sam_roberts30

YES I have got a (what I hope is) good backup plan going. I have a full backup system that backs up once a week and powers down once complete. I also have a second backup going to my work server which is off site. I had to bring the server home to do the bulk of the initial back up but once complete I took it back to where it live. Now it only backs up the changes. Hopefully this will help avert other disasters.

Just an update really. All my data is now back. I used a company in the Canada (anyone need to know PM me) for the replacement pcbs. They charged $49 for the boards with free postage and free bios transfer. I would just like to thank everyone once more for all your help. Sam

I sorted it and now preclearing 3 drives. I uninstalled snap, screen and unmenu and deleted the script. I rebooted and installed unmenu, screen and preclearing and started again. Not sure what was causing it but it's working now so alls good. Sam

I have installed unmenu, installed screen but can't preclear I issue cd /boot screen (get the intro message and press enter) preclear_disk.sh -l and get bash: preclear_disk.sh: command not found. anyone know what I am doing wrong?

doesn't seem to be there.

Did I read somewhere that you can now precleardrives from the GUI in 5.0 or did I totally make it up? I've just upgraded and will need to preclear some drives very soon.

all sorted now thanks.

Does anybody have s3 sleep working with 5.0?

I have just stuck a 3tb drive in my case and it is showing up as a IDE drive. I would have expected it to show as SDE but it is showing up as HDE. Is this normal? It is working fine and have the full capacity available. Just the letters seem to be wrong.

the users shares were turned off. sorted now. cheers.

what would happen if I took a 3tb drive straight out of a windows server and slapped it in an unraid as a parity drive without formatting or preclearing it? would it work as long as the drive is good? I know I should preclear etc but I haven't got time and its a small pet project that will be taken down next weekend.

I'm at work now so I cant check but if they DO need redefining. Do I go to the shares tab and create a share called, for example music. Then all the folders called music on all the drives will show up in the new share called music?

So after a long week I finally got chance to do this. Everything went well except there are no shares but when I go to \\tower I can see all the data on disc1, disk2 etc. How do I get the shares back? I'm running 5.0

I've not done it yet. My daughter has been ill, hopefully I'll have chance to do it tonight.

That's for the tip. Going to do it this evening.

I want to split one of my arrays into 2. Do I:- 1st array. Run a parity check Stop the Unraid Power down Remove the drives I want to put in the 2nd array Power up but don't start Do the init config Run parity Start the array 2nd array Install new Unraid usb and drives (from array 1 and a new parity drive) Power on Assign drives including new parity drive Run parity Start the array

I know it's expected behaviour, just not the behaviour I wanted. Maybe it's because of using unraid but it bugs me that 10 drives spinning up to watch one movie, it just seems like a bit of a waste of power. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad system, far from it. The tech support is fantastic, the features are plentiful and useful but the storage spaces didn't fit for me. I'm still using ws2012 for a lot of things, just not media storage, for me unraid does a much better job for that. The people at wgs who like windows server, like me, but they recommended using drive pool or drive bender as apposed to storage spaces as they are more reliable and more practical. The thing is there is real actively few people with wse2012 so the ratio of the amount of people who had problems:people who have wse2012 is quite high. All the comments I have made are based my opinions about my experiences on my network. You might have more success than I did. I would definately try it, it is a huge step forward from windows home server and has so many tricks up it's leave it's hard not to be impressed. Just don't put faith in storage spaces until you have tested it thoroughly. The one thing I do like about the storage space design is you can pull it from your windows server and drop it straight into a windows 8 machine. Maybe it's because of my recent need for data recovery but anything that aids recovery is welcome in my book!

It is much better after r2 but still not reliable enough to be deemed a reliable solution in my mind. There are addons which would be suitable, like drive pool, but they aren't good enough for my system. The spin down does work in the sense that when the pool isnt accessed they do spin down but if you access the pool all the drives in the pool spin up (at least that's what was happening for me). Go over to wegotserved.com (sorry mods if I'm not allowed to link. Please edit if you need to) and ask about storage spaces. Even with r2 people are getting bad results.

Cheers fella.

It just didn't work properly. It would unmount drives at random and you would have to rebuild the entire pool again, it doesn't write in a sensible manor. I mean had a 3tb test pool (3x1tb) and you fill them up to 75%, added a 4th and carried on filling them. It carried on writing to the original 3tb and when it was full it said I had no space even though there was 3/4 of the 4th drive free. Also there area MASSIVE overheads, you don't really notice on the bigger drives but on the smaller drives you can loose like 10% to the overhead. You can't add parity at a later date, it is very difficult to remove a drive from the pool without replacing it..... Honestly the best thing to do if you want to hear about storage spaces is to head over to another well known server forum that is very much windows biased (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to other website or not) or just google it, there are thousands of horror stories about how bad storage spaces is. Like I said, the server functions like active directory director services, HDCP and DNS services, print server, VPN etc (I'm now using standard server 2012 not essentials) are phenomenal and are super easy to set up. I really can't rate it highly enough apart from the storage spaces. I am using it for client backup using hardware raid 1, again, super smooth and once setup runs very smoothly. The other factor I found to be a pain in the hoop was the fact that all the drives are spun up if accessing any data. Not good when you start getting more and more drives. For that reason I will hold my hands up and say that I should have never dropped Unraid for media storage. As my old hockey coach used to say "the grass is only greener if it's fuelled on bullsh1t" If you have a virtualised environment i would defiantly recommend ws2012 and unraid as a complete solution. You kinda have to remember that it isn't a home server and is fundamentally designed for businesses. I know a few guys who run essentials a drive pool and rave about it but, for me, it isn't the right fit.

Does Unraid support Areca Hdd controllers?

Yeah, I'm in the process of rebuilding the Unraid (see my other thread as to why). I did intend to just use server 2012 but as with most things in life, what they promised isn't what they delivered. But you have to try these things and now I have the best of both worlds.

Basically I got sever 2012 through work and the features like client back up, enterprise level tech support, dhcp/DNS servers, active director directory services, vpn etc (things that unraid just can't do) are what pulled me away. In reality, the server functions of 2012 are spectacular but as a media server it's pretty poor. I have now esxi'd the whole shabang. Server 2012 for the server features and unraid for the media. Truth be told, I only went away from unraid because I had a major failiure which gave me the opportunity to start from scratch, not have to move any data around plus I got to try server 2012 in the home environment with no cost.

Is it really worth trying to reduce the cost of running your server? Running the server with all the drives spun up, 24/7 is costing you ~£8.50 per month. Based on 16p per unit for electric.

A bit of both. I am trying to swap out the pcbs first and if that fails the sending them to the recovery company. So far I have recovered 3x drives myself by swapping the pcb and have sent 1 do be recovered (only because I can't find a suitable pcb ANYWHERE!). Once the pcb is swapped I'm using using FTK imager to pull the data onto my desktop and then onto my new unraid. The pic is one of the pcbs. Each one looks to have the same signs of damage.