I just received a new Lime system, attached fresh/new drives and switched on.

 

The system came up with every drive shown in blue (unformatted) but a parity check started immediately. Hmm, I scratched my head and thought that this must be an error. Why the hell should the system do a parity check with unformatted drives. So I pressed the start button (there was no format button).

 

Now it looks as if "parity check" _AND_ "format" are running simultaneously.

 

Does the attached picture look reasonable.

 

Thanks

Harald

 

 

I suppose it is possible for both to occur simultainiously.

(I've never seen it, but parity is calculated on all the bits on the disks, while formatting is just "bits" so disks are often formatted after being added to the array.)

 

Time will tell.  The "formatting" should only take a few minutes... (depending on the size of the drive and speed of the drive, of course)

You should be able to press the "Refresh" button to see an updated "status"

 

I'm sure you are aware, the 1.5TB drives have some firmware issues as earlier firmware caused disks to occasionally time-out on some data requests and on some RAID systems are taken off-line when they time-out.  This is not a huge problem, but might be if two drives do the same thing at the same time.  (Generally a power re-cycle would be required to get them back on-line)

 

Read the thread about it here

 

I've got 2 of the same 1.5TB drives scheduled to arrive today.  Just figured I'd give you a head's up of the need for the firmware upgrade if you were not already aware.

 

Joe L.

 

Edit: added link to 1.5TB thread describing firmware update need.

Thanks for your answer.

 

Things are getting worse.

 

Since 20 minutes four of the drives report "Formatted". There is no write activity on the other drives - but they still show "Unformatted".

 

It took me nearly two hours to come here. Look at these values. Formatting/Parity check will last for weeks ...

 

Is this 4.4 specific? My first system, nearly same Lime machine but pre-4.4, was ready in few hours with 750GB drives. I would expect a time factor of two for 1,5TB drives but this is very slow.

 

I can't upload the syslog currently. I can't connect with Windows and I'm trying to use scp or ssh to transfer the file. No success so far.

 

Thanks

Harald

 

 

Thanks for your answer.

 

Things are getting worse.

 

Since 20 minutes four of the drives report "Formatted". There is no write activity on the other drives - but they still show "Unformatted".

 

It took me nearly two hours to come here. Look at these values. Formatting/Parity check will last for weeks ...

 

Is this 4.4 specific? My first system, nearly same Lime machine but pre-4.4, was ready in few hours with 750GB drives. I would expect a time factor of two for 1,5TB drives but this is very slow.

 

I can't upload the syslog currently. I can't connect with Windows and I'm trying to use scp or ssh to transfer the file. No success so far.

 

Thanks

Harald

It almost looks like it is formatting each drive in turn...  can't really tell from the screen-shot.  Obviously, a syslog would tell more of what is happening.

 

Did you update the firmware on the 1.5TB drives?  If one timed-out, who knows what happens in your situation.  Most people do not have the luxury to start out with so many large size unformatted drives.

 

Since the array is entirely empty, you can power cycle and just start once more.  Next time it will probably find the formatted drives. I've got no experience adding so many drives on 4.4, and even when I did add a drive, I already had parity configured and calculated.

 

Send Tom @ lime-technology an e-mail... he might be interested too.

 

Joe L.

Power-cycle sounds good. That's what I did.

 

The attached picture shows the initial picture that I see now for the second time. No format button - just start. That's what I hit.

 

Now with the power cycle I can send a syslog from this new boot.

 

Thanks

Harald

 

 

I would un-assign the parity drive on the devices page, then come back and "Start" the array.

Once the drives are all formatted, then I'd stop the array once more, assign parity, and then let it calculate.

 

Since you are starting with everything new... you might even consider starting with only one data drive and one parity drive.  Then you can run the other drives through a rigorous preclear_disk session.  In fact, it would not hurt to do that to all the drives, even parity.

 

It all depends on how quickly you need the server to be on-line.  A preclear cycle of a single 1.5TB drive can take 16 hours or so.  (full pre-read to identify marginal sectors, a "write of "zeros" to clear the drive and reallocate bad sectors, and a full post-read to ensure all is well.) 

The preclear_disk.sh script is run from a telnet session, and is described in this thread

 

Joe L.

Hi,

 

with your and Tom's help I'm back on the track. Here are the steps that Tom sent me:

 

1. Power down and remove the Parity drive.

2. Power up, 'Stop' the array, and then click the 'Restore' button (after first clicking 'are you sure' checkbox).

3. Now all drives should show up 'blue'.  Click Start to bring up the array.

4. If there are any unformatted drives present, click Format button - this will take a long time, perhaps up to 30 min.

5. Once format completes, Stop array, power down, and re-install Parity.

6. Power up & start Parity Sync.  You can use the array while parity sync is in progress.

 

The last step, the parity sync, is running at this time.

 

What I learned during some experiments: The new pre-build systems don't work with 4.3.3, version 4.4 is the only release that recognized the SATA drives connected directly to the mobo. The drives connected to the adapters worked all the time. Now I need the 4.4er BubbaRAID ;-)

 

Thanks for all your support.

Harald

 

 

Should be said that the procedure I gave him was for his specific situation.  He had a new system with 15 new 1.5TB hard drives.  We removed parity in order to speed up the formatting process since no user data was yet present on the array.

 

If you are adding a new drive to an existing array, generally you do not want to remove parity!

Should be said that the procedure I gave him was for his specific situation.  He had a new system with 15 new 1.5TB hard drives.  We removed parity in order to speed up the formatting process since no user data was yet present on the array.

 

If you are adding a new drive to an existing array, generally you do not want to remove parity!

 

Oh, yes. Thanks for pin-pointing this. Great support.

 

Harald

 

 

Wow, that is a fast fast fast machine!

 

A couple of little things, it appears that the onboard SATA ports are not configured for AHCI, and are not fully supporting NCQ.  Since your parity drive is attached to one of those ports, it would probably be better to change them to an AHCI or native SATA mode.  I *think* they are in some sort of IDE emulating mode.

 

It was interesting to monitor how some of the initial configuration changes you made were monitored in your posted syslog.  Something you might want to ask Tom about though, is the change you made that is logged about 60 lines from the end of this syslog.  I've never seen it displayed like that.  I realize a syslog is normally lost after reboot, but often they are saved, and this could possibly form a vulnerability.

 

My preference is to recommend burning in each of the brand new drives, but I can understand this will be very hard to sell, to someone just receiving 15 1.5 terabyte drives!  Would probably take a couple of weeks.  But it is still doable, by waiting only for the first 2 to burn in, then starting the array and using it, while using the pre_clear script to burn in the others one by one, adding them incrementally.

RobJ,

 

thanks again for your help and a happy new year from Germany.

 

I've sent a mail to Tom and asked him about both statements you were writing about. I'm somehow crazy about using passwords. I don't use a single password for two userids and the machine itself is sitting behing routers and switches but I changed it immediately. Thanks for bringing this up.

 

I can't measure the performance right now because I'm waiting for some tips how to install mysql on this 4.4-only machine. 4.3.3 does not run on this new type of machine and as farr as I know the current BubbaRAID requires 4.3.3 as a start. I was somehow disappointed about the writing performance, My "old" unraid is faster. So for the initial steps I unassigned the parity drive. The write performance was not signifantly better then. The next day I recognized that I wasn't reading from the "old" unraid - I was reading from one of these Buffalo Teradrives. Now with two unraids talking with each other its fast as hell.

 

Harald