[Can I run Unraid on this old enterprise server?]

A 6 SATA port motherboard can give you 20TB of protected storage.

FTFY 

[Throttle parity sync/check according to I/O]

I would like an option in the GUI to toggle the throttle, preferably be able to switch back and forth during a check. I have programs running on the unraid box itself that may cause the parity check to never go to full speed, and I'd like the option to starve them in exchange for a faster parity check completion.

[Redballs & Bad Motherboards - Rated NC-17 for graphic violence and gore]

I think I'm going to get ECC RAM to replace it anyway.

Be sure your CPU and motherboard can use it before you buy it. I don't think many of the consumer type boards have ECC enabled.

[newly installed drive to the array does not get written to]

On each of my share folders I had "Disk1, Disk2" in each "Included disk(s)" space.

This should just be left blank?

Tried it with them all blank, but no difference.

Did you restart the server after clearing them out?

[Sick Beard Help]

Midnight commander will do what you need, and is already installed in unraid. Just type mc at the prompt after you log in with putty. Here is a tutorial on usage.

[Check SATA connection speed]

I've done a search and haven't come across any way to check the SATA connection speed for a drive.

I wrote this script to output link speed and identify device. It's not pretty, but functional.

Why would you write a script to respond to a year and a half old post?

[Is it safe to upgrade unRaid 4.7 -> 5.x just before "swap-disable"?]

As both Joe and I noted, your best "solution" is to buy another 2TB drive and let the system rebuild the failed drive BEFORE you do the upgrade to v5.    But the process I outlined will let you avoid doing that if you really don't want to buy one.

Or, short stroke a new 4TB to 2TB with an artificial HPA to accomplish the data rebuild, then do the upgrade, and expand the drive after you rebuild parity in 5.0 with the full size 4TB.

[What the ?? Is this normal?]

Are you running cachedirs?

[[SOLVED] SMB Shares Missing Data]

every time I lose network access to the server, I have to do an unclean shutdown by keeping the power button on the server pressed.

So the unraid local console is locked up as well? If that's the case, I would think it's a hardware issue. PSU, motherboard, RAM or CPU. Have you run a successful memtest session for a long period? (24+ hours)

[Auto wake up?]

Stock unraid does not support sleep, but it spins the drives down. When the player accesses the server, the drives will spin up just fine. So... if you haven't done any customization to force sleep, you won't need any customization to wake.

[Does preclear slow down?]

Preclear does not "stress" the drive, it reads and writes every spot that will be used to store data or rebuild data on another failed drive in the array. Reading and writing data is the basic function of a hard drive, so by definition it's not stress, it's normal use. In the vast majority of consumer drives, a large percentage of the capacity of the drive is never used. Unraid, however, requires that the whole drive be ok to rebuild another failed drive, so it is wise to test it before you trust it. Drives that fail the preclear likely would have lived much longer in a lightly used windows box, but that doesn't mean the drive was good.

[Reading drives via USB]

USB 2.0 max data rate is 480Mb/s, which is about 60MB/s, raw. Overhead eats a good chunk of that, so max real world tends to be around 40. If everything is working perfectly on a new 1TB/platter unraid system, you should be able to get close to double that on a gigabit transfer.

[Reading drives via USB]

Since unraid doesn't fully support USB 3.0, it would be faster to transfer the files over a gigabit network than it would to plug the drive directly into the unraid box. Whether or not unraid handles that partition type is a whole nother question, but not really relevant considering it would be slower anyway.

[Samba Recycle Bin with VFS_Recycle]

Is this something that people would be interested in as a plug-in?

 

For example a plug-in to allow the user to easily add/remove the "recycle bin" support, set a weekly cronjob to empty the trash and allow the user to manually empty the trash?

I wouldn't want the trash emptied weekly, but perhaps aged out periodically. I don't want something in the trash for less than a specified period. Daily, weekly, monthly, whatever, but only permanently delete something that has been in the bin for more than what's configured.

[Server shutting off by itself]

The PSU alone is able to regulate the electricity efficiently against power variations anyway.

 

I don't reject your theory at all, but i'm certain there are other options to explore first

Other options like a failing PSU that can't regulate properly?

[Server shutting off by itself]

my server is not connected to a UPS

Which means any power blip will probably cause issues similar to what you are seeing.

[[Solved] Okay, it happened: Disk became red (disabled); how do I re-enable it?!]

Actually I was hoping there's a way to tell the array "trust this drive, it was just disconnected, I know what I'm doing"

Keep in mind, if there were any operations done to the drive while it was red balled, whatever changes were made are not on the drive, they were done to the parity, so trusting the drive will undo those changes.

[Parity Check Status/Progress ... was "Disable Stop" when parity is running]

It's just enough to think the system has problems. 

Maybe unmenu is reading from your USB when it's slow? I know a flaky USB drive can cause odd delays in functionality, as most basic services are in RAM, and many add-ons can be set to use /boot

[Clone drive to esxi?]

Yeah I already use true image. I was thinking of making a copy of my machine and leaving it as a vm.

What I'm about to suggest works great in virtualbox, don't know about esxi.

 

1. Make full backup with acronis of the machine you want.

2. Create blank VM with appropriate settings. (disk size, ram, etc.)

3. Set VM to boot from acronis emergency media

4. Restore full backup to VM

5. Boot VM and address license and activation issues

 

I know it's multiple steps instead of creating the VM directly from the backup, but it accomplishes the same thing with probably no extra work.

[Apps defaulting in every reboot]

You will likely get much more help posting in the thread that deals directly with each of the plugins.  This section is for support with the main functions of stock unraid, not user add ons and customizations. Also, each application's settings are handled slightly differently, so you need to work on getting them running one at a time.

[VirtualBox compiled for unRAID]

Version 4.3 of Virtualbox is up for unRAID 5.0 i386. I am getting pulled away from the computer & have not started creating a package for unRAID 4.7. Anyone still want me to do so?

There may still be a few around with perfectly running 4.7 systems that could use it, but I'll be honest, unless I have issues, I probably won't bother upgrading for a while (weeks or months), so don't bother on my account.

[First Ever Preclear - Current Pending Sector Issue]

Can the old drive be used for anything else?? - other than a boat anchor

Sure! Use it for a workstation with no local data storage, just easily reloadable programs. Or a game machine, or anything else that doesn't require backup. A windows install probably won't even care if the drive has bad spots, I've seen windows run acceptably on drives that are pretty much trash.

[Server Seems to slow down]

I didnt realize that Cat5e was that far behind!

It's not. 5e is plenty capable of gigabit. You had a bad cable, or it wasn't plugged in all the way.

[Need some help on sharing my Windows connection so I can install unmenu]

Theoretically sharing the connection sets up a DHCP server on the LAN connection of the laptop, so you should be able to leave the unraid box set to dhcp=yes, and let it pick up the rest of the settings automatically. However... if the link is dropping, you may have to use a ethernet switch instead of just plugging one directly into the other. In theory it should work,  but theory matches reality for only a small subset of life. If you have a small unmanaged gigabit switch available, try plugging both the laptop and the unraid tower directly into that, and leave the unraid set to dhcp=yes and see what happens.

 

What miscellaneous network equipment do you have available to you right now?

[Parity check reports errors]

Should I be doing automatic correction parity checks monthly?  My system is set up for parity checks on the first of every month -- I don't believe its correcting errors by default.

Depends on your level of paranoia about your data. A non-correcting check that gives errors allows you to do some detective work to try to pin down the cause before you irreversibly change the parity drive to match the current state of the data drives. Most of the time a correcting check is what is called for, and you move on with life. Every once in a while, consecutive parity checks will come up with much different results, meaning something is actively corrupting data reads. In that case, you really don't want to write ANYTHING to the disks until you figure out what the issue is.