Special offer: Second Key for 30 bucks


limetech

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My 2-cents: I see the appeal of using a reader, and I really wish these things exposed the microSD card s/n, but they don't.  AFAIK all G3's are unusable, and we have run across G2's with duplicate GUID's.  Even if your GUID appears unique don't be surprised if it gets blacklisted in the future.

 

My recommendation at this time, and what we ship with the "preconfigured flash" products, as well as all server products is the SanDisk Cruzer Fit:

http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/drives/cruzer-fit/

 

This device is extremely small and also has pretty good write performance.

 

The G3 work fine! I was booting unRAID to get the guid for all of my checking, the code was one mSD card so it was easy. This ease of swapping is why folks want this and DON'T want the guid from the card passed through. To date I've gone through two USB provided by unRAID in the past (might have been 3x) and at least 2 others over the years. Yes the failure rate is low but when they die you lose access to all of your data and I've never had a warning prior to the failures. I've never had an issue getting replacements but the down time is always a bummer.

 

Since this is for testing its no big deal and maybe it would be best I look for a small dedicated stick. I do think the next time I see a failure or if I can get a replacement for the stick I believe I've lost I'll try to go mSD though just so downtime is near zero if it occurs again on something I rely on...

 

 

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I have 4 of the G3's and they are usable. I use the Micro SD card slot on my G3's in the HP Micro Server.

One of the two slots that are not detected right away.

You have to adjust the bios correctly and if both slots are occupied or changed there could be difficulty.

 

While it's said the failure rate is low, my cards seem to fail about every 2 years or so.

The larger the card, the less often the failure rate since there are many replacement cells.

It also depends on how full the card is.

 

Keep in mind even if you do not write to the card.

Everytime a configuration is updated or the array is updated/stopped, The superblock is updated.

Everytime a file is edited with vi, a .swp file is created and removed.

 

Since I do put a number of boot and configuration files on my /boot flash, It's understandable why they fail.

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If you're concerned about flash drive failure ...

 

I know some folks have configured systems to boot from a hard drive (or SSD), and just access the flash drive to confirm the GUID to validate the license.    This is fairly common with virtualization.

 

I have NOT tried this, but I suspect it would work ==>  it would seem that you could configure a 2nd flash drive as the boot device, with the licensed UnRAID flash drive on a 2nd USB port.    This would drastically reduce the usage of the licensed flash unit -- and put all the "wear and tear" on a flash drive that could be replaced at will.    Basically this is the same as installing on a hard drive, but wouldn't waste a SATA port (or drive bay).

 

However ... as I noted above, and Tom also commented on ... flash drive failure is a VERY low-incidence event in my experience (although WeeboTech's experience has been somewhat different).

 

 

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I'm buying one to support Tom's ongoing efforts! <3

 

My recommendation at this time, and what we ship with the "preconfigured flash" products, as well as all server products is the SanDisk Cruzer Fit:

http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/drives/cruzer-fit/

 

This device is extremely small and also has pretty good write performance.

 

Tom, with Xen being included what will the impact be on boot times?  Would there be any real benefit from getting an expensive high performance USB3 drive?

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Tom, with Xen being included what will the impact be on boot times?  Would there be any real benefit from getting an expensive high performance USB3 drive?

It only takes a few seconds to first load the Xen hypervisor and then it immediately loads the unRaid 'bzimage' and 'bzroot' files.  The latter takes a little longer because the size has increased.  If you have a fast CPU then going USB3 probably would decrease boot time.  To me it wouldn't be worth it, but if you shutdown/reboot a lot maybe it would.

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Just got my new key (thanks Tom) so I could try unRAID 64-bit.

 

I know I could just copy everything on the flash from my 32-bit installation, replace bzroot, bzimage, and the go file with the files in unRAID64, replace Plus.key with my new one, and delete /boot/extra, /boot/plugins, /boot/config/plugins. But I would rather start even cleaner than that.

 

I think all I need to have it recognize and let me start my array is certain things from my 32-bit /boot/config folder. Somebody help me complete (or trim) this list:

 

the folder named shares

disk.cfg

flash.cfg

ident.cfg

network.cfg

share.cfg

super.dat

 

If I copy these from my unRAID 32-bit flash to my new flash containing only the contents of the unRAID 64-bit distribution, and add my new Plus.key will I be able to start the array without having to add drives or sync parity?

 

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I suppose that would get me most of the way, but wouldn't I still have to add cache and configure share settings?

 

Yes -- you'd have to add your cache drive and if you have specific restrictions on your shares you'd need to set those.  I THINK the share settings are all in share.cfg, so you could just copy it from the old drive.

 

Just depends on just how "clean" you want to start off  :)

 

I would rather start even cleaner than that.

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The one thing that's not clear is super.dat. It's not exactly human-readable but looks like it has the serial numbers so I think it must be the most important.

 

May be ... but it seems simple enough to just assign the disks to the new key.  If you don't want to wait for a parity sync, just be sure parity is good before you switch keys (i.e. do a parity check); and then check the "Trust Parity" box.

 

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Just tested a huge number of USB sticks for R/W speed! Not strictly necessary I know but I bought about 4 of them to find a good candidate for a second key and yet another mSD reader too. Naturally the mSD reader had a GUID that showed up in a Google search and appears to be in use by an unRAID user <sigh>.

 

So, tried everything from small sized PNY sticks to a TINY EMTEC stick (tempting to use due to size), multiple Sandisk (one was pretty bad!), to a MicroCenter generic green stick (wow, it was more consistent than most and faster than my Sandisk sticks!), till I finally went back to my first one a USB 3.0 stick from Patriot. In a USB 2.0 slot it was very consistant and faster than the others if not by very much. In a USB 3 slot it increased speed a good bit although sadly my test mobo has no USB 3 socket.

 

We used to test sticks at work so I know they vary wildly between manufacturers and didn't have a chance to find out what their current fave was but I think this ruggedized Patriot will be the winner. 16Gig is overkill but it was under $20 and the smallest USB 3 that Microcenter had in stock. <shrug>

 

Anyway, I hope this is food for thought for folks and I'll be registering this ASAP for testing! :-)

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I decided on using one of my existing 32GB Patriot Supersonic Boost XT, I ran crystal disk mark on it an am pretty happy with the result and it was pretty cheap (32GB preforms better than 8/16GB, apparently).  I've been using the a 4GB USB2.0 version of the same stick for years on my prod unraid without issue.

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