tunetyme

It's not so much that I need a monster CPU today, I am thinking that a CPU like this could last me a number of years (maybe 5 years) and over time it will be cheaper than doing another upgrade in 2 or 3 years. I am not looking for bragging rights but with this I could get a whole lot more out of my machine than I do now. The other choice I was considering was FX 8350. The downside is the 8350 is 125 watts vs the Ryzen at 65 watts. Huge heat difference. I would definitely be able to postpone an upgrade to my power supply. That covers $160 of the $200 difference between the 8350 and the Ryzen. I will also have DDR4 RAM with about $25 additional cost. As I see it, for $75 I can get an additional 2 or 3 years use out of this board vs an 8350 rig. Seems like a bargain to me. I have the 8350 in my Windows machine and I put a huge Noctua cooler on it ($80). Did I mention that the cooler is HUGE... I just love rationalizing (justifying) buying a more expensive rig. I think I have talked myself into it. It didn't take long. I'll wait a bit until all the those who are buying this chip for bragging rights are done and the offer a few discounts. I hate paying retail.

My main requirement is larger drives. I don't have space to expand my total number of drives. I have had several drives that died for various reasons over the years and it was catastrophic. With the price of storage it is very cheap storage to have a couple of backups. The drives I am pulling out will go into the pool of backup drives. I will start adding some 4 TB drives as needed.

I spent an hour or so with the local Microcenter tech and he came up with the following recommendation: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 $330 Crucial Ballistix Sport 16 GB DDR4-2400 $115 Asus Prime x370 Pro $160 Total $605 There may be some bundle deals coming up but this is the current retail. I think this setup would provide reasonable growth. The tech used the high end Intel as comparison and this would be a big cost savings. This is the 3Ghz version and he thought that the additional speed wouldn't buy me significant performance increase. I won't run out and buy this today but I will start watching for some deals. Any thoughts?

I don't want to throw good money away doing an upgrade that won't allow me to play with all the new toys. I thought the limitation was transcoding, virtualization maybe something i may want to play with. I need to spend more time learning about all the new capabilities before I make a decision. With that in mind, If anyone can recommend a mobo, CPU and RAM that is a mid size Chevy that has potential for expansion to accommodate future developments I would greatly appreciate recommendations. Thanks

Ok, I run a parity check tonight.

Here is the diagnostics tower-diagnostics-20170324-1235.zip

I bought a pro license 6 years ago and now with all the new apps I am thinking that I would be better off if I had order twp pro licenses instead of one so I can have a machine that I can try the new apps on without risking my server. What would my cost be?

Where do I look in the syslog or what should I be looking for?

I recently upgraded to ver. 6.3.2 from 4.7. I have used my server as a media server in the past and it has worked flawlessly for me. Now there is a whole new world out there with ver 6. I've invested about $750 so far in replacement drives and need to spend another $450 taking my system from 12 TB to 24 TB which should provide growth fro the next 4-5 years. My current system is: MSI 880GMS-45 with 4GB RAM and AMD Sempron 145 CPU. This is in a AzzA mid tower with room for 11 drives. Currently I have 6 data drives, cache and parity. I like keeping 2 slots open for preclearing drives. The big limatation is, there are only 6 SATA III connections. I would like to upgrade this with a PCI Express connector with 6 or 8 SATA 6 Ports (if possible). Option1: keep the current MSI mobo and increase ram to 8 GB and replace CPU with an Athalon or Phenom CPU X4. This is an inexpensive upgrade and would allow me to play with all the new toys available and determine my new requirements with all the new toys that I may want to implement. The cost is a modest $100. Option 2: NEW mobo, ram and cpu. My current media is entirely FLAC for audio and 80% MKV for video with a mix of other formats I've tried. I don't know how much transcoding that I would ever do which apparently is a big resource hog. As for everything else available I don't have the resources to play with it yet. I use JRiver Media Center. I have both a Windows and Linux license for it and I have been using it over 10 years and love it. Check it out. As I see it now, I may have up to 3 tv's and serious stereo sound system connected. As for preferences, I generally prefer AMD (support the underdog) over Intel which I have had some support issues in the distant past. I openly acknowledge that Intel has more horsepower under the hood. The question is do I need it or will I need it in the immediate future? I am not a gamer at all nor will I become one. For me thousandths of a second are not noticeable but minutes and hours are. I will pay for minutes and hours but the rest is a waste of $$$ IMO.

Johnnie I will start with the oldest drive this evening and try to do a rebuild. I plan on starting a new topic on other hardware upgrades in the hardware section I wold appreciate yours and Trurl's input.

I know, I have to order the other books today. I'll start with The Diamond age.

The password held this time.

I replaced the cables this morning and I think everything is fine now. What is the best method of determining the sequence to replace older drives in my array. I have 4 drives that have between 2300 and 3000 hours on them? Apparently I've never run a smart self test on any of my drives. Is it worth having a base line test on each of my new drives? Should I run these test from the GUI or command line on the console? Disk 1 & 6 had some UDMA CRC errors but these were the drives that had the ATA errors or cable issue. These 2 drives are New 2 TB NAS drives. Trurl, went to the bookstore yesterday and found vol 3 of the The Baroque Cycle and The Diamond Age.

Frank: I was dangerous with the little training I had back then. I worked in Oakton, VA at the Eastern Region HQ doing bypass scenarios. Good to know midnight commander is still there. I haven't used it in the past 6 years. I need to check it out again. Before I begin the next phase up upgrading my disks I would like to resolve the problem with password for root. I have rebooted my system and of course the password was not there (from the command line.) I will try to set from the GUI. Do you recommend from the console or connected PC?

At one time there was a program called midnight commander (I think) that could be used to move files around within the server. I have tried many different ways to move files around because I find this extremely helpful for doing backups to NTFS drives. When the data is well organized the backup process works as well as one could hope for considering the size of the drives. I moved files yesterday with the mv command, 1.8 TB of data to a new 4 TB drive. It took about 12 hours with my 6 year old system but that is about a third of the time it takes to do it by the network. You mentioned rsync which I looked into about a month ago and I was intimidated by what others said about using the command. It appears to do everything I want to do, especially with backups (I maintain 2 complete copies of my disks) but without some sort of video tutorial on how to use the command I am hesitant on experimenting on my own. I will check into the unassigned devices plugin. I really appreciate how this is becoming more user friendly. I loved DOS and hated Windows from the beginning. Please don't make the assumption that all users are dummies. There are some of us who like being able to get to the command line instead of clicking icons. Now that I have retired I have time to start learning Linux again. I used UNIX back in the early 80's while at AT&T. I have had 6 years of flawless operation using 4.7 and 6 looks great and I have a lot to learn. Once I have my secure and finish upgrading to 1 more 4 TB drive I plan in replacing the motherboard, CPU, and RAM. I expect that when I am finished I will end up with 4 - 4TB drives and 2 - 2TB drives giving me me about 8TB of expansion. That should hold me for a couple of years. One last observation, if the intent is for users to use the GUI then why isn't this the default boot option?

Frank: Unfortunately, I can't do everything I want to be able to do in the GUI. Simple disk management tasks that I do directly such as relocating some files from one disk to another without having to route it through the LAN. I keep additional hard disks with complete backups. Currently I am using a NTFS format so I can use it in a Windows system on occasion. I will have to reexamine this practice now that I am moving into 4TB drives and abandoning the 1 & 2TB drives. I have to acknowledge that I have just upgraded from 4.7 and I don't know everything I can do with the GUI yet. So the limitations I have expressed may be my lack of know how with the GUI.

Here are the diagnostics, I am moving files so I can't reboot for awhile. In the past I have booted the server and input the pass word on the command line using passwd. I have done that again before I downloaded the diagnostics attached. Previously I used the command line and the GUI. After I rebooted the pass word was gone. Frankly, I think it is a bug if I can't set passwords from the command line. tower-diagnostics-20170322-0621.zip

Which do you think is a better method swap out disk 3 and let the system rebuild it first or copy my back up to disk 2 then swap disk 3 out? Here are the diagnostics after everything finished and before I reboot the system. tower-diagnostics-20170321-1111.zip

I'm 65 so we are close in age. Since graduation I have found myself reading technical docs and reading wasn't fun anymore. Now that I've retired I am beginning to read for fun. I will look into Neal Stephenson. Any particular book that you recommend?

Trurl and Klapaucius Trurl is certainly easier to spell than Klapaucius. It appears these weren't published in English until 1974. My era was Robert Heinlein. His brother as one of my professors.

Trurl, We can settle on all the things that I don't know to do over drinks. Johnnie, you're invited too. Trurl will pick up your flight....

Once I have all the data squared away and running smoothly, I plan on replacing the mobo, cpu, and ram (fans & cables too). If there isn't a significant issue today with the cable then I would like to replace at that time (2 -3 weeks). I will dig around to see if I have one handy if I do I will replace it. I need to figure out what will take me another 5 or 6 years. I don't expect to become a big power user but with all the improvements I will be expanding my universe significantly. The check parity was check marked upon completion of the format so I thought that I needed to run check parity so I started it. When this is done I will reboot. My plan is to copy from my backup disk to the new 4 TB drive. The backup is NTFS and I plan on mounting in the server and copy it from there. This will be an experience. Next I plan on replacing Disk 3 (the oldest drive now) with another 4 TB drive. I will try to rebuild this one from parity. Once this is all stable I will move on to the internals and then pick up 4 TB replacement drives for the remainder. Until I finish the internal upgrades I do not plan on putting my server back in daily operation. This way I have current backups of every thing and I can recover from any situationthat may arise. I have purchased 4 Seagate Iron Wolfs 3 4TB and 1 1TB no errors of any kind on any of the drives.

Here it is. tower-diagnostics-20170320-1352.zip

I didn't think so but it is started and at this point I am just going to let it run. It can't hurt and this will leave me some time to do something else.

It formatted it XFS and now requires that I run another parity check for 17+ hours