Marshalleq

I suspect bonding 2 NICs that are the same is OK, but in the case above, there was one 10G Nic along with some slower speed ones, which is probably not so great. Unraid networking - never been as straight forward as the competitors implementation.

Hi all, does anyone know in what way thunderbolt support has been added to unraid? I ask because I've read that linux can work without the thunderbolt header and even without thunderbolt support on the motherboard at all, which would make things a lot easier. Otherwise it seems get a Titan Ridge Rev 2.0 card and short the pins. My motherboard only support TB1, so I also don't know if a TB2 or TB3 card will work or if I'm stuck to TB1. The problem I've got is the host is a Lenovo P700 and official TB cards have been unavailable for years. I'm hoping I can get to TB2 at least but even TB1 is fine really. Details on it here. I've purchased a nice thunderbolt connected 8 bay disk cabinet. I like this solution because unlike SAS cabinets, thunderbolt has a lot of options available that suit homes better particularly that they're quiet and smaller. If we can get thunderbolt working on unraid for disk storage, I think there will be a lot more options available to all of us - especially those of us living in apartments. In the chance that a dev comes across this, I'm keen to help - I don't know what would be valuable though - getting a TB card or something. I'm sure there are a few of us that would band together for this. Edit: This looks promising: https://github.com/utopia-team/Thunderbolt Thanks all. Marshalleq

Card Status: Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge 2.0 (Flashed for Mac) - Installed on Asus X399 Prime-A - Card detected with short pins trick - Devices Autodetect Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge 2.0 (Flashed for Mac) - Installed on Lenovo P700 (Thunderbolt disabled in BIOS) - Storage Working Known Issues Reboot sometimes freezes system while thunderbolt plugged in Bolt tools are needed to properly authorise devices Devices may become deauthorized on reboot

This page documents two parts of what is working and what is not working with Thunderbolt on Unraid. Part 1: The generic subsystems (for want of another name - perhaps someone can describe something technically more accurate here) Part 2: Specific matches of PCIe hardware to Hosts systems To date the following Thunderbolt subsystems are confirmed working on UnRaid: Storage: Working Networking: TBC Display: Passthrough

Hi thanks for starting this wonderful plugin. With my datasets (there are quite a lot). I wonder if it might be possible to make it so that the pools are shown in a list and then the data sets are only shown / hidden by clicking the pool i.e. having an expand / retract feature. That way we could have a summary status across the whole system and more easily find problems without scrolling, potentially missing them in the process. Plus it would be a lot cleaner, currently mine takes up about 3-4 screens of scrolling. Thanks. <Edit> I think I should have opened my eyes - 'Show Datasets'!

I came here because I too am looking for this. Not because I'm disagreeing with the point above, but because MegaCli can query information on the card from the cli which is very useful. I am currently trying to figure out why a raid cabinet is not hot swapping disks properly which has led me down a whole path with mpt2sas and mpt3sas which ended up me wanting this tool to get info. I think it would be great to have as part of nerd tools or something. e.g MegaCli64 -LDInfo -LALL -aALL

Hi all anyone know why the above might be happening. It's a drive in an external cabinet connected via SAS. I'm thinking it's something up with the external cabinet. The symptom is that I cannot replug the drives without powering down the whole system power cycling the external cabinet as well, then doing that in reverse. If I hot unplug them, I have to power down to replug them. Occasionally they don't start up even after doing that. Diagnostics attached. Thanks. skywalker-diagnostics-20220226-2136.zip

What kind of controllers? I assume encryption is off and the cpu you have is reasonable? If that is the typical target file size Have you tried setting recordsize=1M on the dataset? There are quite a few optimisations you can make but that’s probably the most obvious one for a large file. You can also try ensure you’ve got your ashift set correctly, perhaps it’s not? kinda guessing so far to be honest. If that’s still the same you could post your zpool get all and zfs get all might show something else.

What kind of data are you writing there? There are a few settings that can optimise eg small files or large files or databases etc. It does sound a little slow for one of those drives to me.

You know what guys, I just found out the tool is open sourced here. So to that end, surely someone on this thread knows how to fix it. The drive scanning thing seems to be happening on Mac as well as windows, so I'm guessing it's specific to the app, not the OS, but I'm no developer.

I think the point is, this is little to do with USB 2 / 3 and the stick you use, the manual method works, the creator hasn't worked for many years. @limetech need to at least publish on their download page that this is the case, so that everyone doesn't waste their time wondering what they did wrong and wasting hours in the process. Even an .img file using a 3rd party image transfer tool would be better. Or just list the actual things that work.

Oh, sorry you're right. I seem to recall I had to do something extra to get it to work and that needed to be redone after a reboot, it was that I was referring to - but perhaps the situation is resolved now! I can certainly type zdb now and stuff is coming up so I guess I'm golden!

Just picking up the end of this conversation so apologies if I've misunderstood - if there is a plugin system scripts or similar, zdb would be a good candidate to include.

Randomly I came across this openzfs man page which lists a device type specifically for storing dedup tables. I was not aware this device type was available. So this would be I guess to split it out from the other metadata and small file blocks that come with a special vdev, for those that want to do that - though I suspect that's pretty niche as the special device type should offer additional performance improvements in most cases. ZFS is awesome.

Hey, I went through a few of these tests. You can add the special vdev at any time but you do have to recopy the data. A quick way I ended up figuring out how to do that was to first rename a dataset to a new name, the send receive that back to the original name, then delete the renamed set. There's also a rebalance script I could dig up, but there are caveats to that, so I ended up just doing the rename. I've read, that you can take a special vdev out again in certain circumstances, but to be honest it was not very clear and sounded scary - most people in that discussion concluded it wasn't for them. Remember the special vdev holds all the information about where the files are stored (I guess it's like ZFS FAT), so if it dies - the array is effectively dead, because it doesn't know how to find the files. Though again, only files that have been modified since the special vdev has been added are on it, so I'm not sure if the whole pool would die or not. EDIT: From that other thread "Supposedly, special vdevs can be removed from a pool, IF the special and regular vdevs use the same ASHIFT, and if everything is mirrors. So it won’t work if you have raidz vdevs or mixed Ashift." Honestly the best thread I found on it is below, with a fantastic thread of comments and questions at the bottom of it, worth reading if you're considering doing it. The opening paragraph from the article: Introduction ZFS Allocation Classes: It isn’t storage tiers or caching, but gosh darn it, you can really REALLY speed up your zfs pool. From the manual: Special Allocation Class The allocations in the special class are dedicated to specific block types. By default this includes all metadata, the indirect blocks of user data, and any deduplication tables. The class can also be provisioned to accept small file blocks." Link https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-metadata-special-device-z/159954 Happy reading!

Have you found some doc that says performance of dedup with special Vdev is bad? I mean it’s going to be slower than ram In most cases but that doesn’t mean we will notice it or make it unusable. The other link that is continuously posted above is ambiguous. I’ve heard otherwise and that aligns with my experience. Or are you just speaking generally from educated guesses? (Genuine question). I have mine with HDDs so probably is why I don’t notice it.

@subivoodoo Great feedback! Did you by chance try the special vdev (or want to) to see what the difference is in terms of ram usage for dedup? I figure for this test, any small ssd would do (though typically you'd want it to be mirrored).

Nice find on the GPU-P - I hadn't realised we could do that now!

Nice to hear @subivoodoo, yeah encryption that will do it! There's a video online somewhere about a guy doing something similar for multiple machines in his house. He configured steam data to be on a zfs pool for all computers and the the dedup meant he only had to store one copy. Cool idea - I would have thought the performance was bad, but apparently not. How's your RAM usage? @jortan I've seen you've replied, but I'm not going to read it sorry - I can see it's just more of the same and I don't see the value for everyone else of having a public argument. I get that differences of opinion get annoying and it feels good to be right, so lets just say you're right. Have a great day and don't stress about it.

Sigh, yes, it absolutely is, the original poster declared that a home scenario was what they were working on and you seem to keep comparing it to disaster scenarios. No-one here is saying don't be careful, don't plan, backup your data or whatever applies, people need to be given some credit, they're not all morons. LOL, if I answer this it's going to get into a flame war, so I'm just going to leave it (and the remainder of the points). The poster has the information and two opinions on it. I have given actual evidence, you have given your experience, which I'm sure is also extensive. They can make their own decision as to whether this works for their lab, or whatever they end up doing. Thanks for the info, have a great day. Marshalleq.

Just saw reply from @jortan (previous reply was just foreseeing some of the questions and trying to be helpful). None of my comments were directed at you, just directed at the misinformation lying around the web - which is what you find when you google and get old documents. Some of the newer stuff now is reflecting the newer state, but unfortunately also some of the newer stuff is still getting written by people whom haven't tried it for quite a while and are repeating out of date experiences - special vdevs in particular being the main case of change here. I do believe special vdevs hold all the DDT for the pool, it even says that on the page you linked. Except for when it's full of course. If you read that page a little deeper, it says this thrashing happens when the special vdev gets full, not 'constantly' as you say above - this is because it will start putting the DDT in the main pool instead of the special vdev once it starts getting full. Of course, this is talking about a busy corporate environment that is worrying about IOPS all the time, for the average person playing around at home (something that @subivoodoo seems to indicate is their scope i.e "My aproach is safe some space on clients... and play with IT stuff 😁 ") then this would not be an issue. In any case, I have a very high IOPS requirements and I am constantly marvelling at how well it does considering I'm just running Raidz1 on everything, have dedup on, my special vdev is running on great but older Intel SSD's that are actually quite slow, the mail server, the various web services, automation and undoubtedly a ton of misaligned cluster sizes which are killing it etc etc. It's under constant use and really it's incredible. Can we argue in a corporate environment we could get more performance? Absolutely, but if it were we wouldn't be running unraid, it wouldn't be all on one box and a whole bunch of other things. Sorry for the laborious post, but I think it's fair to say that the dedup scare mongering that's out there need some balance - again, not directed at you. Marshalleq. PS, I've tried that lancache, ran it for a few years, it works well sometimes, others not so much. Definitely worth a try though.

Some stats on my setup to give you an indication: I run two configs 1 - 4x480G SSD's in RaidZ1 - this hosts docker and virtual machines. I have only 3 VM's at present totally about 50G. I have a bunch of dockers but only the VM's are deduped. There is 653G free and my dedup ratio across the whole pool is 1.11 (i.e. 11%). 2 - 4x16TB HDD's in Raidz1 with 2x 150G mirror for a special vdev with small blocks up to 32k enabled. Most of the Pool is unique data that cannot be deduped. There is 598G free on the array and 70G free on the special vdev. I dedup my backups folder, documents folders, isos, temp folder which totals about 530G, I am getting 1.14 dedup ratio across the whole pool which is about 14%. I think these numbers are pretty good. I thoroughly tested the memory usage before and after for the Raidz1 array as I was unsure if all or some of it would go to the special vdev. I noticed no difference at all. I did the same for the virtual machines on the array without the special vdev and while this was less scientific, also noticed no perceptible difference (I mention because so many people cry out that dedup uses too much RAM). Now, I do have 96G of RAM in this system, however before enabling dedup on anything the RAM usage was sitting around 93-96% full. It didn't change. I think this speaks well to the issue as I would have had big failures if it did use a lot of RAM. I've been running it like this for a long time now and no issues yet. I hope that helps!

Yeah, I'm just using image files on unraid. I found great returns on virtual machines, especially when based on the same install iso - but even on different ones. I found reasonable returns on isos and documents. I probably have a few duplicated isos with not so obvious names so it saves having to sort that out. I don't think there's much benefit in dockers but could be wrong. And that's correct I don't use ZVOL's. I've tried them and found them them at best to be non-advantageous and a lot less flexible. I don't yet understand why anyone would use them really, except maybe for iscsi targets.

I'm using dedup quite successfully. What I've learnt is that most people whom say it isn't worth it either haven't looked at it for a while (so are just continuing on old stories without checking) or are not applying it to the right type of data. In my case I'm running a special vdev. It works extremely well for the content that can be deduped (such as VM's). I've never noticed any extra memory being used either as I do believe this is handled by the special vdev. I'm using unraid - tried TrueNAS scale but it's containerisation is just awful - hopefully they figure out what market they're aiming for there and fix their strategy in a future version not too far away.

I would suggest that you log this upstream as it sounds like a bug.