bkastner

I've updated from 12a to 15a with no issues. I have SF & UnMenu installed. Parity check took a bit longer (10:30 hrs vs 10:00 on 12a), but no issues starting, stopping or rebooting. Everything looks solid.

Thanks for the help.

We use the Supermicro X9SCM-F-O and X9SCM-iiF motherboards. We usually plug the two back fans into a single motherboard port using a splitter. The 3 front fans end up with there own motherboard port. If you need a splitter for yours I would suggest getting as many of these as you need. Thanks for the input. Am I correct that I am okay plugging these 4PIN fans into the 3PIN ports on the motherboard? Does this just make the fans run at 100% all the time? If I am splitting into 3PIN motherboard connections are there any limits to the number of splits I should use (I've seen 3-to-1 and 4-to-1 4PIN splitters). Since I have 5 fans and only 2 motherboard 3PIN connections I need to split the two back fans as you mention, but need to get the 3 120mm fans on a single connection as well.

Hi Raj I have a Norco-4224 and as expected it sounds like a jet taking off, so I've purchased the replacement fans and fanplate you had recommended on the Greenleaf site: Fanplate: Norco 120mm fanplate *optional Fans: (replacing the stock fans is optional, but recommended if quiet performance is desired) •Nexus PWM Series D12SL-12PWM 120mm Case Fan x 3 *optional •ARCTIC COOLING ACF8 Pro PWM 80mm Case Fan x 2 *optional My question is how best to plug these PWM fans in. I have an ASUS AM3 motherboard that has 2 3PIN connections, but all 5 purchased fans have the 4PIN connections. I've read that I can plug the 4PIN connections into the 3PIN ports, but lose fan control (which I don't know if you want reduced fan speed in the 4224 to begin with). So, I have 2 questions for you: 1) When you build these machines do you typically use 3PIN motherboard connections, or are there adapters you can purchase to manage these properly? Or do you only use motherboards that support the 4PIN. 2) Do you have recommendations on splitting the PWM connections? As you likely know, the original fanplate on the Norco-4224 has fan connectors that tie into a single MOLEX connection, whereas the replacement fanplate has none of that. I am having problems finding good splitter cables to support these 3 120mm fans. Thanks Bill

I checked all 3 backplanes that were in use, and don't see/smell anything. All ports that had failed drives now have valid drives and Unraid is back up and running (finally!). I still need to poke around with the defective drives, but I am happy to be back online. Do you have any thoughts on whether I should step down the power supply from an 860 to something lower to reduce the risk of future issues?

So even though they appear to be working you think I may still face issues? Since I still have the case open I will pull them out and see if I can see any physical damage. To be honest, I don't know a lot about electricity, so power supplies are not my strength. Do you think the Corsair AX-860 may have been a mistake (other than it blowing up)? I wanted something with sufficient power to cover all 24 drives if they are up and running (i.e. during a parity check/build), and looked through the different Corsair families and saw that AX was their top of the line. I figured the extra money would be well spent, but maybe not. I have a Corsair CX-500 in the case now and it's happy, but that is only with the 11 drives.

Thanks for the replies guys. The data on all 3 drives is movies, so provided I can figure what I lost I can likely get most of it back with some time. I may continue to play with the drives, but since 2 motherboards and 2 SATA cards can not read the drives in my Unraid server I am going to assume that even if I get Windows to recognize the drives I am likely not going to easily get them back into Unraid. I am going to initconfig the Unraid server to get back up and see what is left, and then once I've completely given up on the drives I will RMA them (thankfully they are all under the 3 year warranty) and then start rebuilding data. If I can magically get the drives recognized in Windows I am assuming I can use reiserfs to copy from Windows to my Unraid server, correct? f451 - That is a disconcerting article. What is odd is in my scenario it took out 2 3TB drives, 3 2TB drives and 1 1TB drive. Thankfully 2 of the 2TB drives came back (I have no clue how), and the 1 TB drive was a new cache drive. I've also plugged other drives into the same backplane ports where the failed drives were originally (including 3TB drives) and it all appears to be working fine again. I've worked with computers for 20 years both professionally and personally, and I think this is likely the strangest issue I've faced. The article from f451 makes me second guess the Norco case, but I know there are a number of Unraid enthusiasts who use them successfully, including Rajahal, Johnm and others and I have to assume they are using 3TB drives by now and there would be lots of warnings here about the case - when instead it's actually recommended for large builds. I think I will just stick with the case and push my luck.

So I have managed to run a series of tests... I started with another motherboard/cpu/ram that I had lying around and did the following: - Confirmed Unraid starts successfully with no drives attached - Attached 2-3 drives directly to the on-board SATA on the motherboard and checked the following: - Is the drive visible in the BIOS - Is the drive visible in Unraid GUI - Is the drive visible via: dmesg|grep SATA|grep link - Is the drive visible via: fdisk -l The 3 drives I had considered "failed" did not show up in any of the above tests (I am guessing if they don't show in the BIOS the rest of the tests were redundant, but I wanted to confirm). I also attached each disk to an external USB drive bay on a Windows 7 machine. Disk Manager saw each drive come online but it showed as "Disk 1: Unknown - Not initialized". Since they are all Western Digital drives I installed the WD Data LifeGuard Diagnostics utility, and while it did see a drive attached to USB it was not able to provide me model number, serial number, capacity or SMART status. What is odd is I ran the various diagnostics and they all passed. I also tried the "sniff test" WeeboTech suggested, and I do smell a faint trace of something, but since the "pop" happened Saturday afternoon, which was over 48 hours ago, I am going to guess this test is less conclusive than if I had been able to check just after the event (though it likely would have been masked by the power supply smell). I am still baffled that the power supply pop travelled through the Norco RPC-4224 backplanes and hit some drives across 3 backplanes, but did not affect the backplanes themselves, or all the drives attached. I am very happy it didn't kill all 11 drives, but it's odd it killed 4 (3 with data, and 1 new one that was to be my cache drive). Unless anyone else has some suggestions on other tests to run I am back to assuming my 3 data drives are dead. Provided the smart Unraid guys are in agreement, can someone provide me a recommended path to get Unraid up and running again even though I am down the 3 data drives?

I agree the "pop" was strange. Usually when I've heard it before it's the power supply, but the power supply is dead after that, whereas in this instance it still worked (though I did notice the internal facing fan was no longer working). After moving my motherboard back to the old case and testing, and then back to the Norco case with the power supply issue the system wouldn't even power up anymore (I'd get the light on the motherboard come on, but that was it). I put in my old power supply in the Norco case and it booted up right away, so I am leaning towards it being a power supply issue, but it is worth testing with another motherboard (which I thankfully do have). I am somewhat confident the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8s are okay as during my testing I was swapping SFF-8087 cables, SAS cards and ports to try and rule out those being an issue (as well as moving the drives around the bays). I think I tried all different combinations to confirm the cards and cables were good, but I am the first to admit it wasn't completely scientific, and I may have missed something. I also tried all the drives with the on-board SATA on the existing motherboard and had the same drives come up missing, which is why I was thinking it was a drive issue - however I was really surprised when 2 of the faulty drives showed up on my last boot with the Norco case. I had also tried a few of the faulty drives in an external USB enclosure. Unraid drives that were good would show up in Device Manager in Windows as partitioned with the correct size (though obviously unreadable without reiserfs), but the drives in question would not display the size, and reported that they were uninitialized. If I tried to initialize them then Windows popped up a message that the drive was not ready. Thankfully I've read these forums enough in the past that I printed a screenshot of my drive assignments prior to moving hardware so I definitely know which is my parity drive. I will try your suggestions with the new motherboard and a few drives at a time and see what happens. I should have thought of that myself. I will try after work today and report back.

Thanks for the suggestion... I will do so. I did do pretty extensive testing (I have 2 SuperMicro SAS2LP-MV8 controllers, each with 2 SFF-8087 cables). I tried swapping out cables, controllers, backplanes (on the Norco 4224). However, I was very surprised when I got 2 drives back on last boot. I likely won't get to this until tomorrow afternoon, but think I will leave things offline until I can dig deeper. I appreciate you chiming in.

The fact that the drives in question don't show up during boot via BIOS or the SATA Controller (there are just gaps for the ports they are plugged into) makes me believe there is nothing else I can do, however I am open to any/all suggestions if anyone can provide ideas on how to bring things back. I was thinking I may be able to try and mount them as external USB drives again, and maybe run some SMART tests, but I don't know if it would even do me any good. I am hoping someone much more knowledgeable than I am (like Joe L.) can offer some thoughts.

I have a serious issue... I have an Unraid server running 5.0 RC11 with 5 WD Green 3TB drives, and 4 WD Green 2TB drives. Having nearly maxed out the case I was using I purchased a Norco RPC-4224 and decided to step up the power supply to a Corsair AX-860 so that as I continue to grow I know I will have the power to support it. Yesterday I cleanly shutdown Unraid and moved my hardware over to the Norco case. As I first powered up I heard a pop, and a funky smell - which usually tells me the power supply died (even though it's brand new), however the system still booted up fine, so I ignored it for the moment. Since the Norco uses SFF-8087 -> SFF-8087 I had bought a second SuperMicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 controller which I stuck in as I rebuilt and was going to skip the motherboard SATA connections. I also added an extra WD Green 3TB drive for data and a WD 1TB Black drive for cache. As I powered up I was only seeing sporadic drives (6 of 11, or 5 of 11, it would vary). After several hours of testing different drives in different bays (thinking it was a backplane issue) I started trying to mount the drives via external USB on a Windows PC to make sure I could see the drives in question. In Windows I was seeing the drives listed as Disk 1 "Unknown" - Not initialized - which is odd. I know I can't read the Unraid data, but I should still see the drives showing up with proper size. I ended up abandoning the Norco case, and putting everything back into my old case, but continued to have issues. Of the original 9 Unraid drives I could only see 4 when starting up the system (via BIOS & SAS2LP), and via Unraid. I started to freak realizing I may have lost 3x 2TB drives, and 2x3TB drives of data (or course my parity drive was fine, though I would have happily traded it in for a drive with actual data). Having resigned myself to the loss of 2/3 of my data I moved everything back to the Norco case. Unfortunately the Corsair AX-860 wouldn't power up at all, so I had to put in my old power supply for now. Amazingly 2 of the faulty 2TB drives are showing up again in Unraid, but I still have 3 failed drives, which means I am still somewhat screwed - however I am only missing 8TB of data instead of 12TB (all drives except the latest are 100% full). My best guess is that the power supply "pop" toasted the drives in question, however the Norco backplane they were connected too is fine (I can attach other drives to the bays without issue). It also only hit some drives even though all were connected at the time - which is very weird. Since I have 3 failed/missing drives, there is no way to bring Unraid back online as it stands. I know there is a way to wipe out the drive configuration/parity and build a new Unraid array with my 6 working drives, but I want to make sure I follow a proper procedure to ensure I can access the data on my existing drives. Sorry for the long winded rant, but it's been a stressful 2 days, and while I've resigned myself to a lot of data loss, I want to make sure I don't do anything to make it worse. Can someone please advise how best to bring up my server at this point while maintaining my data? Thanks Bill

Thanks for the suggstion Alexandro. I have never used SNAP, but will look into it. Does anyone else have any other ideas?

I have an Unraid server, and have a friend with a second one. I want to give him a copy of a bunch of data and am trying to figure out the best approach. I don't want to use an external drive as it takes quite a bit of time to copy across and then back, and since there is a distance involved I want to save him two trips (one to drop off, one to pick up). I was thinking a better approach might be to buy a new drive, add it to my Unraid server, pre-clear and copy what I want to it and then hand him the drive to add to his array. My question is whether I should be adding this disk to my standard array, and will Unraid complain when it's gone? Or should I add it as a cache drive, so that it is not calculated into parity (and presumably will have less impact on my server). If I use a cache drive, can I prevent Unraid from trying to move the data back to the array? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you both for the replies. I had guessed it may be memory related from some of the error messages, but was not sure. I've just rebooted and can successfully copy files over again, but will try memtest to verify.

I don't know if this is an issue related to build I am using (RC8-a), but occasionally when copying files over I get a message that the UnRaid drive is unreachable. This happened again a few mins ago (10:42am in the attached syslog). It seems to start with the following: Sep 27 10:42:01 CydStorage kernel: smbd: page allocation failure: order:4, mode:0x4020 Sep 27 10:42:01 CydStorage kernel: Pid: 6736, comm: smbd Not tainted 3.4.11-unRAID #1 (Errors) Sep 27 10:42:01 CydStorage kernel: Call Trace: (Errors) Then there are a bunch of errors. Any suggestions on the cause and/or resolution would be greatly appreciated. syslog-2012-09-27.txt

son of a motherless goat! You nailed it, and I feel really stupid. My copies are still slow, but I can watch a movie from that disk without everything crapping out. Thank you very much for the (should have been) obvious answer to a problem that has been driving me nuts for a few months.

It's actually a 10/100/1000 NIC: Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 100Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair It's also connected to a gigabit switch - though I have had issues with the switch in the past. I am coping 1.08TB of data off disk1 and it's only 10.9MB, which does suck. Once it's done this set of data I can plug into a different switch. So you think that if I plugged into another switch I may fix these issues? I would have thought that while 1GB is nice, that 100MB should be sufficient - especially for 2 data connections - but I have been wrong before and would be happy if this is my major issue. Bill

I had posted this question previously, but didn't provide all the details in my first message and did not get a satisfactory answer. I have an UnRaid 4.7 server with 4 data disks and 1 parity disk. I have always had issues with more than one computer trying to view a movie on the same disk, but things seem to be degrading further. I am copying data from a single drive (\\unraidserver\disk1), yet no-one is able to watch any movies on any of the other drives. We have a Boxee set up and it basically plays a movie for 20 seconds, and pauses for 5 seconds, then plays for 20, etc. While all movies are presented as a single share (\\unraidserver\movies) I have tested with movies I know are on disk2 or disk3 with no difference. I am at a loss to understand why, and am hoping someone can offer suggestions. System Specs: AMD Athlon II X2 260 Processor 8GB Ram ASUS M4A88TD-V Motherboard Intel 10/100/1000 NIC 4 Hard Drives: 1x WD2002FAEX 2TB Parity (WD Black) 4x WD20EARX 2TB Drives (WD Green) All are on motherboard SATA connectors (3GB SATA) All drives are configured as AHCI If I run a Parity Check I get 55-60MB/sec. I am also including my syslog for review. I did some tests today trying movies on different drives while I continue to copy data off disk1. The Syslog does not show any data for today other than spindown entries. Is there a way to get more verbose logging from syslog? Is there anything that anyone can suggest to improve this? I really like the simplicity of UnRaid, but this limitation is making it nearly unusable unless I only do data copies late at night - and that is just to get around the issue above. It still does not help me be able to watch multiple movies from the same disk which is really what I want the system to do. syslog-2012-04-23.txt

I have confirmed the drives are in AHCI mode (I am building another UnRaid server and they won't even show in IDE mode, so I guess this wasn't an option). Any other suggestions?

I have attached my syslog for review, however I had to power off over the weekend, so it's only 3 days of logs if that matters. I am pretty sure the drives are set to AHCI, but I will confirm tonight. As for system specs: AMD Athlon II X2 260 Processor 4GB Ram ASUS M4A88TD-V Motherboard Intel 10/100/1000 NIC 4 Hard Drives: 1x WD2002FAEX 2TB Parity (WD Black) 3x WD20EARX 2TB Drives (WD Green) All are on motherboard SATA connectors (3GB SATA I think) I am running a Parity Check now, and getting around 55,000-60,00 KB/sec (so 55-60MB/sec, right?) syslog-2012-03-27.txt

Just to clarify, you are saying that the disk (which is a WD Green disk BTW) should be able to serve up multiple 1080p sessions without issue, and that it should only take 5-10Mbps of bandwidth, so I should be able to push out multiple streams across the network (which is Gigabit)? Do you have any suggestions on how this might be troubleshot?

I've been using UnRaid for nearly a year now and have been generally happy, however as our family usage has increased I've come across an issue and I don't know if it's my setup, or just the way things work. Basically it comes down to the fact that if more than one person tries to watch a video from a single disk, both experiences become unwatchable (stuttery, loses sync, etc). I've found that coping to UnRaid while someone is watching a video can cause it to crap out too. I understand that a single disk only has so many IOPS available, and that there is a limit to what a disk can do (especially pushing out 1080p movies which all my movie files are). Is this normal? Is this the behavior I should expect? Are there any suggestions to ease the impact so that two users can view a movie from the same disk? I am trying to understand if this is a limitation of the UnRaid non-RAID single disk solution, or is there possibly something else happening. Thanks Bill

I've been playing with unRAID for a week or two, and have been playing with different packages, and in some cases different versions of packages. Rather than try and undo what I've done I'd like to start fresh with unRAID, however I have started copying data to my drives. All my data is on disk1 under shares. Is it easy for me to start over with a clean install? Will I lose any of my data? If I recreate my share, will it just find the existing data in the folder and share it out normally? Are there any gotchas or concerns I need to be aware of?