garycase

Might be an interesting Catch-22 => I wouldn't be surprised if you have to change the default video in the BIOS to HDMI ... and possibly even enable it; but to get to the BIOS you need to connect a display to the DSUB port (VGA).

Try the VGA port.

"Needs" are in the eye of the beholder !! Clearly I NEED anything that I WANT ... the trick is convincing the spouse that this is true As I've said before, she gets anything she wants, and I get anything she can't talk me out of. That's how it works at my house as well ... fortunately, my wife never tries to talk me out of anything

"Needs" are in the eye of the beholder !! Clearly I NEED anything that I WANT ... the trick is convincing the spouse that this is true

You'd have certainly learned a lesson if it had been !!

I remember when you bought that bracket -- in fact, I had bookmarked it when I saw your original link, as I planned to use it the next time I did a mini-ITX build. But I also thought $16.99 was steep -- it's definitely nice to see it down to $8.99, which is not only very reasonable, but low enough that I decided to replace the bracket in my current Q25B with one "just because" [Ordered it right after I posted the note above.]

I've only used a few, but have also had zero issues. I can only surmise that those who have problems are using them in write-intensive scenarios where they frequently encounter the "wall" of a full "persistent cache", which will make the drive's performance drop to absolutely abysmal levels until the drive has enough idle time to "catch up" on writes to the shingled area. In a use case where they doesn't happen, the drive will effectively "freeze" -- a "fail" in the eyes of a user. Clearly in those cases, they shouldn't be using shingled drives. But as long as the use case is one where Seagate's mitigations work well, the drives are just fine. One thing that HAS happened since these were released, however, is that the manufacturers' have been able to increase platter density to as much as 1.33TB/platter ... so they can make 8TB and larger drives using standard PMR technology -- this has likely slowed down Seagate's plans to make larger SMR drives, at least until they can adapt the SMR technology to higher capacity platters. They're already shipping 10TB Ironwolf and BarraCuda units, which use traditional PMR technology -- so there's no reason to make an SMR version at this point.

Yes, that will work fine. It's just like the bracket that Silverstone ships with their SFX supplies. Note that the after-market bracket Silverstone sells is slightly different => it positions the power supply towards the top of the hole, instead of centering it in the hole. That's actually a slightly nicer location, as it leaves more "working space" below the power supply. But either bracket will do the trick just fine.

Just realized you didn't buy the Silverstone STX unit => you bought the Corsair STX power supply. Apparently it doesn't come with an adapter plate -- so all you need to do is buy the adapter plate I linked to above. The STX power supply with that adapter plate fits FAR better in the Q25B than an ATX unit would.

The Silverstone STX 450 fits just fine in the Q25-B using the SFX->ATX adapter plate it comes with. Did you lose (or misplace) that adapter?? If so, you can simply buy one: https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology-Universal-Bracket-RL-PP08B/dp/B01BYB33J8

Reads are not an issue => the shingled technology has no bearing on the read process.

Agree. The old adage, "don't fix what ain't broken" is good advice. If the system's working well with Reiser, there's no compelling reason to switch. From my perspective, the only reason to change a drive from Reiser to XFS is if it's a very active drive that's also very close to full => Reiser tends to result in slow writes to the drive in that situation, whereas XFS doesn't slow down at all. Otherwise, a Reiser drive will perform quite well.

Nothing at all wrong with that approach. It does take longer; BUT it's all "computer time" and not "human time". In other words, the whole process probably doesn't take you more than 5-10 minutes/disk ... perhaps an hour TOTAL of actual time you will be doing anything to convert ALL of your disks. All of the rest of the time is just letting the computer do its thing. ... so, as you noted, time is really not an issue.

As long as all of the data on a drive will fit on another drive, the size doesn't matter. i.e. Yes, you can use the 2TB drive to hold the data from your 3TB drive if you want to convert the 3TB drive to XFS.

Yes, that's a reasonable copy speed -- remember, you're writing to a parity-protected array, so writes are much slower than reads.

Playback is never an issue => there's NO difference in the read capabilities of shingled vs PMR drives. It's only a writing issue. If you cache the writes, that would indeed minimize the likelihood of filling the persistent cache, since virtually all of the writes would be contiguous, which will go directly to the shingled array instead of the persistent cache. As I noted earlier, the only way to know for SURE is to just try it. If you record motion only, that alone will almost certainly reduce the write load enough that this won't be a problem.

A bit of counterpoint ... ... the SAFEST way to do a conversion is simply to not do it => at least not in the array. If you want to take ZERO risk, then just (a) copy all of the data from the disk you want to convert to another system; (b) validate the copy (either while doing it; or via a compare operation after it's done; or using checksums if you have them; © Stop the array and change the file system type for the drive to XFS -- then Start the array and it will format in just a couple minutes; and then (d) copy the data back to it (validating this as well). Yes -- it's a long process => but almost all "computer time" and just a few minutes of "your time". And there's virtually NO risk. [The only real risk is that you reformat the wrong drive !!]

I'd be a bit concerned about the constant writes at random locations from 3 different video streams -- depending on the specific distribution of the writes this may fill the persistent cache ... and if that happens performance will drop drastically -- and could effectively "freeze" the system. No way to know for sure except to try it -- IP cameras are generally not very high bandwidth video, so it may not be an issue at all. One easy way to avoid any issue would be to have each camera record on a different drive; and to replace your parity drive with a standard PMR drive [ironwolf or a WD Red].

Yes, I'd say that's working just fine

I haven't done any USB-based pre-clearing; but my understanding is the newest version supports USB v3, so as long as your computer has USB3 ports, pre-clearing via USB should be just about as fast as a direct SATA connection -- and has the advantage that you'll know the drive is good before opening the case to remove it (thus voiding the warranty).

Remember these are called "shingled" drives => the name is derived from the fact that the writes overlap each other, as c3 noted above -- think of the shingles on a roof (this is why they named the technique "shingled"). The drives perform very well for reads (no different than standard PMR drives); but to write anything on a specific track requires re-writing the entire track as well as every track after it up until the next "buffer" track (where there's no shingling). This could result in TERRIBLE write performance, except there is an area reserved for "buffering" all of these random writes, known as the "persistent cache", which buffers writes to a non-shingled area, and then moves them to the shingled sections later (during idle time). Seagate has done a very good job of mitigating these issues, as I've outlined in this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39526.0

That's the right sector count for an 8TB drive, so you're good to go. In fact, you don't even need to bother removing the old partitions => UnRAID will re-initialize the drive anyway.

Thanks for correcting that -- not sure where my mind was :)

That 134MB appears to be a 2nd partition, NOT an HPA (which wouldn't show up on the display) If you attach this drive to a PC, and go to Disk Management, you should be able to simply delete both of the existing partitions ... then have another look and see what it shows. Run a /dev/sdX (where X is the assigned letter for that drive) to see exactly what the sector count it. Then you'll know if there's an HPA or not.

This isn't the right thread for a detailed discussion r.e. file system conversion -- just search for "XFS conversion" if you want to read more details. But I'll toss in a couple basic thoughts ... => XFS is the recommended file system for new drives you add to your array, but there's no real reason to convert current Reiser volumes, especially if they're essentially static (i.e. filled with media and rarely changed or written to). => Reiser does indeed have better recovery tools in the event a Reiser volume should get corrupted -- there are plenty of examples of just how good they are on this forum. => If you have a very active volume -- lots of writes, deletes, updates, etc. -- it's probably a good idea to convert it to XFS, as XFS doesn't have the issue Reiser does with slow write performance as a disk gets close to full. If you DO decide to convert your data, be VERY careful. Read the threads about this CAREFULLY and be CERTAIN you understand what the "user share copy bug" is and that you absolutely avoid it -- it will result in complete data loss if not.