Poprin

I think this is what you are looking for: https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/The_parity_swap_procedure

Appreciate this is an old thread but I thought it would be worth replying to as I found this via a google search when looking for ways to utilise my RAM more effectively. Does anyone have their unRAID box configured in this manner with the adjusted parameter for vm.dirty_ratio=xx? I have adjusted my go file to add this parameter with a value of 50 so in theory using approximately 4GB of my RAM. Now at first I thought this was a god send because 50% of my data transfers are single files up to approximately 3GB. When testing copying to the array via my VM it would copy the whole file into the RAM cache first and I thought cracked it! However I quickly realised something was amiss when my weekly machine backup on my desktop took much longer than before to complete. After testing by making a backup of my virtual disk to the array (30GB) I noticed that when it run out of cache after about 4GB instead of seeing the usual copy speed I get of 40-42MB/s I was instead only achieving 24-26MB/s. Can anyone shed any light on what is happening here? Have I read this old thread and this is no longer a wise thing to adjust? Any help appreciated!

gfjardim firstly I'd like to say this is a fantastic plugin. I've used it on 4 drives now and it's worked superbly. However during the preclear of my last drive I updated the plugin to 2016.08.29 version. Admittedly should have waited for the preclear to finish but if i'm honest I forgot it was running! Anways.... Preclear finished no problem, but since rebooting my server the preclear icon has disappeared from my settings tab. (V6.1.9). I can get to the settings by typing server/settings/preclear into my browser as a workaround but the icon has disappeared. I also installed the 'fix common problems' plugin before rebooting the server so I was wondering if they aren't playing well with each other for some reason. I have since removed both plugins, deleted the plugin data from the flash, rebooted and reinstalled just the preclear plugin but still no joy. Any suggestions?? EDIT: Note to self, read release notes... I have searched the forums and other people are finding this issue, I shall read further but when trying to run a preclear on another disk if I click the eye icon to view the progress I just get tput: unknown terminal "screen" tput: unknown terminal "screen" tput: unknown terminal "screen" etc,etc I've noticed some people suggesting to use the original scripts but I don't get that option from the drop down when selecting preclear.

Aptalca this does interest me, I'm guessing you are saying this can't be done via the GUI? I have always wondered as my Windows VM is set to use Core 0 on my 4x core processor. If the VM is running does it get 100% use of that core? Or can Plex for example steal some of that cores resources if it is performing transcoding for example? It's not a major issue as I just use the VM as a bit of a safe test and browsing environment but I have noticed when using it sometimes the performance drops off significantly.

This is a fantastic showcase for unRAID you must be so pleased, just watched the video and I must say I was staring in slack jawed amazement! Great stuff! Might splash out and replace my 4 core FX with an 8 core so I clan live a small underpowered fraction of this dream.

Are you running the virtual disk for the VM on a parity protected SSD?

Thanks for that Frank1940, downloaded just in case!

You need Plex Server running and pointing at your media shares. You do not need to pay for this service, I never have. Limetech maintains its own Plex Server docker and is easy to install. Once this is running and you navigate to the web front end it should become much clearer!

I also know this is an old topic, but I was researching other board options as I am thinking of upgrading my unRAID processor and stumbled upon this at the top of a Google search so thought I would contribute in case it helps anybody else. Basically all AMD FX processor support ECC Ram, as do all the Opeteron's but I don't think all Athlon processors do. I ended up using the following Kit for my unRAID 6 machine. After some deliberation I decided I wanted ECC because I would be running a virtual machine and my machine is always on. Asus M5A78LM/USB3 AMD FX-4100 quad core (95w) 8gb (2x4) Crucial 1333mhz ECC unbuffered RAM Now the issue I had was the FX-4100 isn't exactly renowned for being economical. However after basically a week of tweaking BIOS settings I managed to get the base system (i.e. without hard disks just one SSD) down from 54w idle to 48w idle and from 120w in prime95 to 89w. Also I got load temperatures down from 62c socket and about 55c on the board to 53c at the socket and 42c on the board. Which to be fair I was well happy with. I achieved this by disabling all motherboard functions I did not plan on using, i.e. the onboard sound controller, serial, com, etc, etc. Once this was done and I had it running 'bare bones' I then started to tweak my voltages. I wanted to maintain performance but a big factor was of course heat and power usage. So first I ran a benchmark using novabench to get my CPU score as I wanted to maintain this. It's worth mentioning the only software I found to give me accurate temp readings on this particular board was HWMonitor. Everything else gives you garbage readings. CPU core is the on chip temp, TMP01 is the CPU socket temp and TMP02 is the motherboard / chipset. I started by going into BIOS and setting everything manually to stock. So instead of everything set to AUTO you want everything set to it's standard. So processor for example is 1.375v for an FX-4100. Then I disabled turbo (as this causes havoc when trying to reach a stable clock) and compromised by manually setting the multiplier to a little over stock. So stock it is 3.6 and turbo's to 3.9. I discovered setting it stock at 3.7 with no turbo returned me very similar performance to standard. Then I went about undervolting the CPU. I found that the only two items that you needed to worry about that had the biggest effect on heat generation and power usage is the CPU voltage and VDDNB voltage. I reduced the VDDNB voltage first until I reached the lowest stable and then reduced the CPU voltage. My reasons for this build is I didn't want to spend a fortune but at the same time I wanted to use ECC RAM and have a processor that could run a windows VM and a Plex docker. I have achieved this with Bells on. The processor cost me £30 off ebay and the board was about £38. The RAM for £42. Compare that to basically any Intel Xeon setup and you have saved £200 minimum. The FX-4100 can handle three plex transcode steams simultaneously v's my Athlon 610e I was using previously which could only handle one! Also it's worth noting that a TDP wattage is not the absolute wattage that a processor will use it is a guideline to it's thermals more than anything. I don't have all my BIOS settings to hand, but if anyone is really interested in all the settings post and let me know and I will reboot the server for the first time in three months and check the BIOS

I think a recommendation can only be given based on the file sizes and quality of playback you are hoping to stream. I use a chromecast in my bedroom and use the Plex iPad app to operate it and it is flawless for me. It works perfectly. However the wireless router is only in my study next door and I only use 2gb ish movie files as I only output to a 40" screen in my main room and a 26" screen in my bedroom. I know because I have tested, if I try to playback a 25gb BDRIP then it will not work. I think the main problem is the wireless connection trying to handle that bit rate. I can't even handle that bit rate with my home plugs it starts buffering and I have some good quality netgear 500mb/s ones.

I can't offer any advice as to the source of your crashing issue. However I would suggest (purely as a workaround rather than a solution) that you disable automatic library updates in Plex. I totally understand why you would use them, however in my personal situation I am the only one who updates my Plex server with new content. Ahead of this process I also confirm all the folder structures and file names before updating the library's. As this is a manual process it only takes me an extra second to trigger the update process. The also for me has the massive advantage of allowing my drives to spin down correctly and only spin up when they are needed. If you are scanning your library hourly what are you drive spin downs set to? You would realistically need to disable this feature. Also my hardware (FX4100, 8gb ECC RAM) is capable of handling three transcode streams simultaneously using Plex via the unRAID docker. With 4gb of RAM and Q9300 I would be surprised if your server would not handle a similar workload with Plex running as a docker. Have you tried this? I have migrated from a Windows Server running 24x7 with Plex and unRAID is infinitely more stable for me with the same hardware.

I have not setup a HTPC / NAS however during testing I successfully managed the following: Setup GPU pass through, USB controller pass through and created a fully functional Win8.1 workstation with the following hardware: Intel DQ45CB Sckt775 workstation motherboard, Intel E5400, 3gb DDR2 RAM and an AMD x1650 pro. All of these bits were the cheapest most useless bits from my parts bin, probably could buy them on eBay for less than £50. My point is you don't need to go out and purchase a new Xeon processor to achieve your goal. On the whole, AMD provide the most features for the least money. Just need to research the components fully before purchase.

Just a quick post to say congratulations to the Limetech Team. I have been using unraid5 free version for some time as my storage needs were light, I then built a Windows server to take more advantage of my hardware and because I've not got the time to learn Linux at any kind of advanced level. I've been testing unRAID 6 for about a week and it has so far exceeded my expectations by a large margin. You have provided enough documentation and simplified the interface so much that I can now get somewhere with everything I try and with an hour or so extra effort seem to be able to crack it. I've got a VM working with GPU, Sound and USB pass through and two dockers running alongside. I am pretty much 100% converted!

saarg thank you for the link and archedraft thank you for the guide at the other end of the link. I've got this working and so far it appears to have eliminated the lag from the mouse and I can now also 'hotplug' my 360 controller into my machine and VM picks it up. Some more testing required but I think this could well and truly work as a fully fledged gaming machine on top of unRAID. Excellent stuff.

Thank you for this thread archedraft. This has now re-ignited my desire and drive to create a Windows gaming VM on top of unRAID. I would suggest this be a sticky somewhere or be included in the unRAID instructions! I think that the group file and command need to be at the top of the instructions though. I am using an old Intel Sckt775 workstation board for testing at the moment and the USB bus's were grouped into two groups. I had 8 USB bus's listed in total and I had to pass 4 of them to get the VM to start without error. Once this was done it worked like a flippin charm! I can now unplug / connect my 360 controller into the front USB ports and Windows recognises it straight away (I am using Windows 8.1 pro)

If I could wade in here with my opinion and would also welcome input from anyone else. I moved away from unraid last year because I wanted to make more use of my server hardware and due to limited time to learn how to use Linux at an advanced level I decided to setup a windows server. I had snapRAID, Plex, owncloud, utorrent client and handbrake installed so it did all of the donkey work and was always on. However the release of unraid 6 peaked my interest and I have setup a test server. I must say I am VERY impressed so far and I am looking to potentially move back to unraid. What I was particularly excited about was the prospect of consolidating some hardware and having my primary gaming machine running as a VM alongside all the above applications. That way I could also take advantage of Steam home streaming and stream to my HTPC in the lounge (which I already do but would be nice to have an always on resource). However, so far I have encountered some stumbling blocks to having a pure gaming machine as a VM. I've managed to successfully configure pass through for my GPU, sound card, mouse, keyboard and 360 game pad. However, I find that if the machine is under significant load the mouse can sometimes lag on input which is a big no no if I'm playing something like DOTA. Also you can not 'hot plug' the 360 game pad and need to leave it plugged in permanently in order for it to be passed the VM which isn't really ideal... not to mention the fact I can't seem to figure out how to hot plug any USB drives which I tend to use for Steam backups and swapping installations round. It shows massive potential but at the moment I'm not sure I can sacrifice the usability of my existing game machine. Unless anyone else has had more success than I?

Valid arguments from both sides, I would say upgrade for support though if it is straight forward. 5.05 is the latest stable release and appears to be just that. FYI sureguy I would say that large organisations run outdated software for the following reasons: 1) It costs them a fortune to upgrade 2) It costs them a fortune in licensing 3) They stick with the most stable, most supported version 4) They wait for new versions to be 'field tested' by joe public and smaller organisations before they spend a fortune on upgrading. When your reasoning for an upgrade is a more stable system with better support at no extra cost any organisation would make that change.

Can't you just not type anything when it prompts you for a password and hit enter? Will that not work? What are you using to telnet into your box?

Alternatively, it's a little more complicated but if you have a spare drive you can mount it outside of the array and use that. I used the SNAP plugin (which isn't fantastic but does the job) to mount an old laptop hard disk outside the array with the share name plex. I could then set my plex library to /mnt/usr/plex (/<mount>/<user shares>/<share name>) and my transcode directory is /mnt/usr/plex/tmp. Works a treat and gets round the problem of not being able to use a cache drive on unRAID free.

Fliptoback you are correct, it looks like NFS only works on 8.1 enterprise, 7 enterprise and ultimate. Not 8.1 pro, which is vaguely ridiculous! Surely someone must have a workaround. Spotted this post but don't have time to research too much. Might be worth a look: https://github.com/GM-Alex/vagrant-winnfsd/issues/12

Hi Fliptoback, please see this link to a post I put on here a short while ago. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=33405 Hope this might be of some help to you, basically had problems and in the end I started using NFS rather than SMB for streaming and it has totally sorted my problem. Also passed this information on to a friend of mine using a similar setup and it has also rectified the problem for him also.

Just a quick follow up on this, changing the shares to NFS has made a massive improvement. Again, this is likely nothing to do with unRAID and more to do with either my media PC and Windows 8 or my network. However I have seen posts on other forums with people reporting similar playback issues so this may be of use to some people. FYI as you are likely aware you can run both NFS and SMB protocol on the share as I am still using SMB to upload data to the server from my other machines and using NFS purely for streaming content.

There was nothing wrong with the formatting of your first log as long as a viewer is used that understands linux line endings like Notepad2. When I load it with Windows Notepad then it comes out looking badly formatted because each line for Notepad is expected to end in a cr/lf pair (Carriage return/Line feed) not the linux lf (Line feed) that your files have. So nothing wrong with them. Can't tell you what your problem is by looking at the log or at least I don't want to give you bad advice so I have not looked at it just checked the formatting. Every day is a school day! Symptom of being a complete Windows user. I downloaded notepad++, I can read the logs now. Your syslog does not show any suspicious errors. A failed disk I was testing recently riddled my syslog with I/O errors. Now I can see the smart report for disk b more clearly bjp999 is spot on. It does look like a cabling issue, although if all cabling checks out and you try a different SATA cable and still get problems I believe I've read somewhere this can sometimes be related to miss-configured RAM. i.e. wrong timings / voltage / speed in BIOS.

If you are sticking with standard desktop hardware I have just built my first unRAID server. Details are in my sig, I also live in the UK. The MSI board I have used has 8 SATA ports and the CPU is a quad core athlon with a TDP of 45w (less than i3). If he still has some an chap on ebay is selling them new, they are old HP stock I think. Processor was £46, board was £38. I've ran into no significant problems yet!

The formatting in those logs is almost unreadable. I've picked through them quickly. You need to look at the results for smartb. I'm no hard disk genius but that looks knackered mate. It's riddled with errors.