SNDS

I tried various PCIe slots, regrettably I don't have another board to test with so I'm going to call this one dead, especially as the other slots are shown to have worked with other devices (10gb ethernet as well as two different GPUs). I have 4 PCIe 16x slots and 1 PCIe 1x and need to retain 1 for my GPU (Quadro P2000) for Plex hardware transcoding. What alternatives do you think could work in those circumstances? The ones I've found end up requiring 2 controller boards and 2 multiplier/extender cards to fill the need of 45 drive bays all of which would have to use the 16x slots. At that point, with those 3 cards I could buy a brand NEW Rocket 750 (as this current one was used via eBay) for the same price.

Yikes. Sorry about that. snds-unraid-diagnostics-20190927-0015.zip

So, I rebooted to install my NVMe storage drives (WD Blue 1TB x2) for cache as well as the rest of my hard drives and for some reason the Rocket 750 isn't showing up anymore. I've attached some more diagnostics but I'm wondering if this thing is just flaky (a la the issues with Marvell controllers previously mentioned). I have tried other PCI-e slots to no avail. It worked fine all day. I also made sure to disable any other virtualization functions in the BIOS to be sure. I'm going to attempt to update the BIOS version next to see if that helps. @johnnie.black or someone else that's around, can you check the new diag file to see if it's something software related? Additionally, could someone hazard a suggestion for an alternative card (or two) that are --relatively-- inexpensive and can accommodate up to 45 drives? I'm using one of those Storinator cases and want to be able to use all 45 drives eventually (I have an LSI HBA to cover the other 5 drives that the Rocket 750 can't). The Rocket card was a second hand purchase via eBay and I'm thinking this might be a return.

@johnnie.black That did it. Thanks for the help. I'm hoping a BIOS update might allow me to access IOMMU for VMs in the future. In the meantime, things are working now. Cheers!

Hey folks, I just got my machine up and running. The problem I am having is getting my Highpoint Rocket 750 to show up and the drives with it. I only have a single drive attached presently for troubleshooting purposes. I have attached my diagnostics file for your perusal. I noticed the 750 showing up on boot in the loading screen before the GUI loaded up but nothing beyond that. I'd appreciate any and all help. snds-unraid-diagnostics-20190926-0143.zip

This.

*BUMP* Anyone have thoughts on the drive size and pool size? I'm thinking of going @jpowell8672's route and use dual 1TB NVMe drives in Raid 0 for newsgroup services and LANCache use cases. As an aside, what's the max that one can do for parity drives? I was thinking of getting 2 4TB 7200RPM drives for parity.

I don't know how others use the cache specifically. But I know, that for my sake, I want to be able to use newsgroups (apps like Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr/SABnzbd) and I know they can take a toll on the random read/write of drives when using them conventionally, so I suspect it may be good to have a good cache for writing files coming from newsgroup sources as they could be large and one doesn't want to hammer the actual array until it's time to offload. I could see files up to 25-30gb downloading up to 5-8 files at any given time during much of the day/evening depending on the requests and needs. I'm also considering a LANCache but that won't be a constant download, most likely I'll download a bunch of stuff up front then the LANcache will be refreshed after I have a LAN event at the house. --edit-- Supplemental context: the main use cases for my server are in order of priority - Plex/Newsgroups Downloads/LANCache/Game Servers

Hey folks, While I am waiting on my build parts to arrive in order to start tinkering with Unraid, I did some searching on the forums here with mixed results so I wanted to see if the community would be willing to give me some perspective and insight on the cache pool before I get rolling. Is there a limit on how many drives can be in a cache pool? Is there a best practice for the size of a drive? I am using this machine as a Plex server/media sourcer (newsgroups mainly), if that helps. What's the word on NVMe cache pools? Is it any better to use the faster I/O on those devices for my use case (see #2) even if it will over-saturate the array when migrating files? I haven't purchased the cache drives yet because I'm unsure about the above and it will guide my purchase there. Thanks folks!