swells

After i did some reading yesterday, i went home and updated to unRAID 5.0beta13 which was surprisingly simple. I then installed Plex on the server and started adding media. After i had a good chunk of movies on there i grabbed the iOS app for Plex and played with it on my ipad. I really like the interface and the features it provides, huge upgrade from the default UI i was using on my TV. I ordered an Apple TV based off of what i read about Apple TV vs. Roku as far as Plex was concerned. Apple TV will be here today. This seems like it will be prefect for what I was looking for since i have an Iphone 4S and and an Ipad to add to the Apple TV. I was really impressed with how simple the Plex install was on the unRAID box, couldn't have been any easier. Im glad these forums exist, everything i want to try to do, someone else has already done it and written a nice how to. Thanks again to everyone who contributes here and makes unRAID more impressive every day.

I have been searching in the forums and in the wiki and havent found anything yet. Is there instructions for upgrading unRAID from 4.7 to the current V5.0b13? Also, I have a nice stable 4.7 install with 6 disks and about 7.5TB of data. I really want to try out Plex which is why i am considering this. Any reason i should not upgrade?

Hello forums - A little background first. I have been using unraid for ~6 months or so and love it. Initially, the easiest thing i found to do that worked for me was to have ps3mediaserver on my Windows 7 machine with the unraid box as the shared media. Since my Samsung tv has DLNA, i can then view and stream 99% of the content directly on my tv. This works great, but the UI built into the Samsung player sucks. I am now looking at other options. I have seen some threads here with YAMJ and others and like the look of having movie boxes and sometimes IMDB info on all the media. I have a few concerns/questions about this if anyone can help me. I am open to almost anything with a nice UI and which will stream straight from unraid to a STB. In order to show Bluray/DVD boxes and IMDB info, does the media need to be in a specific format? 95% of my content is from torrents and is in various formats. (MKV, AVI, etc.) I am not againt a STB such as PCH or something similar as long as its not too expensive and will work for sure. My current setup works. My biggest things are getting rid of my windows machine as a middle man between unraid and my tv and the UI.

Subject says it all... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514&cm_sp=ProductSpotlight-_-22-136-514-_-05162011

Awesome.... Went and downloaded Index Your Files and so far so good. I ran it through a battery of tests, renamed file, deleted, moved, etc. Spun down all drives after each action before a index rescan and never did my drives spin up. Very nice. This looks like what ive been looking for as my workaround for the lack of Windows 7 indexing. Thanks!

I have the same situation as Ouze. The cache directories is working fine, when i browse the folder structure of the share its all there instantly and doesnt spin up drives. When i actually search for something, it spins up each drive and takes a few minutes to complete.

I've been looking for a good indexing/search method myself. Tried Locate32, but doesnt seem as reliable as i would like. Anyone have any other options or methods they use?

Hello everyone. I just replaced a 750GB drive that was in the array temporarily until i had funds to get a 2TB EARS to replace it with. The EARS drive was precleared once with no errors. Everything is going fine, only thing that concerned me was the rebuild speed. The first ~1% of the rebuild process i saw speeds of 20MB/sec or under. Now it is moving along fine at ~60MB/sec which appears to be fine. Just wondering if i should be concerned about that initial speed when i started the rebuild. Also, i did not do a parity check before replacing the drive, my last one was on the 1st with the monthly check and i had no errors.

They are all three of the newer ones. I checked an old syslog (at work so cant look at a new one). Apr 18 17:52:20 Tower emhttp: pci-0000:00:07.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 host1 (sda) WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WMAZA0690036 Apr 18 17:52:20 Tower emhttp: pci-0000:00:08.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 host3 (sdb) WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WMAZA0334009 Apr 18 17:52:20 Tower emhttp: pci-0000:00:08.0-scsi-1:0:0:0 host4 (sdc) WDC_WD20EARS-00MVWB0_WD-WMAZA2763400

I am actually already using teracopy. I also love it, especially how you can queue multiple transfers so that they do not run in parallel and degrade throughput.

Im using the mobo connectors right now on a NVIDIA nForce 560 SLI MCP chipset. I have 3x EARS drives, one parity and two data. I recently added a Hitachi 750GB drive to expand a little until i could order another 2TB EARS drive, but adding that didnt affect my speeds at all. Im running windows 7 as my client where the data is being moved from and most of the data is off of my main 1TB WD Black OS drive. Dont get me wrong, im not unhappy with 25-30MB/sec since the initial copy of >3TB of data after build was the only part that i would have seen great benefit. Now i will be moving smaller 50GB or less blocks of data over at a time and wont really notice it too much. I just thought if there was a way i could squeeze out more performance, why not.

Is ~40MB/sec normal from the EARS drives. I currently have 3 of them and only see above 30MB/sec in bursts. Usually stays between 25-30MB/sec. All of my drives are 4k aligned. Anything else i should check? I was under the impression that my speeds were normal from what i had read until i saw this post.

I would upgrade the processor to a dual core version, that should be good enough. Agreed. Thank you for the quick replies. Looking for a processor with AM2/AM2+ socket is kind of difficult on NewEgg. Any suggestions? Or maybe I'm so n00b that I am blind to the right options... IIRC, a socket AM3 cpu will work in a AM2/AM2+ motherboard. AM3 has both DDR2 and DDR3 controllers. It does not work the other way around though for the same reason. A socket AM2 CPU would lack the memory controller to run on a AM3 motherboard.

Quick question... I just added this to my unRAID install. It is working perfectly except for one detail. I have some files that are more than 5 folders deep. Which numbers in the go script do i need to edit? Both of the 5's or just one of them? My current structure is below, I just need to up it to 6 i believe. Media>TV>Completed>Show>Season>Episodes The 'episodes' is the actual video files within the Season X folder, not another folder. I thought that would technically be 5 levels deep but the drives were spinning up when i got this deep. I added the line listed in the wiki to my go script so it looks like.... /boot/cache_dirs -d 5 -m 3 -M 5 -w Thanks guys!

I only found one post related to this, but it didnt really address my question. Is windows indexing possible with the unraid shares? I currently have one share mapped onto my windows 7 machine as Media, which is the top level folder i am using. When i go into indexing options in windows, i do not have the option to add the drive to indexing. Has anyone been able to do this with unRAID?

Ok, so I let that parity-check finish, there were over 200mil corrections. As soon as it finished i started it again and went to work. When i got home, it had finished with 0 errors. I moved some data to both disks 1 and 2 as well as to the main Media share i setup. Then i moved the data i copied to each individual disk between the two drives, to try and create different scenarios of data moving around between the two drives. Then i stopped the array and restarted the server. The array was started and looked good upon restart and i started another parity check. Assuming this check completes with no errors, i think everything is ok.

Ok. Some history on what happened. I originally setup the array without setting MBR: 4k-aligned. When i noticed transfer speed performance problems and did some searching, i realized my mistake and wanted to correct it before putting anymore data on the array. I searched the forums and found a post saying to use dd if=/dev/zero count=8 of=/dev/sdX on each disk and then initconfig to start fresh and reformat the drives. This worked fine and when i started the array, all the drives said unformatted so i checked the box and formatted. When that was done, it ran the initial parity check. I thought there may be an issue during this because disk1 was getting read at over 100MB/sec while disk2 was at less than 40. I let this process finish and when it was done, i noticed that the read I/O on disk1 was still over 100MB/sec even after all activity on disk2 and the parity drive had stopped. So i stopped the array, shutdown the server and restarted. When it booted back up, it once again said that disk1 was unformatted. This was weird, but i checked the box and let it format again since there was no data on it yet, so i wasnt worried about losing anything. When it was complete. The array showed that parity was in sync and everything looked good. So i copied some data over last night and when i got home from work today i decided to do a parity check with data on the array so that i could make sure there were no issues anymore. This is where i am now. Sitting at 15.5% done with the parity check and currently at 46,777,623 sync errors. Im hoping that everything was seriously off from my formatting issues and that once this sync completes and i do another, there will be no errors. I just wanted to see what others thought. I am attaching the syslog which shows parity errors at the end. It looks like it stopped logging them 2 hours ago, not far into the check. Thanks for any input anyone may have. syslog.txt

Hey guys, i have had a lot of trouble so far getting this unRAID server going. To make it short, im currently running a parity check and am 0.5% in with 2564056 sync errors. Im not sure how i should proceed from here. Do i let it finish, correcting all the errors and then run another to make sure all errors have been corrected? Or should i stop this and start over (for the 2nd time)?

Ok, anyone know about the difference in read speeds? When i did the initial parity sync the first time, it took like 8 hours. This one says it will take over 12. Not sure if the 4k-aligned setting makes it take longer?

Ok, so i reformatted the drives using 4k-aligned. It started the initial parity sync. One of the two data drives shows Read I/O that is 3 times higher than the other. Any reason this would happen? The only thing i can think of is that the disk getting the higher read speed, is the one that had almost all of the 1TB of data i had copied over before reformatting. But if i reformatted, they should be empty correct? I have copied over a little during parity sync to see if my speeds were better. I was getting between 22-30MB/sec. Will this go up when i copy while not performing a parity sync or should i expect this range from here on out. I know i ask alot of questions, but i just want to make sure this is all correct before i get everything copied over.

I think i got it, the drives weren't set to 4k-aligned. I used a post on these forums to clear the disks and reset array config so that i could format again using 4k. Now, even while the initial parity sync is running, im getting over 30MB/sec. Much better than my 12MB before.

Ok, so once i had my new unraid server up and running and started copying files to it, i realized it was time to get a gigabit switch. I was at around 11-12MB/sec which would be right for a 10/100 network. Once i added the Gbit switch and verified that both my unRAID and windows 7 machine were showing the connection as so, i tried some more copies. It starts at about 25-30MB/sec and goes steadily down until its back around 11MB like the 10/100. I am using 3x2TB EARS drives with one as a parity drive. Im not expecting 100MB or anything but i read on these forums that 25MB or so is about normal. Any ideas for what i could try to get it up to a constant 25?

I just finished my first unRAID server also. I found this tutorial to be extremely helpful. I followed it step by step and got just about every feature i wanted installed. Check it out. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuration_Tutorial

Man, look at that response time. I'm fairly indecisive, so i'll prolly go back and forth on this for a few weeks before i make a firm decision anyway. Thanks for the quick reply's!

Thats kind of what i figured, but i thought i'd ask the pro's to be sure. Here's another question: If a drive fails, does it have to be replaced with a drive of matching size? Or can it be big enough to hold the data that existed on the failed drive. Example: If i have a 2TB drive which is using 1TB of its available space, it fails, can i use a 1.5TB drive as a replacement? I ask this because im leaning toward sticking with the 2TB green drives and just preclearing and using the 1.5TB Seagates i already have as spares or in other machines for storage. I like the idea of keeping with the green drives but want to know if i can use one of these in an emergency.