sota

One of the downsides of big drives, that I think a lot of people overlook, is the rebuild/recovery time when you drop a disk. According to my last Parity/Build pass, it took 18 hours, 10 minutes, 19 seconds, Average Speed: 152.9MB/s to process my 1+5 10TB disk array. That's an awful long time (in my opinion) to be exposed to data loss, and one of the reasons why the next time 10TB drives are on sale the next pair I buy will be used to add the 2nd parity drive and 6th data array. I hoping to buy 3 so I can keep 1 in reserve as a cold spare.

96GB in 12 sticks. because the cost savings on the build spec was only a couple dollars even if I cut the memory in half.

HP DL380e G8 can have up to 14 drives (2 in the back.)

I'm not sure the idea is really that useful either. Let's look at a couple examples: starting point, 3x 3TB drives, (1 parity, 2 data, 6TB total). you have effectively 6TB of data storage. add 1 6TB drive (parity). retask 3TB parity as data. data increase: +3TB (9TB) add 2nd 6TB drive (data). data increase: +6TB (15TB) add 3rd 6TB drive (data) data increase: +6TB (21TB) now, starting from the same 3x 3TB... add: 1st 6TB (data), retask 2x 3TB as parity (RAID0 6TB) data increase: 0TB (9TB) add 2nd 6TB drive (data) data increase: +6TB (15TB) add 3rd 6TB drive (data) data increase: +6TB (21TB) you've come to the same place, but now you've added complexity and increased failure potential. about the only hardware RAID i've considered is potentially RAID1 for the parity drive, but even that is problematic.

nah. they're not shingle drives. my understanding is, we won't see shingle drives for public sale for a while, due to the back end hardware/software needed to make them not totally suck. so basically, shingle drives will only ship as "black box" type storage.

All mine are shucked. 2 EasyStores and 4 Elements. I would like to point out, the Element units shuck much nicer, and don't break little tabs inside, so you shouldn't have a problem putting them back together if needed. I found his comment about warranty length interesting, as how would they know if you've shucked the drive? The cases have the serial number of the disk inside on the outside, and when I ran those numbers they all came up as 6/21 or 8/21 expiration.

I'm not sure how to interpret the ACPI errors; keep in mind there's 3 controllers on this machine: CD-ROM SATA, HP B210i (not used), HP P420 (used). And of course the USB slot for the unRAID stick (inside the case.) I re-checked the cache settings and --get says they're all set to enabled. However when I did force it for sdf and sdg and refreshed the log I see an entry each for sdf and sdg saying it's now enabled. Weird. eta: dug more on the ACPI errors... they're nothing to worry about. They're related to HP being HP; see https://www.serveradminblog.com/2015/05/kernel-acpi-error-smbusipmigenericserialbus/ I'll worry about dealing with that later.

Back to it being slow. Had the machine off for a couple days, waiting on some parts to come in. Moving more data on to it, and write speeds are down again to 30MB/s. Did the WCE thing on all drives, no effect. Will try mounting an NTFS disk in a bit, do a test transfer, and see if things change. Local disk-to-disk transfer of a 4GB file resulted in a 168MB/s data rate. cube-diagnostics-20191026-2353.zip

Here you go. I have no idea what changed, but all of the sudden i'm now getting 100MB/s transfer speeds into unRAID. I'm trying to think of what it is I messed with during this time: Hot added a 4th drive to the machine, which showed up as /dev/sde. Mounted sde as /mnt/ntfs1 (it's an NTFS formatted drive.) Did some file copy tests from it to one of the array disks (/mnt/disk2.) Got a computed 112MB/s data transfer rate, which to me is appropriate. Deleted the copied files and unmounted /mnt/ntfs1. After all that, I went back and looked at the network copy activity, and it was running near 100MB/s. i could see on the graph (Windows Server 2012R2 source) the big hump and jump up. I guess whatever Fat Electron cleared out of the wire? cube-diagnostics-20191019-0015.zip

I'm apparently having the same problem. My write speeds are in the sub-30MB/s range. I checked the WCE flag and it's enabled on all my drives. This has been consistent across two different builds (other was an HP 8000 Elite SFF C2Q Q9650, 16GB ram, native SATA connectors.) I'm still looking for a solution.