First post and am very glad to have found unRAID and the support community for it. I was originally going to build a FreeNAS box as a home server to store media as well as files from all our machines as needed.  I stumbled on unRAID just as I was set to dive into FreeNAS and spent a week looking through all the information on the boards and support pages.  For my needs, unRAID seems the way to go.

 

The system will be based on an Asus M2N SLI Deluxe with an Athlon 64 X2 at 2.5Ghz, 4 Gig of Ram and initially three 1TB WD Black enterprise drives.  I am in the final stages of putting together the case and installing the drives.  All my hardware shows up on the compatible hardware pages and I am hoping I don't run into any major problems. 

 

My plan is to just go with 5.0 Beta 14.  I went back on forth between the beta and 4.7 and based on many posts, I feel confident the latest beta is stable enough for a noob build.

 

I have installed the sytem files, unMenu and the preclear script to my flash, a Sony 4GB Microvault.

 

I figured I'll start with the basics and all other stuff once the server is up and running.

 

Based on my hardware and system build selection, I would appreciate any suggestions. I still have several hours before I fire it up.

 

All comments would be greatly appreciated and I would be grateful for any and all help since this is my first server build of any kind.

 

Edit:

Since things are going so well with the installation, I thought I'd backtrack to the first post and list the hardware.

Asus M2N SLI Deluxe Motherboard with bios 1804.

4Gig Kingston KVR800D2N6K2/4G

Corsair CX600 PSU

Corsair 500R case - This is one of the best built cases I have seen in a long time.  Plenty of bays and fans.

Sony 4GB Microvault flash drive.

 

SATA Drives:

3-1TB WD Black - Enterprise Drives - Model WD1003FBYX-01Y7B1

1-1TB Samsung Drive Model: HD103UJ

1-400GB Samsung Drive Model HD403LJ

1-500GB Seagate Drive Model 9BJ146-305

 

unRaid 5.0 beta 14

 

 

I regularly reference the excellently written Configuration Tutorial - http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Configuration_Tutorial

 

It covers everything from setting up Networking to installing unMenu, preclearing your drives and setting up shares and adding your data.

 

There's also a lot of info in the other wiki's.

Well, you guys have done a heck of a job taking a new guy by the hand and showing me how it is done. Took me a little while to get the board bios to boot from the flash, but I finally figured it out.  This board reads the flash stick as a hard drive. All you have to do is move that 'hard drive' to the first spot and set the bios to boot from a hard drive.  The system booted right up.  I installed unMenu and screen.  I am typing as my hard drives are whizzing away in the preclear  process.  My drives are not AF, so I just went with the basic preclear command since I was unsure if setting them as AF drives would be detrimental. Was that the right choice, or should I have gone with AF?

 

So far, so good.

 

Thank you for all your work on this project!

 

BTW, I did in fact install 5.0 beta 14. and it is working as advertised in the configuration wiki. Just for grins, I logged out of screen, terminated the telnet session and the drives kept on doing their thing.  I am now logged back  in and it worked just fine.

My drives are not AF, so I just went with the basic preclear command since I was unsure if setting them as AF drives would be detrimental. Was that the right choice, or should I have gone with AF?

 

 

There is a setting on the settings tab under disk settings for "Default partition format". If you set that to "MBR: 4K Aligned" then it will be set for Advanced Format drives and create an MBR-4k-aligned partition starting on sector 64.

 

So depending on how that's set (not sure but I think the default is unaligned, at least for 4.7) and whether you override with -a or -A as a parameter to preclear is what the preclear will do.

 

Even though you have older drives, from what I've read it's ok to use "4K Aligned" on those drives.

 

You can convert using the -C 64 parameter with the preclear script after it's completed preclearing the drives (but I think before you add them to your array).

 

Thank you for the idea.  I will see if I can find information on the implementation of the command to have the preclear change them over before I add them to the array.

 

 

Info on preclear is here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2817 along with the Config Tutorial I linked earlier.

 

Here is info on AF drives: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9936.0 and in the wiki here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Advanced_Format_Drives

Thank you. I have been using some of those references to run the script.  I used the -? command to get the syntax to convert the drives once the pre-clear process is complete.  I'm just waiting for the first to finish. A little over 5 hours and the smaller drives are almost done. 

 

Based on following the process, I suspect one of my drives is going to fail.  I now remember why I had it lying around. It had started acting up with Windows XP and I pulled it.  I see many errors in the unMenu snapshot of the system log. 

 

I'm really glad I decided to take the long way and run the pre-clear. I had the urge to just get with the server configuration and skip the pre-clear process.  I now see the value of testing the drives in this manner.

 

The command should be something like ./preclear_disk.sh -C 64 /dev/???

The command should be something like ./preclear_disk.sh -C 64 /dev/???

exactly.

As it turns out, I won't get to try that command on this go.  Last night I was in my easy chair and monitored the progress via my laptop.  I had a telnet session open and inadvertantly hit some combination of keys that stopped the process.  I could not re-establish the process and ended up just giving up.  So, I had to start over and let it run over night.  Still running, but should be on the latter stages of the pre-clear.  Telnet is new to me, so I need to learn the command structure and syntax when I get some time.

Don't forget "screen" in the future...which allows the preclear to continue when the telnet session is disconnected.

As it turns out, I won't get to try that command on this go.  Last night I was in my easy chair and monitored the progress via my laptop.  I had a telnet session open and inadvertantly hit some combination of keys that stopped the process.  I could not re-establish the process and ended up just giving up.  So, I had to start over and let it run over night.  Still running, but should be on the latter stages of the pre-clear.  Telnet is new to me, so I need to learn the command structure and syntax when I get some time.

 

Try the following to avoid this:

 

 

Preclearing

 

Multiple pre-clearing cycles are good, 3 is a good number. They will however take a lot of time.

Note that if you start preclear by telnetting into the server from your pc the preclearing is dependent on your pc continuing to work (a reboot of your windows box will stop the preclear, this can be prevented by using "SCREEN" (it will make sure the preclear will continue even with your windows box shut down)

 

The following commands will have you covered on both (3 cycles with screen and sending reports on progress by email):

 

cd /boot

screen

./preclear_disk.sh -M 3 -c 3 /dev/sd?

 

Don't forget "screen" in the future...which allows the preclear to continue when the telnet session is disconnected.

I have been using screen all along.  I was in screen when I pressed who knows what combination of keys and it 'stopped' the process.  I could not figure out a way to restart it, so had to back out and start over. The screen works very well and I tested that before I ever got going.

Here is a good reference when needing to reconnect to screen

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=18741.msg167621#msg167621

There it is!  That's what I couldn't figure out. Just needed to add the number values to the command.  Oh well, live and learn.

Something slightly odd going on with my last disk. I started them all at the same time and all but one are done. All other driver screens are closed and when I hit CTRL-A n, I seem to be getting another window for the same drive. Both pre-clears are close in where they are in the process.  Is it possible that I inadvertently started two preclear sessions for the same drive?  Should I stop one, or let them finish up?

It is possible.

If that is the case, do you recommend stopping one preclear.  I note the run times are almost 1 minute apart.  I really suspect I created a double screen for the same drive in my frenzy to get things going....

Disregard my last question. I decided to check the logs of the completed preclears and noted that there was one drive I never precleared, although I thought I had started them all.  What I did, was do one drive twice.  As soon as I closed the screen for the duplicate entry, my access speed went from 32Mps to 96Mps.

 

I really should pay more attention and stop staying up all night working on this.

 

Thank you for all the help.

Since I messed up earlier, I decided to just stop the system and take a look at what drives had been precleared and which have not.  Just to be on the safe side, I rebooted the server and used the command to verify the signature on each drive.

 

./preclear_disk.sh -t /dev/sdX

 

It turns out this  was a worthwhile check. All 5 drives had been precleared with a starting sector of 64.  Who know what I did when starting the screens to start so many preclears.  I was way tired and must have made several entries. 

 

Now, on to getting the server up and running....again, thank you all for your help.

Server is up and running.  Set up user shares and will wait until tomorrow to start moving files over.  This is going to be nice!  Thanks again for all the help on this thread and everyone's work on the support wiki.

 

Started transferring files and believe I have an issue with network transfer speeds. My NIC is Gig capable and the router and switches are as well.  In a windows to windows test, I get huge transfer speeds.  However, I seem to only be getting about 17Mbps to the server, with no parity drive.  The 17Mbps is reported by the Network Performance function of unMenu. My windows XP machine is reporting a 1Gig connection and showing only a 27% network utilization. 

 

I cannot disable acpi in my server bios, it is greyed out.  I tried the acpi=off in the syslinux.cfg, but that did not make a difference.  Any ideas? 

Show the outputs of "ifconfig" and "ethtool eth0".

Here's where I get to show what a noob I am.  I have the results in a putty screen.  Now, how do I copy that information to a file to upload, or paste?

Something slightly odd going on with my last disk. I started them all at the same time and all but one are done. All other driver screens are closed and when I hit CTRL-A n, I seem to be getting another window for the same drive. Both pre-clears are close in where they are in the process.  Is it possible that I inadvertently started two preclear sessions for the same drive?  Should I stop one, or let them finish up?

just let them both finish.  Easier than trying to figure out which to kill.

Joe, thank you.  I ended up stopping all the sessions and I had planned on starting fresh on any drives that were not precleared.  As it turns out, all drives had the preclear signature and were recognized as such when added to the array.  Who knows what the heck I did when I was working on that. 

 

BTW, thank you for all your help on these boards.  I have seen your posts on many, many threads.