heffneil Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 I know this has been discussed at length but I now have 4 - 3tb drives that I have precleared. The question is what do I do with them in 4.7? Upgrading to a beta isn't an option for me no matter how good it is. I'm not sure I should have pre cleared these normally but I gave it a shot. Took 48 hours for each drive! Holy cow! So what are my options and what is everyone else doing? Thanks! Neil Quote Link to comment
pantner Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 from my understanding the ONLY way to use 3TB drives in UnRaid is to use 5.8beta or higher. 4.7 does not support them. There are no special switches to use while preclearing, no tricks, its either upgrade from 4.7 or use 2TBs instead. I don't know if you are able to limit the space on them and use them like 2TB drives in 4.7... Quote Link to comment
One2go Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Search for HDParm and you will find your answer. On 4.7 you have to reduce the 3 TB drives to 2TB or 2.2TB your choice depending on your parity drive. Find out the number of sectors of your parity drive and then do the HDParm thingy to create a drive equal to or less then your parity drive so you don't have to replace or do a new parity drive because the drives you added are bigger. Quote Link to comment
opentoe Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 I know this has been discussed at length but I now have 4 - 3tb drives that I have precleared. The question is what do I do with them in 4.7? Upgrading to a beta isn't an option for me no matter how good it is. I'm not sure I should have pre cleared these normally but I gave it a shot. Took 48 hours for each drive! Holy cow! So what are my options and what is everyone else doing? Thanks! Neil Good luck man. I've been heckling myself about getting 3TB support in a stable release. It is really holding the users back that don't want to use a beta for their critical data. Right now I'm looking into getting a Synology 1511+ with a couple add ons to support more drives. The awesome thing about this Synology is the write speed is 165MB/sec and the read speed is even more, almost 200MB/sec. While there are things you can't do, they aren't limitations. Quote Link to comment
Johnm Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 you really have 3 choices.. 1 run a beta (so far so good for me and everyone else, i have yet to hear of someone loose data with a 3TB drive in the betas) 2 you shortstroke your 3tb drives to a 2 or 2.2 TB drive. 3 you wait for a stable release (that now has a wrench thrown in it with the bad kernel/driver issue) @ opentoe... LoL.. sorry but i wont spend $800 a glorified drobo plus $1,000 for the 2 add on docks (without any drives). for half that price you can build one hell of a hardware of zfs2 raid server. The purpose of unraid, low power consumption mass storage across mixed drives. unraid has its place, and is not for everyone... but i bet your unraid would be handy to back up those synology boxes... you could also switch to 7200 rpm drives if you want better performance. perhaps an SSD or raid cache drive... save some cash. up to you. Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Just some food for thought. Once 3TB support is added to a 4.x stable... It becomes unstable because it has to go through the betas. I suppose the only benefit would be a tried and tested kernel, but we still have to consider the new test cycle. I don't know what's holding back 5.x at this point. But I do feel the frustration with it too. I'm on the verge of building a new 24 drive server and I don't know if I should tell the customer to bite the bullet and purchase 3TB drives or go with 2TB drives for now. Quote Link to comment
heffneil Posted October 27, 2011 Author Share Posted October 27, 2011 I understand and agree with all of you above. I guess the question is this: Lets say I take a drive and short stroke it to 2.2 and make one my parity and add one to the data pool because I need the extra 200 gigs and the parity has to be equal to the biggest drive (right?). So I do that and everything runs ok. I am sure I can find out on this forum how to do that with HDParm. Next question is when 5.x is released and supports 3 TB drives then what? Can I expand them or do I need to reformat / preclear again?! Just wondering what is next. I am sure that is a loaded question only because 5.0 isn't out yet and no one really knows but I guess I am trying to get comfortable with my options for now. I would hate to load up these 3 TB drives as 2.2 or 2.0's and then have to shuffle data around to get them to expand when the time is right. Thanks! Neil Quote Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 I understand and agree with all of you above. I guess the question is this: Lets say I take a drive and short stroke it to 2.2 and make one my parity and add one to the data pool because I need the extra 200 gigs and the parity has to be equal to the biggest drive (right?). So I do that and everything runs ok. I am sure I can find out on this forum how to do that with HDParm. Next question is when 5.x is released and supports 3 TB drives then what? Can I expand them or do I need to reformat / preclear again?! Just wondering what is next. I am sure that is a loaded question only because 5.0 isn't out yet and no one really knows but I guess I am trying to get comfortable with my options for now. I would hate to load up these 3 TB drives as 2.2 or 2.0's and then have to shuffle data around to get them to expand when the time is right. Thanks! Neil I don't have a definitive answer, but I would guess that the drives will need to be reset with HDPARM to the correct size. Then precleared and formatted. You may need a spare drive to use as a leapfrog drive. Quote Link to comment
One2go Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Once you set the drives back to 3TB size they will appear to UnRaid as new drives and you have to go through the process of adding a new drive. This does require some juggling of content. I am standing in front of the same door http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15848.0 Quote Link to comment
Johnm Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 if you short stroke the drive and then want to replace it later. you will need a spare 3TB drive. you would preclear the spare drive, while it is doing that, run a parity check. once those are done, replace the parity drive and rebuild parity. i would then test parity one more time (optional). take the drive you just removed and set it back to full size and preclear it if you want.. (or use another spare drive) stop the array and replace a short stroked drive with a full sized 3TB drive. repeat the last part as needed. once for each short stroked drive. If you have 5 short stroked drives, expect to spend a week expanding your array, longer if you only have 1 extra drive due to preclear times. while it takes a while, you dont need much interaction. most of this is set and forget. after the first drive and parity, you already have more usable space... Quote Link to comment
One2go Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 If you have 5 short stroked drives, expect to spend a week expanding your array, longer if you only have 1 extra drive due to preclear times. while it takes a while, you dont need much interaction. most of this is set and forget. after the first drive and parity, you already have more usable space... Thanks for the tip on the time it takes and the time to expand the array certainly will enter into the equation to upgrade or mot to upgrade to 5B12a. Quote Link to comment
opentoe Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 you really have 3 choices.. 1 run a beta (so far so good for me and everyone else, i have yet to hear of someone loose data with a 3TB drive in the betas) 2 you shortstroke your 3tb drives to a 2 or 2.2 TB drive. 3 you wait for a stable release (that now has a wrench thrown in it with the bad kernel/driver issue) @ opentoe... LoL.. sorry but i wont spend $800 a glorified drobo plus $1,000 for the 2 add on docks (without any drives). for half that price you can build one hell of a hardware of zfs2 raid server. The purpose of unraid, low power consumption mass storage across mixed drives. unraid has its place, and is not for everyone... but i bet your unraid would be handy to back up those synology boxes... you could also switch to 7200 rpm drives if you want better performance. perhaps an SSD or raid cache drive... save some cash. up to you. @ Johnm I've seen guys building servers for several hundred dollars without the hard drives. I paid $150 just for my Seasonic power supply. Spending $800 for the main 1511+ system really isn't that far fetched for what you get. Right now I am using all 7200 WD Black drives. These would perform much better in the Synology anyway. Right now, it all happens to be about the money. I'll wait until the end of the year to see what happens here. If no change, I'll have to move on. I do not want to spend anymore money on 2TB drives. Quote Link to comment
heffneil Posted October 28, 2011 Author Share Posted October 28, 2011 I really have to say I feel like I am between a rock and a hard place now. I did pre-clear my drives at 3.0 TB. Does the beta require a license? I would imagine it does. But I have another box I could screw around with but then I would have to buy yet another license. I will email Tom and see... Thanks, Neil Quote Link to comment
prostuff1 Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 I really have to say I feel like I am between a rock and a hard place now. I did pre-clear my drives at 3.0 TB. Does the beta require a license? I would imagine it does. But I have another box I could screw around with but then I would have to buy yet another license. I will email Tom and see... Thanks, Neil No, all versions of unRAID, beta or otherwise is free for the 3 drive version. Quote Link to comment
Johnm Posted October 28, 2011 Share Posted October 28, 2011 and the other side of the coin, your 4.x license will upgrade to 5Beta and 5 at no additional cost. Quote Link to comment
heffneil Posted October 28, 2011 Author Share Posted October 28, 2011 Yes I understand that but in order to make this work I think I need to migrate to another box. I will check it out. Thanks, Neil Quote Link to comment
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