mrow

Boot times for bare metal and virtualized are basically the same. The USB drive is passed through to the VM so you're limited by how fast it can load from the USB drive. Yes, you could do this with an SSD or even a spinner. Just set the boot priority to that disk in the BIOS. I guess the reason more people don't do this is because on a bare metal machine that disk would take up a slot that could be used for an array disk. When it's virtualized you already have a disk being used for a datastore so taking up a disk slot doesn't really enter in to the equation. You could also just buy one of those super fast USB 3.0 thumb drives and get Tom to switch your license to the GUID for that drive.

Are the files too big to host on Dropbox? Never tried to upload something that big to my Dropbox account so I don't really know.

Can't believe I waited so long to do this! Boot times go by in the blink of an eye now. This may have already been mentioned elsewhere in the thread but you can use your existing unraid VM with this vmdk, you don't have to create a new one. Just disable or remove the CD drive that was loading the plop ISO. Remove your current hard disk. Then add the vmdk as an existing hard disk. Works fine. Side note: it's annoying you have to use a web browser to download these files. wget doesn't work with Google Drive shared files with their obfuscated URL.

I just use the plugin from this thread. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11449.0

No, that model doesn't support VT-d. I actually have 4 of those Q6600s I'm about to sell on eBay.

I just realized that after looking it up further. Shame cause this sucker had dual xeons in it. I'm trying to get the number of systems I have down to a minimum here. I also have a Optiplex 755 with a Core2 Quad in it which I think supports VT-d. I'll probably just keep the unRAID separate and use the 690 as my esxi box. I'd be too afraid of trying to move my existing unRAID array to ESXi anyway. Thanks everyone for the help. This may be cheesy to say, but this forum is seriously amazing. Always someone there to help and offer advice. You don't find that too often. The free hypervisor only supports one physical CPU anyway so the other one would have been doing nothing except eating up electricity. Which Core2Quad do you have? EDIT: It looks like the Optiplex 755 was offered with these 4 Core2Quads: Q9650, Q9550, Q9400 and the Q6700. The first three support VT-d, the last one doesn't.

You just add it as a usb device in your VM. Go to the setting screen on your VM, Click "Add...". Add USB Controller, then you add USB Device See this post: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=14695.msg138465#msg138465 Scroll down to "VM#3 unRAID VMDirectPath Hardware Passthough" Thanks for the reply. Went through the steps but under Configuration>Advanced Settings it says "Host does not support passthrough configuration." I'm using a Dell Precision 690 with a Integrated Broadcom 5752 Gigabit Ethernet controller. I'm assuming that doesn't support passthrough? If I check the settings of the unRAID VM the network adapter says its Inactive. It info bubble says "The state of the attached network prevents DirectPath I/O. Is this just a limitation of the build in nic? Looking at a sampling of processors that were available in the Dell Precision 690 from listings on eBay those CPUs do not support VT-d which is required for DirectPath I/O in ESXi. Your only option then would be to RDM all your disks which can cause/be a major headache. IMO you're better of just running unraid on bare metal and not trying to virtualize with your current system.

Beta, have you or anyone seen the SASLP-MV8 working on ESXi. Some googling around seems to indicate that it is not well supported on ESXi 5.1. I noticed that your Orion build was originally going to have the MV8. For me, I need something that is x4 PCI-X. The mobo I have and want to use does not have an x8 slot. Thanks. I'm using an MV8 with my ESXi setup now. Make sure you follow the steps outlined here to get it to pass through properly: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7914.msg128847#msg128847

If the only VM you're going to run is unraid then what is the point of running ESXi to begin with? Just run it on bare metal and it'll go to sleep fine.

Like I said though, I'm not configuring cache_dirs from your GUI. I'm configuring it from my go script. Your plugin is just installing cache_dirs but it isn't enabled in the GUI.

root@Unraid:/usr/local/sbin# md5sum cache_dirs 25ce0b04e39d07bb85921d3f7e05a5e0 cache_dirs root@Unraid:/usr/local/sbin# cache_dirs -V cache_dirs version: 1.6.7 I believe it's being installed by the Simple Features plugin. However, I have the plugin disabled and manually set its parameters from my go script. And the share directory definitely does not have a backslash in it. However, I just tried "/usr/local/sbin/cache_dirs -w -B -u -m1 -M10 -d9999 -i Downloads -i Movies -i "TV\ Shows"" with the backslash in it and that worked without the error. Not sure why quotes and backslash are both necessary..

Weird problem. One of my shares is named TV Shows. cache_dirs is telling me a directory with that name doesn't exist. I've tried both TV\ Shows and "TV Shows" when running the command but get the same results. root@Unraid:~# /usr/local/sbin/cache_dirs -w -B -u -m1 -M10 -d9999 -i Downloads -i Movies -i "TV Shows" ERROR: included directory "TV Shows" does not exist. cache_dirs process ID 9277 started, To terminate it, type: cache_dirs -q root@Unraid:/mnt/user# /usr/local/sbin/cache_dirs -w -B -u -m1 -M10 -d9999 -i Downloads -i Movies -i TV\ Shows ERROR: included directory "TV Shows" does not exist. cache_dirs process ID 11203 started, To terminate it, type: cache_dirs -q root@Unraid:/mnt/user# ls -l total 8 drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 72 2013-02-25 10:30 Backups/ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 120 2013-02-25 13:57 Downloads/ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 7824 2013-02-25 10:39 Movies/ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 48 2012-06-08 02:29 Movies-Unsorted/ drwxrwsrwx 1 nobody users 80 2013-02-25 10:39 Music/ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 80 2013-02-25 13:57 TV\ Shows/ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 72 2013-02-23 11:02 other/ drwxrwxrwx 1 nobody users 352 2013-01-27 23:09 plugins/

You should post this in the plugin design forum section. That is the place people are currently posting plugins.

I agree, but time is money, and it's much quicker to flatten a drive than to hook it up to a box and wait for it to do several erase passes. I do remember seeing demagnetizers though, and I'd assume they'd also work just as well. It would only take a few seconds to unscrew the cages. Those suckers get expensive when you're replacing them with every new drive change. It's quicker to just replace the tray with a new one then swap it. If one of us wanted to take some of them off in out spare time to keep for personal use we could but no one ever bothers. Not sure if either of you have ever worked in the health care industry before but because of the HIPAA and HI-TECH acts we have to actually destroy all devices taken out of production, whether its because they are broken or being upgraded, replaced, etc. Even keyboards have to be destroyed. Crazy, I know.

Funnily I somewhat regularly put them under crushing force. We use Supermicro cages in the servers here at work and when we replace a server or a cage or even a dead drive (we have lots of spare trays) we leave the hard drives in the trays and crush them in our hydraulic hard drive crusher because I work at a hospital and they have private patient data on them hahaha. They are actually pretty damn tough. Our crusher will break a hard drive in half like they are made from cardboard but we usually have to do three or four presses before it'll crack the tray.