Lev

You made a lot of great points. And you're right, there is likely a better way I could structure things that would reduce the number of UDs.

UD animation and it can vary in length of time. Fastest is usually 5-6 seconds, average maybe around 8 - 10 and the extreme would be 15-20 seconds. The UnRAID main page loads instantly.

No smb / nfs mounts are in use or created. I think I also keep the disks spun up to see if that helps. Sometimes it's a longer wait for the refresh than other times. I suspect this is when there is activity on one or more of the drives and UD is having to wait in the queue to get the info from the disks that it needs for the refresh. You rock, awesome.

Story time.... 🤣 I think I have a lot of UDs. 16 drives to be exact managed by UD. Pretty cool! Quite the growth since 2011 when I first started with UnRAID. I have all 28 data disks in UnRAID utilized. So now with another 16 disks managed by UD, it'd given me some experiences to consider how UD works with this managing this many devices and where do I want to go next. The recent enhancement of 'None' or 'All' to show the mount points has been awesome. Really improved the usability of UD with this many devices. I can easily find mount point names. As I keep adding devices, managing mount point names is getting more of a chore. Thankfully UD has a great feature that it uses the disk serial number ID by default as a mount point. This works great with MergerFS, as I can keep this default, and just add the parent directories I wish on the drive and MergerFS takes care of the rest. Super easy! 😀 Two enhancements I think about sometimes based on this large number of UD devices: 1With this many devices in UD, it can take about 10 or more seconds to load the Main UnRAID page with the UD GUI. It has me wondering if there is a way to speed this up. Like if disabling temperature (hdparm) or some other info UD queries to improve UD loading speed. I find of all the switched on the UD GUI I use the 'Auto-Mount' switch the most. Each time it triggers the 'refresh animation' and has me wondering if there is a way to make it work similar to UnRAID Docker's 'autostart'. Those switches don't trigger a GUI refresh when switched, so I'm wondering if a similar method could be leveraged by UD. I really love UD has enabled all this to be possible via the GUI. While I could do it via the console, it wouldn't be as much fun. Really appreciate all the work you've put into UD over the years @dlandon.

Dude you're a beast. Thank you for your dedication.

I've been puzzled for the last week why most of my XFS partitions were reporting 'sectsz=512' and a few were reporting 'sectsz=4096' and traced it to a whether the drive had been partitioned and formated by UnRAID or UnAssigned Devices. I put the detailed log output at the very bottom to show both outputs. Researching if an answer existed already I had to take a trip down memory lane searching through the posts to recall that UD didn't always create UnRAID compatible partitions. I remember those days but didn't find an answers to why the difference. I went deeper into the code and traced it to the difference in the following commands: # Create new UnRAID Partition sgdisk -o -a 8 -n 1:32K:0 {$dev} # Create UnAssigned Disk Partition sgdisk -o -a 1 -n 1:32K:0 {$dev} What's the real impact? 🤷‍♂️ Both ways work and are functional, however the UnRAID command aligning on "-a 8" does seem to not trigger an alignment warning. # UnRAID partition creation # sgdisk -Z /dev/sde GPT data structures destroyed! You may now partition the disk using fdisk or other utilities. # sgdisk -o -a 8 -n 1:32K:0 /dev/sde Creating new GPT entries in memory. The operation has completed successfully. # UnAssigned Devices partition creation # sgdisk -Z /dev/sde GPT data structures destroyed! You may now partition the disk using fdisk or other utilities. # sgdisk -o -a 1 -n 1:32K:0 /dev/sde Creating new GPT entries in memory. Warning: Setting alignment to a value that does not match the disk's physical block size! Performance degradation may result! Physical block size = 4096 Logical block size = 512 Optimal alignment = 8 or multiples thereof. The operation has completed successfully. Detailed XFS_INFO output from two drives for comparison Partitioned and Formated by UnRAID v6.8.3 # xfs_info /dev/sde1 meta-data=/dev/sde1 isize=512 agcount=11, agsize=268435455 blks = sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1 = crc=1 finobt=1, sparse=1, rmapbt=0 = reflink=1 data = bsize=4096 blocks=2929721331, imaxpct=5 = sunit=0 swidth=0 blks naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0, ftype=1 log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=521728, version=2 = sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1 realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0 Partitioned and Formated by UnAssigned Devices v2020.06.28 # xfs_info /dev/sdas1 meta-data=/dev/sdas1 isize=512 agcount=8, agsize=268435455 blks = sectsz=4096 attr=2, projid32bit=1 = crc=1 finobt=1, sparse=1, rmapbt=0 = reflink=1 data = bsize=4096 blocks=1953506633, imaxpct=5 = sunit=0 swidth=0 blks naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0, ftype=1 log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=521728, version=2 = sectsz=4096 sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1 realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0 Any thoughts on this @dlandon ?

Works awesome No more playing hide and seek trying to guess which drive has the mount I'm looking for. Love the change. Thank you!

Awesome work, this will come in handy for sure.

A enhancement request... as the number of drives grows in my UD list in the GUI, I find I have to press the (+) to expand each drive to find the one that has the mount point I'm looking for. Not sure what the right enhancement is, perhaps a way to expand them all at once to make all the mount points visible?

Not that I'm aware of.

Nice update @Squid! Much appreciated 😀

You mean like this? My current server

@Addy90 Now that I've got more free time on my hands, I'm going to give CEPH a try. I ordered some more RAM for my 4 server cluster that I'll be setting up for it. In the meantime I'm reading and watching tutorial videos. Thanks again for your post. Using CEPH at home is a big leap from UnRAID but in the years ahead it will prove to scale beyond my yearly budget to buy additional hard drives 🤣

I'm presently in my 3rd Generation of UnRAID server. 2017 to present - SuperMicro SC847 - 36 bays 2014 to 2017 - Norco 4224 - 24 bays 2011 to 2014 - Dell Inspiron - I modded the case to hold 10 drives. Future - In Test - BackBlaze Storage Pod v3 - 45 drives Not sure if it'll be UnRAID. Right now I'm testing SnapRAID w/ MergerFS to overcome both the drive limit and move to a asynchronous parity sync to gain write speed direct to the data disks.

No. It doesn't fit my requirements. I overcame the 30 drive limit, there's various methods. I use Unraid VMs within an Unraid Host and the mount the smb shares on the Unraid VMs with Unassigned Devices in my Unraid Host. It took some time to get used to. Rebooting the UInraid Host takes a lot of effort to make sure each Unraid VM's array is stopped and then each VM is powered down before the host.

@cbr600ds2welcome, I can see you are new here. happy to have a new person asking these kinds of questions. you'l fit right in. rather than continue this thread, I invite you to join an existing thread. You will likely have many advanced thoughts if you're asking such things. Try searching the forums, and you're likely to discover a wealth of information from those who have asked the same question years eariler.

Almost 3 years later.... I've returned to this thread looking for answers to go beyond the drive count limits. I have a lot of drives. Maybe 60 or so. Presently I run UnRAID on bare metal, with two nested VMs that also run UnRaid. Tota of three UnRAID pro licenses to make this possible, each with their own USB key pass-thru to the VM. It's awesome and it works @limetech. The bare metal is 36 bay SuperMicro server with external SAS cards that attach to a SuperMicro JBOD array. I want to add more drives. A lot more drives. I recently came into possession of 4 of those BackBlaze 45 drive storinators. The backplanes and SATA expanders can be mapped to two UnRAID instances. It'd be split with 30 disks to one UnRaid instance, and 15 to the other UnRAID. That 15 seem inefficent and is nagging at me to find something else to have a single 45 drive array. What's the answer? I've been researching SnapRaid. Seems viable. If I explore deeper I'll start a threat on my findings and link back to this thread. This thread is important. Years gone by and looking at where I am now, versus where I was when I posted here. The drive limit hasn't changed. UnRAID is still awesome. But my needs have changed. I'm happy to purchase more UnRAID licenses, but I don't want to manage multiple UnRaid servers. Three is enough. Any ideas on what else to explore or consider?

Three days of solid stability. Everything looks as expected. Nice work.

Wow I've been using this and it's simply amazing. Huge thank you to integrating this into Unraid.

If anyone has the following error using tmux, here's the workaround. Not sure when this was introduced, I'm presently running 6.8.0-rc3 Error message Run this command as a workaround

I've got this working but I'd like to reverse the example to share a VM filesystem and then mount on my Unraid host using VirtIO. Is this possible somehow?

@johnnie.black this is a tremendous resource and was interested in your thoughts on what would be the expected speeds to determine the optimal configuration for a for 30+ drives in the following configuration: SuperMicro SuperStorage 6047R-E1R36L configured as: BPN-SAS2-846EL1 (front 24 bays) with three 8087 connectors BPN-SAS2-826EL1 (rear 12 bays) with two 8087 connectors LSI 2308 SAS2 PCIe 3.0 host adapter with two 8087 connectors (motherboard integrated) 6x SATA ports on the motherboard, running at 6GB SATA3 (DMI 2.0) 2x NVMe slots via Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 add-in card The drives are all WD Red/White 10TB & 8TB models Unraid setup as of 4/27/2019: Data disks x28 x24 connected to BPN-SAS2-846EL1 dual linked to LSI 2308 x4 connected to motherboard SATA ports Parity disk x1 disk connected to motherboard SATA port cache disk x1 NVMe drive connected to AOC-SLG-2M2 Not in use/connected BPN-SAS2-826EL1 (rear 12 bays) x1 SATA port x1 NVMe port Is this the most optimal setup to spread out the utilization and not encounter bottlenecks? Any opportunities for improvement? If I was to daisy chain a single link from the third 8087 connector on the BPN-SAS2-846EL1 to the downstream BPN-SAS2-826EL1 how much of a negative impact on performance would that have? The 826-EL1 would be empty, no disks. Would that reduce PHYs available or add significant additional SAS overhead?

How'd this work out for you? Any steps you found that worked?

I was reading through this thread today to find an answer to something (I found it) and just wanted to say thanks again @dlandon for all you do. Hard to count the ways your plug-in has been a tremendous addition to the community.