patseguin

OK I guess my question is answered in that it gives a performance boost and it doesn't have to be the same size as the parity drive. Could an SSD drive be effectively used as a cache drive?

I only mention WHS because it sounds like it may be a much faster solution although like you said there is no real data protection except for mirroring or if I use a RAID card. I'm hoping my preclearing is done when I get home so I can start copying data. I'm going to use teracopy as suggested.

Do you mind if I ask what advantage unRAID has over Windows Home Server 2011?

OK so it sounds like creating parity first is probably a better idea? Is teracopy something I just need to find and copy to the flash drive somewhere?

OK so is my plan of preclearing, copying data, creating parity, in that order a good plan? I was thinking doing parity last because file copy might be faster?

Ok so it seems that the drive needs to be equal to my parity drive which will be 3TB so that rules that out. I suppose I can make a share that just uses the 500GB drive?

Ever since I got my pro key I noticed a "cache drive" list along with my drives and parity drives. Am I meant to select a drive in there if I want some faster speeds? I have a 500GB hybrid HD/SSD in the machine from when I used to run Windows. Would something like that be ideal for the cache drive?

Only if you find some kind of hardware problem during your testing. You were having copy issues and crashing. If you don't figure out why then it's likely to just happen again. Peter No, I wasn't having crashing issues. It seemed to be copying really slow over the network and people here told me the speed was actually good but me being the dumbo that I am decided to cancel that and try a hard drive to raid copy. I think all of my problems were a result of rushing into it.

OK thanks. I have right around 2TB or so data so how long will that take to establish parity? I assume the web gui will show me progress?

OK thanks. As to my other question, is it a good idea to copy over my data and then create the parity drive? Or vice versa?

Fwiw, I am keeping all my media on my local PC until unRAID is good to go. bjp is totally right though. What happened was I decided I was going to try a hardware raid and I configured it in BIOS but then changed my mind after realizing all the space I could be using with unRAID. Well, when I rebooted back into unRAID my configuration was fubar. It listed drives missing, wrong, etc. Additionally, I originally skipped preclearing because I thought since they were fresh shrink wrapped drives that I would be OK. This time I am doing everything by the book. I cleared my unRAID USB stick and reinstalled it. I am now preclearing all 6 drives. Once that is done, I will create my shares and copy my media over, followed by creating the parity disk. Does this sound like a good plan of action? Also, just in case something happens - what if Windows crashes or I close the telnet window? How will I be able to tell when preclear is done? I am running all 6 preclears using Screen.

How do I just start all over again? Do I just format the USB drive and copy over my Pro Key again? The whole thing is fubar right now lol.

I am trying to delete or replace a file that got only partially copied. When I try copy copy over, it tells me it exists and when I hit yes is says"You need permission to perform this action". When I try to delete it, says "can't delete, this file is open in another window". So, how a telnet session can I find the file and forcibly delete it?

The manual says "you can run preclear_disk.sh script on a new drive before you add it to the array and unRAID will recognize that the drive already has zeros written to every sector and will only take the array offline long enough to perform a format which only takes a minute or two." These are drives right out of the packaging. Shouldn't they be good to go? The first one is at 2% after 7 minutes...

I have 3TB drives. Will that take 24 hours per drive to preclear?

I'm working through my own issues, but it was my understanding that unRAID was DESIGNED to be a media server. It's the perfect solution theoretically with it's expandability and parity protection.

I'll find syslog when I get home. Hardware is 5x 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives, AMD990FX mobo with FX8150 CPU and 16GB RAM, mobo giga ethernet, nVidia 430 gfx. All the drives are set to AHCI in the BIOS. Actually could this be a problem with unRAID? SHould they just be set as SATA type?

Given the troubles I've had, might it be wise to destroy my array and start over again? #1 - do I need to preclear the drives in the array? I have 5x 3TB #2 - can I create the parity drive AFTER creating the array and copying my data?

Why is it that when I cancelled the file copy after about 16 hours and connected a hard drive to copy the files (per the manual) it was actually slower than the network copy? I was getting about 25MB/s and it was giving me a copy time of about a day and a half. It froze overnight too.

The drives are nowhere near full. I'm not feeling very good about unRAID right now to be honest. 30-40 MB/s transfers across gigabit doesn't sound right at all and hard drive to RAID copy was even SLOWER at about 25MB/s before it froze. I had no choice but to hard reboot and I started the array and it seemed fine. I tried overwriting the partial copy of the last movie and it said "you need permission to do that". I tried deleting it and it said "that file is open in another program". Furthermore, I looked at the main screen and it said something about checking parity and it was at 1% with about 10 hours to go or something silly like that. I really wanted unRAID to be a good solution but if I do get everything copied over in a week, I can really expect a single rip to take about 3 hours to copy over? I was previously running hardware RAID10 on Win 7 and a new rip would take about 2-3 minutes to copy over the network to the server. Anyone able to help on these issues? I really want unRAID to work but it's not looking too good. Someone told me yesterday that my 40GB/s over gigabit ethernet was great but when I decided to try a hard drive copy as per the manual all help broke loose. Not only was it slower, but it froze part way through one of the files and I can't delete it or copy the file over it now.

It's been a small disaster copying files to my shares. I was getting around 40MB/s yesterday across network and then after looking through the manual, I decided to connect a temporary HD, copy the files from this machine, then connect it to the unRAID server and copy that way. Well, I was getting a whopping 20MB/s (wtf?) and got up this morning and MC said "lost connection to host" which I guess means the hard drive. I still have the computer connected to my monitor so I switched to its input and the screen is black. If I try to open a telnet session it just says connection failed. I can't bring up the web interface either. I appear to have no choice but to hard reboot the system. Is there anything else I can do? EDIT: Well the system appeared to be frozen so I had no choice but to hard reboot. The array is online and all seems fine but now when I try to replace a files on one of my shares I get "you need permission to perform this action". EDIT #2: I am copying a new file and it's going at 13MB/sec. I can't believe how slow this system is. Every time I rip a new movie I can expect it to take 3 hours to copy to unRAID? Something doesn't seem right. EDIT #3 not only can't I seem to replace any files, but copying a new file is going at 18.8MB/sec right now plus the main screen is showing Parity-Check in progress with an estimated remaining time of 1,983 minutes. Something seems very wrong. Should I just break apart the array and rebuild it?

Maybe a local RAID array, but not over a network with a maximum theoretical speed around 100Mbps and certainly not to an unRAID protected array which is slower than a RAID array due to the way it works. Peter the connection is 1Gb/s theoretical, not 100 Mb/s. I started copying my 1.38TB of movies over at around 9am. 4 hours later I am about 1/3 of the way through. It says 12 hours remaining but I think that figure is wrong possibly, hopefully anyways, heh. The movies I am copying were copied from my previous Windows 7 hardware raid over ethernet to this Windows 7 station in about 3 hours.

Well, you mean slower to copy to or slower in general? It will still have the speed to stream my 1080p content obviously right? I guess on a side note, is this Apple Time capsule an OK choice for this setup. It worked fine before but now that I am getting seriously into media sharing, I wonder if I need a better router/switch.

So is Telnet a client I can use on my Windows PC and it will mirror what I am typing on the server? A KVM won't do me much good since it will be the only computer in the area. I suppose I could just get the smallest cheapest monitor I can find and I have about a dozen keyboards laying around.

In my searching, I noticed a user who said they had Ubuntu and unRAID installed on their server. What's the reason behind that? The OS runs off the USB stick right?