Brucey7

I have a hot swap drive caddy in a Win7 client for non-system secondary disks, I can't find any settings, but it doesn't matter what make drive I put in there, they always sleep after 15 minutes.

It's not a good idea to use a production machine for preclearing disks whilst the array is mounted and in use (especially writing to the array). Some hard disk failures will crash or hang your machine. I have a 2TB drive that will do this every time.

Absolutely your web host is liable. Assuming you are a paying customer, they owe you a duty of care to look after your data with a proper backup routine. If they can't recover a backup, no amount of fine print in a contract will be considered "fair" and they are on the hook with unlimited liability. Period. Of course, you have to prove and justify your financial loss to get compensation. There are two types of disk users, those who have had a disk failure and those who are going to have a disk failure.

I used to fund my movie collecting hobby by buying disks in the USA and selling them worldwide from eBay UK, I sold thousands of WD, Seagate and Hitachi. I had between 2% and 5% fail within the first month (usually D.O.A. but the best was Hitachi and the worst was Seagate which are also the noisiest), About another 5% fail under warranty from Seagate and WD but no failures after the first month from Hitachi. Historically, the worst I ever had were Maxtor, but I haven't seen any of those in several years. Also interestingly, 2TB failures on my own Thecus RAID5 boxes I kept in a cupboard and have just used them under windows to do a backup, with only one failing out of 9, and that didn't fail I just got fed up of the slow copy rate and threw it away. I will only buy Hitachi Green drives for my own use and have 15 x 3TB of them in the server Rajahal delivered to Thailand for me 2 weeks ago.

I suspect double disk parity will require all parity protected drives spun-up for any writes, the maths for double parity is a lot more complex than single parity.

I only use the option to navigate the music folder having already organised my music the way I want to find it. Last time I put SqueezeBox Server on a Linux Server (admittedly 3 years ago on a Thecus NAS), I lost the ability to navigate my music library by traversing the "Music Folder" option and had to put it back on a windows box, is this feature available again now?

Here's a wacky idea for a combined UPS and PSU. It's called a car battery 12 volts (approx), tapped at 4 cells for 5v (approx) with a decent charger on it. Anybody tried it? After all, our UPS is a 12 volt battery, run through an inverter to produce 230VAC (in Thailand) then the PSU steps it down to 12volts AC, rectifies it to DC and smooths it to nearly as good as a car battery, all that inefficiency... You could probably get 4-6 hours Uninterruptible Battery Backup with a decent car battery.

I am new to unRAID, Rajahal hand delivered my first server order from him 2 weeks ago with 15 of 3TB drives in it, I am in the process of copying all my data onto it at the moment, it's for a new home I am building in the mountains north of Chiang Rai. When I retired here I became a director of Loxley who own 5% of TT&T and CSLoxInfo. TOT must be the worst internet service in the world ;-) I used to get all of 4KB/s downloading torrents some times

Ford Prefect Thanks for that, interesting post and it explains my data corruption, the checksum must disagree from my data and the Thecus box simply drops out when I get to that part of the file (a movie), preventing me watching or copying it. There is no SCRUB utility on a Thecus box, it's simply gone forever, which is a shame when movies are compressed "lossy" and you can accept a bit of corruption. I chose ZFS because it was the only future proof file system when I ran out of space and replaced 2TB drives with 3TB drives. I can tell you from first hand experience, it can get corrupted, probably before I put new batteries in my UPS's, we get lots of power outages in the rainy season in Thailand.

Besides unRAID, I also have 3 Thecus N7700 NAS boxes with 7x2TB drives in each running ZFS. ZFS is the only file system supporting partitions >16TB (XFS is limited to 16TB). The linux ZFS port is NOT perfect, I have some corrupted files that cannot be read or corrected. There is no file system check/repair in ZFS sure it does most things automatically but if something serious goes wrong, you lose everything. RAID5 is also very dangerous as the chances of an unrecoverable read error on a parity rebuild are high (especially with large arrays), then it really is Bye Bye to all the fish - permanently. For media storage, unRAID is VASTLY safer, better, cheaper on power, more expandable.

Who wants to buy 5 for me and post them to Thailand? (for a small fee ;-) I have 15 already in a server Rajahal delivered by hand 2 weeks ago. Bruce