Ok good to know. Thanks. Now that the array is up and running shouldn't there be numbers in the read/write columns of each hard drive? They are all zeros.

Ok i guess I never noticed. I guess the numbers aren't cumulative. They only change when something is happening.

@Wody, question for you. You mentioned in a previous post that one of the mobo's I was talking about's PCIE slots were only for video cards. How can I tell what the PCIE slots are for, what am I looking out for? On my new Mobo the Supermicro, on the board itself it says CPU next to the PCIE slots, now I'm sure that's not what I think it is, but was wondering if you can point me to some where to educate myself to know what to look for in Mobo and what PCIE slots are designated for. Thanks.

 

By the way I put that SAS LSI card in slot 3. Hope that's the right one as I think slot 1 is for graphics.

7 hours ago, Cartierusm said:

shouldn't there be numbers in the read/write columns of each hard drive?

On the right and above of the array/pools is a blue icon, if you click that it switches between speed per second, and total number of reads/writes, which only change if something happens, as you found out. It can be confusing if you're expecting a big number of read/writes and see the speed being 0. So check if it says /s (for per second) or not and check the icon.

38 minutes ago, Cartierusm said:

@Wody, question for you. You mentioned in a previous post that one of the mobo's I was talking about's PCIE slots were only for video cards. How can I tell what the PCIE slots are for, what am I looking out for?

 

By the way I put that SAS LSI card in slot 3. Hope that's the right one as I think slot 1 is for graphics.

A long time ago, it didn't matter what slots you used, but at some point the video cards became faster than the slot (like PCI) was capable of, so you got special slots for the video card like AGP that were faster. Then PCIe came, and it's supposed to be universal, so I don't know why graphics cards only PCIe slots even exist, but they do. In your case, it says it in the manual, so that's how you can know, but if it doesn't say anything, you should assume you can put whatever you want in there (as long as it follows the PCIe standards of course).

 

So you can put both the graphics card and HBA in slot 3, or 1, or whatever, traditionally the slot used with a graphics card would be closest to the processor, which is slot 6, and in your case that would be the best one to use too, because it's an x16 slot, while HBAs typically are only x8 so slot 2, 3 or 4 would work best for that. Since slot 3 and 4 automatically switch between x16 and x8 x8, I'd put it in slot 2 for a more direct connection (but for HDDs it doesn't matter).

 

Slot 1 is only an x4 and linked to the PCH (platform controller hub, or the chipset) so typically you wouldn't use that unless you have to, or for low-speed things like a card with extra ports (like 2.5gbit networking).

Gotcha. Thanks, again.

 

I was reading that newer versions of Unraid, I'm using 7.0.1, with a cache using BTRFS automatically TRIMs. If that's not true how often to have it TRIM? it gives me, hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.

I'm not sure if it automatically trims, or if the filesystem has a similar function. So I would enable it anyway if it isn't enabled. How often you should let it run, depends on how intensely you re-write the contents, because trim lets it check what space is no longer used and can be erased, so if you have a lot of apps that change things often, you'll want to run it more often, and if you only have things that get read a lot but not changed, you can run it a lot less.

 

Operating systems seem to default to weekly, so that's what I have set it to. Running it more often won't hurt anything, since trim just tells the drive that it can do this operation, but its firmware decides when it is needed to actually do it.

Cool Thanks.

A bit of a revisit on this. Server is working flawlessly and many thanks for the help. My power bill has been abnormally high so started tracking down what the problem is. Came across my 10G TP Link Switch and it's so hot you can't touch it for more than a second. Turns out this is kind of common, but all that heat comes from power consumption. So I'm looking at going to fiber as suggested. Could use a crash course in it and maybe a card recommendation that will work with unraid and my Supermicro X11SPI-TF MOBO and a switch.

I would recommend a used Mellanox X3 (with 4x PCIe although your board has a lot of 8x slots available) with SFP+ cages.

Power consumption will drop a bit (not a lot, TP uses about 5,1W per port, Fiber goes <0,5W per port. This sums up, but if you have only ONE port, you wont notice it at the bill very much)

and your fingers are safe again 😁

(You can also use DAC connection if it is in close range (<3m), will also be much cooler and consume less than TP)

Great. Thanks.