was wondering if anyone else had one of these? it has a switch to use RAID 0, 1/10, 3, 5, LARGE, CLONE, CLEAR RAID, OR NO ACTION. Im guessing i use LARGE. When i do though they all show up as 1 big drive obviously. So my question is..if one needs to get replaced will it know it? Also shows up in //tower as 1 big drive as well. only way to get it to show drives individually is on CLEAR RAID Setting. I was assuming to use NO ACTION, but that is one big drive as well. Unless its my mobo im using which is a HP dc5750. Hard drives settings are Native ide (which i have it on), Legacy ide, or raid. Everytime i put it on raid it detects jbod - raid 1/0, but im guessing thats the mode im supposed to be using since i see ahci there. I eventually get to root bootup after hard resets and such. Was trying to run preclear and one time it shot out a bunch of commands and wouldn't do nothing. The next time it just froze and rebooted.

 

thanks in advance for any help.

You likely want no action so the drives show up individually. It's likely a SiL PM on the board and those are reported to work with unRAID but you do need a compatible SATA port. The motherboard would have to be set to AHCI to have any chance of working with it.

 

Peter

What motherboard are you using?  As lionelhutz said, an AHCI compatible motherboard is best.  You also want all the drives on the RAID card to show up as individual drives so that unRAID can access them properly.  If CLEAR RAID is the only setting that does that, then use CLEAR RAID.

I guess after i used the clear raid option and put it on no action i can see all drives as singles. Also running great now and no resetting after i took off jumpers off my 2 2TB WD green EARS hdd's. Im running 4.7 and read don't need them. one 2tb EAR hdd precleared in 28hours. the other 2tb EAR hdd was going over 37hrs and didn't look close to done cauz it was going at 2mb/s. Taking off the jumper fixed that problem. Im just glad i didn't have to RMA it like i hear so much about. Hope this helps other people. So basically 5 port multiplier is working great and switches should be set to NO ACTION!

 

Thanks to all who replied.

but isn't using these type of card slowing down the parity check to a halt? 5 drives all running at 80-100mb/s thru 1 port?

You did use the -A option with the preclear, correct?

 

Peter

but isn't using these type of card slowing down the parity check to a halt? 5 drives all running at 80-100mb/s thru 1 port?

 

In theory, you get 300mbps on the SATA port so you could run about 3 drives without any slow-down. In practice, others have reported very good parity check times running 5 drives on a port multiplier. In general, why care if the parity check takes another hour or two?

 

Peter

i haven't got my server raid up and running yet. almost done with preclearing drives yet again. first time i had jumpers on pins 7-8 and read if you change posistion of jumpers it wouldn't read correctly anymore. i didn't take any chances and just precleared them again without the jumpers before i add to array. so far all drives are showing about 100mb/s throughput in preclearing process.

 

The systemboard im using is from an HP DC5750 SFF. had to work some magic to make work in my tower since its a sff mobo. i have it upside down in my chassis with vga and ethernet hooked up and coming out the back. This is all stuff i had laying around and going to be in basement so i didn't care what it looked like. Well, besided the raid pro software i bought and the syba cards. It has 2gb memory, amd 2.4ghz processor, onboard video and ethernet port. 600w Ultra Xfinity ATX power supply which i took out of an old computer. Had to strap on a fan to the processor with zip ties but looks good. i have 2 x WD Green 2TB EARS hdds, 1 x 320GB hdd, and 4 x 250GB hdd's.

WD EARS drives like a little extra attention. Since you removed the jumper, to ensure good performance your MBR should be 4k-aligned. To do this you must preclear with the -A switch as lionelhutz mentioned. Alternately you can use a utility like dd to zero the first few sectors of the drive after preclear and then ensure that the "Settings>Disk Settings>Default partition format:" is set to "MBR: 4k-aligned". Since you are not adding to an existing array, but are creating your array for the first time the preclear signature that preclear_disk.sh creates is not required.

 

Good luck with your build, I'm anxious to hear what your parity check speed is capped at with five drives on a single SATA port. I suspect you'll get something north of 50,000k/sec.

Glad to hear it worked out for you!  I encourage you to add your Syba card to the list of PCI SATA controllers known to work with unRAID:

 

wiki link - PCI SATA controllers

(you have to be logged into the forum to edit the wiki)

 

Please include a link back to this thread in your wiki entry.