Worlok

I finally figured it out, I was not booting off the USB, but a transparent boot image that I built because the motherboard was having an issue with seeing the USB at boot. Once I modified that with the updated files, everything worked correctly. That is waht I get for setting it up and not touching for over a year. Thanks for all you help and I apologize for my brain-lock...

I have checked the \\tower\flash directory and it shows the correct file dates and size for both bzimage and bzroot. I have attached a screen shot of the directory. Any other thoughts?

I just upgraded my 5.0-rc10 version of Unraid to 5.0.5 and rebooted. Everything appears to be working fine, but it also seems that there was no change to the system. I followed the "upgrade Only" instructions and copied the bzimage, bzroot and readme files to the USB drive and then restarted the system. When I connect to the Unraid web interface, I still see: unRAID Server Basic version: 5.0-rc10 I am not sure if the upgrade took or what is happening. Any assistance would be appriciated.

I did not really see this as a "problem" to place in the support queue. It is more a question/statement for the general population. I have two unRAID machines, both running inside of VMWare off of my ESXi server. One is 4.7 with 3 1TB drives and one is the new 5.0-rc10 with 2 2TB (let me know if you would like to know how I got it working), both appear to be function fine but I keep running into what I think are odd data transfer speed issues. When checking either system for the displayed transfer rate of the parity check (unRAID Main menu), I will see anywhere from 50MB/sec up to over 100MB/sec. Which seems consistent with the hardware I have installed. When transferring data to either machine while the parity check is running, transfer speeds will max out at around 15MB/sec and usually drop off after several minutes in to the copy process to something less than that. If I copy files when not running a parity check, then I usually see transfer speeds up in to the 25MB/sec to 40MB/sec range. If I happen to want to copy files after I have installed a new parity drive, I might as well forget it, because it with either fail outright or slows down to below 1MB/sec and eventually times out on the copy process. Which I guess I can at least understand logically, due to the system diverting most of the processing resources to building the parity drive, but to stop completely, that is ridiculous. Now, here is my real rub. When running stable and NOT running a parity check, I get my normal 25MB/sec to 40MB/sec transfer speeds. If I completely pull the parity drive out of the configuration and just use it as storage, I will get consistent transfer rates of 60MB/sec to 80MB/sec. Which seems to indicate that the system can get these types of transfer speed and is not being hampered from a hardware or VMWare issue. WHY SUCH A DISPARATE DIFFERENCE IN TRANSFER SPEEDS? I could see loosing a few MB/sec on the transfers due to the system trying to keep the parity information up to date with what is being transferred to the array. But almost a 50% reduction? I just do not understand that. Hell, even Microsoft's software raid in Windows server does not slow down that much on data transfers. So out of all this rambling, my question is, why is it so much slower when the parity is enabled and is there anyway to resolve this. Other than maybe using a cache drive. Also, will using a Really fast drive (7200RPM or more) for the parity drive possibly improve this performance? Rod

Is there an issue with the download site? I was able to download the files for my 4.7 server, but I was working on standing up a new 5.0rc10 box and today I can not download the files. Just wanted to verify it was not something on my end. Thanks, Rod

I can answer a couple of these questions from my own setup. 1) Yes, with a supported controller (one the ESXi sees the drives) you can map the raw drive to the VM. 2) I paravirtulaized the SCSI controller in my VM. It has been working fine for me without any issues. As for the other two questions, I have not worked with the specified controller so I have not experince with it. I can tell you that my UnRaid server console indicates that the drives "spin down" after the allotted time of no activity, but I have taken the time to verify if the physical drives actually spin down or if it is just the software indicating they are idle. Rod

I ended up picking up several of the HP 4GB micro USB drives when they were $7.99 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00404JF80/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B0018YHZPA&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=17WZHXC7G8FSV1XB0JD2

I just built my VM server (ESXi) with a socket 775 desktop MB, a 2.8Ghz dual core CPU and DDR3 ram. The HPs are nice (I use them extensively at work, G5s some older G4s and the BL blade servers), but they draw a ton of power while running, especially if you are spinning up older SCSI drives. I took the little bit a trade off on redundancy for the lower cost of daily operation. Besides, for a lab/test environment that your indicated, you should not be to worried about total up time if there was an intemittent failure. Rod

Thanks, I guess I stopped one document to soon in my search for the answer. This is what I was looking for, Rod

I have my unRaid 4.6 box up and running smoothly as a VM under ESXi. It is actually working much better than I was expecting. So I have been setting up my shares and all my windows and samba based devices have been working well, but I wanted to try and map some NFS shares to a couple of Linux boxes. I have read through the UnRaid Manual, the Unofficial Manual and the Un-Official Manual, but none of them cover the syntax for setting up the Export (NFS) under the User shares on the box. The Export (SMB) has a drop down box for the export type selection, but the NFS does not and I am not sure of the syntax since the different options I have tried do not seem to work. Any help on this would be great. Thanks, Rod

Hi All, I am new to the forum, but I have been following this thread for a while now ans I have been building up my ESXi box to unRAID and other virtual machines. Here is the hardware that I am running. Gigabyte EP43T-UD3L motherboard Intel E5500 2.8GHz 775 CPU (ZALMAN CNPS9500 AT 2 Ball CPU Cooling Fan/Heatsink) OCZ 4GB DDR3 1600 PC12800 RAM Intel PCI-express 10/100/1000 NIC Rosewill RC-209-EX 4 port SATA controller Old Nvidia video card (just for the console screen) Corsair 650-Watt TX Series 80 power supply In a cheap HEC Blitz Black Steel Edition ATX Mid Tower Computer (four 5.25. bays, 1 for the DVD and the other 3 for an ICY Dock 5 in 3 removable drive bay (not yet purchased)) I run two older Seagate 160GB SATA drives connected to the Rosewill controller for the ESXi datastores and have two HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB drives that are currently mapped to the unRAID VM The MB has an on-board Southbridge 6x3GB SATA controller and a Realtek 8111c LAN card along with 8 rear USB 2.0 ports, PS2 (keyboard and mouse) and on-board audio which I turned off. I had an issue with installing ESXi 4.1 U1 to the machine (which you can read about here http://communities.vmware.com/message/1701491#1701491) but was finally able to get it all configured correctly and boot up the unraid_4.6-vm_1.0.6.iso without and issue once I had 4.1 installed and the VM setup according to the readme.txt I am currently running the unRAID (free version) on the ESXi box along with my Windows DC and a media server to feed content from the unRAID drive space. For those interested, this link ( http://communities.vmware.com/message/1701491#1701491 )also links to a Linux script that can compile non-native drivers (like the Realtek 8111c) in to an ESXi bootable USB or a DVD installation image. At the time of this writing I am copying 50GB of files at 60-80MB/s with no errors. I have confirmed that the drives do spin down when idle and spin back up when tasked. So I am very happy. The only item that I have is that I upgraded the ESXi to 4.1 Update1 and the unRAID server is generating a notice that the VMWare tools are out of date. Is it possible to maybe get a 1.7 version of the ISO that incorporates the updated tools? Thanks, Rod I just read that 4.7 is now available, so can we get a 4.7 ISO with VMWare Tools for ESXi 4.1 Update 1?