older drives with bigger, newer ones as I hit capacity. Preclearing used to be easy when I could just plug the new drive in an empty drive cage. No more.

$179.99 also on Newegg with a coupon code EMCRKBG22.

Both Amazon and Newegg are offering the Ironwolf Seagate NAS TB HDD for $190 today. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZDFMWQ/ https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179004 Sale ends today. I'm tempted...I don't really need new drives right now, but this is a pretty good price for a drive designed for NAS use. What's the consensus on these Ironwolf drives from Seagate?

I'm a fan of Invision's forums software, good upgrade! However, the default theme is a little "spacey". Lots of empty space everywhere, making shifting through forum posts slower than before, because there are less posts per page than before. Would it be possible to install a theme that has a bit more compact user interface?

That is a great price, and it's a very nice case. Great build quality. I bought one for a developer workstation I'm filling with drives I'm salvaging from my unRAID server when I'm replacing them with bigger ones. The only thing I'm not too happy about is that it gets really tight if you fill the case with drives. You are almost certainly going to screw up the wire management a couple of times before figuring out a way to snake them through/around/over the drive cages.

Looks like the changes are working quite nicely. I'm getting roughly 60MB/sec parity check speed at 780GB mark. Thanks a lot for your help Johnnie! Really, really appreciate it. This is going to cut days off the process of replacing the older drives with new ones.

I've rearranged the SATA connections. Parity disk is now connected to a SATA port on the motherboard. According to old syslogs it was previously attached to the SATA controller connected via DMI. That controller also had 8 drives connected to it while the controller directly connected to the CPU only had 6. That's now also been corrected. diskspeed report looks pretty much the same. I ran the unraid-tunable-tester tool overnight and just changed the tunables to the Unthrottled values recommended by the script: md_num_stripes="4480" md_write_limit="2048" md_sync_window="2048" I am now running a parity check to see if there is any improvement. It might be a little early to say, because the check hasn't run for too long yet, but it looks much better at the start than before all these changes. I'm currently seeing a 40+ MB/sec speed.

Here's the chart for two of the Samsung drives sampled at every 1% this time. This looks a little odd to me, but the average speeds are still way up there, so I'm not sure if that's anything to worry about.

There are three Samsung ST2000DL004s in there. This is the data drive inventory: 1 Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 3 Samsung ST2000DL004 3 Seagate ST4000VN000 4 WDC WD20EARS (soon 3) 2 WDC WD20EFRX 2 WDC WD40EZRX 3 WDC WD60EZRZ (soon 4)

I just finished running the diskspeed.sh utility on my array. I don't see anything abnormal in there with the exception of one of the 2TB disks having kind of a choppy chart. I'll run the diskspeed script with more sampling points on that drive next. 2TB WDC EARS drives manufactured in 2010 are the slowest, but the numbers look similar to other reports at slightly less than 100MB/sec.

The syslog has been completely quiet during this rebuild. Literally not logging anything at all after the log entry about starting the data rebuild. The 2TB and 4TB drives spun down at some point, but those are the only log entries in there. It's got a little less than an hour to go and it's humming along pretty nicely at 87MB/s. I'm suspecting one or more of the older drives are getting close to end of their life, but we'll see. Like I said, I'll do some digging after the data rebuild is done. Hopefully I'll find something.

Thanks. I also verified this from the motherboard manual. The data rebuild should finish sometime this evening. I'll start tweaking and troubleshooting the drives when that's done.

Thanks for the info. I was reading that SATA controller benchmarking thread of yours but somehow missed the DMI section. I'll do speed tests on the drives after the current data rebuild completes to see if I'm having issues with one or more of the drives first. I'll also doublecheck seating on the controllers and the cable connections. Possibly a stupid question...how do I identify which one of my controllers is the "bottom controller"?

I have an unRAID server with 18 data disks I built 5 years ago. It's running unRAID 5 and has 20 total disks, one parity and one cache on top of the data disks. I've just recently started migrating the older, smaller 2TB drives to 6TB drives. In the process I've had the pleasure of syncing my parity and rebuilding data drives a few times. I also had some issues with loose cables and bad seating on one of the Norco drive cages that caused some red balls and I had to do rebuilds a few times more. The current drive inventory on the array is 10 x 2TB, 5 x 4TB and 3 x 6 TB. One of those 6TB drives is currently rebuilding after it replaced a 2TB drive. My motherboard is a BIOSTAR H55A+ LGA 1156 motherboard which has 2xPCIex16 2.0 expansion slots and 6x3Gbps SATA ports on the motherboard. I have two AOC-SASLP-MV8 SATA controllers on those PCIe slots connecting to 14 of the 20 drives on the server. 6 drives are connected to the SATA ports on the motherboard. The data rebuild just passed the 2TB mark, and the speed drastically improved. I was doing roughly 15MB/s up until 2TB and the speed just picked up to 94MB/s after passing the 2TB mark. After reading about this sort of stuff this morning I'm under the impression that the bottleneck is almost certainly those AOC-SASLP-MV8 controllers. They can't push enough data through the bus when it has to do that for all the drives at the same time. If I replaced the AOC-SASLP-MV8 controllers with AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 controllers, I should see significant speed increase (at least 2x) on parity syncs, parity checks and data rebuilds during the time it's reading parity from all drives. Additionally I should make sure the parity drive is connected to the motherboard SATA port. I'm not sure that's true at the moment. Does that sound correct? Anything else anyone could recommend? Should I try and stick as many of the 2TB disks onto the motherboard ports as I can as well?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822235063 With coupon code ESCELGK24. Sale ends July 29th midnight PST.

And I just bought two more 6TB WDCs. I can't wait until the prices drop to competitive levels with 4TB and 6TB drives. It's pretty amazing how much storage capacity you can stuff into a home NAS device these days. With these drives I have a 180TB max capacity on my unRAID box. That's just insane.