CyberSkulls

Doing that for some of us isn't realistic. I'm currently at roughly 50TB and another 50TB of full backups. That would take for ever to back up.

Point was some people choose to have all their eggs in one basket and that's fine. If that works for you, then so be it. Some of us don't and want multiple baskets. I'm one of the multiple basket varieties.

Agree with gary and with quality flash drives literally only costing a couple of bucks on Amazon/Newegg you could be setting yourself up for massive headaches down the road all in an effort to save what $3.00?

That's not necessarily true. Your assuming he would have to buy all new hardware including disks. And that also assumes he wants big 6TB or even 8TB drives. I prefer 2TB drives myself and run them in Supermicro 24 bay 846 chassis. Since I prefer the 2TB drives, a fully functioning enterprise grade barebones chassis can be had on fleabay for $175. So assuming he has a spare chassis sitting around and more spare 2TB disks, it won't actually cost more upfront. Yes you will spend slightly more on powering two chassis vs one but in the grand scheme of things that's really a couple bucks a year depending on your cost of power. I actually prefer having my chassis split up rather than one massive server full of 8TB drives. It's all personal preference.

Not that it will help but I was having similar issues trying to preclear disks on a AM1 board with a Athlon 3850 just because I had it sitting around. Constant lockups. Moved that set up over to a FX4350 with 8GB DDR3 and problems are gone and preclearing 5 disks as I type this. Not sure if it was a CPU issue or running out of ram or exactly what. But going to a much more powerful machine seemed to fix the issue.

I didn't mean LT would do anything to cluster, I was referring anyone else who comes up with something. For instance with PLEX, their developers have no desire to make it easier to run multiple PLEX servers but some wild members have started to code their own add in to do just that. So you never know what kind of coders are hiding in the unRAID community that might be working on a crazy thing such as this

Gonna have to follow this thread in hopes it gets more active. I wanted to do the same thing with plex a while back and harness the transcoding power of multiple boxes but received the same replies as the OP about not really possible. Would love to see unRAID have a feature to cluster multiple boxes as a processing node.

It's not that your being too cautious, everyone has s limit of what they feel comfortable with. As for my original comment above, it may have sounded odd when I said I would just replace the missing content. I was referring to just that specific drive that failed. Sounds like you were looking at it from having to replace the entire array. Now that we're on the same page I hope my comments make a little more sense As I said I'll use the dual parity simply because I want to click a button within unRAID and have it do its thing. But I suspect replacing the failed drive and just copying over the missing data would actually be substantially quicker rather than a drive replacement, let unRAID rebuild the missing content, then run a parity check. Im moving to unRAID for different reasons than most. I liked the fact it boots off s thumb drive freeing up a drive slot compared to Windows Server. I like the simple GUI accessed by any web browser rather than having to use Remote Desktop. Speaking of the GUI, it's very simple and straight forward. I like seeing all my drive temps right on one page. I like it showing me smart warnings with a small icon then clicking on that icon takes me to the actual smart data. So it took what I liked about Windows Server and made it more simple with w better interface. The parity drive is a benefit but I'm not real comfortable with only having one parity drive protecting my array. I use it because it's there but it's not critical for me like it is others users since I have full backups in a secondary server like yourself. Dual parity will make it better but I would really like to see LT catch up to other NAS OS's and offer three or four parity drives. When it comes to data protection, LT has dropped the ball and focused on other features unrelated to a NAS like dockers and VM's.

On my backup systems I run Windows server and drive pool. I purposely want them on a different OS that my main machines. But as to dual parity, to be completely honest since you have a full backup machine like me, it would probably be quicker to not use parity at all and if a disk fails, swap in a new disk and repopulate the missing content over what I assume is a gigabit network. No cache drive or slow parity writes required. I'm building my new unRAID machines so I will use parity and will also be leaving a drive unassigned for when dual parity hits. But that's only because I'm lazy and find it easier to replace a failed drive, click a button and go on about my laziness

No problem. I was in the same boat and couldn't justify $90 for a shelf. I was a little concerned about the price being so much lower but I had bought Navepoint items before so I though why not roll the dice. They were the same quality I expected them to be. I got the 32-38" models. I don't use them anymore as I switched over to Supermicro 846 chassis and rack rails. But they worked perfectly for me. Now I have like 8 of those damn shelves sitting here just begging for a project!

If you have to go the shelf route, I recommend "Navepoint". High quality but a lot less cost. You can buy directly from their site or if your a Amazon prime member, most of their items are also available with prime shipping.

Question for you guys. This disk in question passed Pre Clear but afterwards it still shows offline uncorrectable at a value of 314. I found that strange based on what the pre clear information. Should I just toss the disk? I honestly figured filling it with zeros would do the trick but apparently not. ================================================================== 1.15 = unRAID server Pre-Clear disk /dev/sdb = cycle 1 of 1, partition start on sector 64 = Disk Pre-Clear-Read completed DONE = Step 1 of 10 - Copying zeros to first 2048k bytes DONE = Step 2 of 10 - Copying zeros to remainder of disk to clear it DONE = Step 3 of 10 - Disk is now cleared from MBR onward. DONE = Step 4 of 10 - Clearing MBR bytes for partition 2,3 & 4 DONE = Step 5 of 10 - Clearing MBR code area DONE = Step 6 of 10 - Setting MBR signature bytes DONE = Step 7 of 10 - Setting partition 1 to precleared state DONE = Step 8 of 10 - Notifying kernel we changed the partitioning DONE = Step 9 of 10 - Creating the /dev/disk/by* entries DONE = Step 10 of 10 - Verifying if the MBR is cleared. DONE = Disk Post-Clear-Read completed DONE Disk Temperature: 26C, Elapsed Time: 27:52:22 ========================================================================1.15 == WDCWD2003FYPS-27W9B0 WD-WCAVY4447100 == Disk /dev/sdb has been successfully precleared == with a starting sector of 64 ============================================================================ ** Changed attributes in files: /tmp/smart_start_sdb /tmp/smart_finish_sdb ATTRIBUTE NEW_VAL OLD_VAL FAILURE_THRESHOLD STATUS RAW_VALUE Seek_Error_Rate = 100 200 0 ok 0 No SMART attributes are FAILING_NOW 314 sectors were pending re-allocation before the start of the preclear. 313 sectors were pending re-allocation after pre-read in cycle 1 of 1. 0 sectors were pending re-allocation after zero of disk in cycle 1 of 1. 0 sectors are pending re-allocation at the end of the preclear, a change of -314 in the number of sectors pending re-allocation. 0 sectors had been re-allocated before the start of the preclear. 0 sectors are re-allocated at the end of the preclear, the number of sectors re-allocated did not change. root@NAS002:/usr/local/emhttp# So after that, unRAID still shows a yellow warning with offline uncorrectable sitting back at 314. Also shows a multi zone error rate of 104. So again, just thought with numbers that high it wouldn't have passed the pre clear. Your thoughts?

I was running on a box with 4GB of ram and had the exact same lock ups at different points of the preclear on only 2TB drives. Was about to give up and decided to swap unRaid over to a different server (Asus M5A97 R2, FX4350, 8GB DDR3 G.Skill) and 14 hours later that same 2TB drive is done with the pre read, the zeroing and is about 1/4 through the post read process. Only mentioned the machine specs meaning I swapped it over to a much more powerful machine rather than the AM1 machine that should have been more than enough for a unRAID media file server. So from my personal experience, unRAID may run fine as a file server on a low powered, low ram machine, it defiantly doesn't do well preclearing drives on a low power NAS. Again, just my personal experience.

I'm new to unRAID but familiar to the Supermicro chassis as I have 5 of the 846's. So my first question would be which backplane are you looking at for that 846 chassis? One thing to keep in mind is those power supplies are absolute screamers. Again from experience. I actually converted one of my chassis over to a standard ATX power supply today. Now it's silent and reduced the consumption by 30 Watts. I would stay away from the Norco chassis. Not to be rude to anyone reading this but Norco chassis are not even close in build quality compared to the Supermicro chassis.

Those of us that are buying the SM chassis are doing so strictly on the build quality. I bought all new Norco chassis and ended up boxing them all back up and will be selling them all on eBay hoping to get back half of what I paid. I changed to all SM chassis (some new and some used) as the Norco's don't even come remotely close to the same quality. For my 24 bay units I settled on the 846 with the sas1 backplane. I like to use 2TB drives so they work just fine for me. Also as strictly media servers I couldn't saturate the bandwidth of the older backplanes even if I tried. So they work perfectly for an unRAID build. Only thing I'll be doing is swapping out the power supplies for a standard ATX supply for noise and power usage.