March 5, 201412 yr Issue with Unraid server upgrade. I have an old Unraid build that I wanted to upgrade the motherboard and add some larger HDD’s. Old system is an AMD X2 Toledo 2.2ghz dual core, 4gb DDR 3200 ram, Corsair 550w single rail PS, Asus A8N-SLI deluxe MB and Adaptec 1430sa qty2 SATA PCIe cards. I’m pairing this with three 5x3 SATA hotswap bays for a total of 15 drives in an old Thermaltake Armor full tower case. New build is ASROCK C2550D4I Intel Avoton 2.4ghz board. I bought 8gb (2x4gb) of DDR3 1600 ram Kingston HyperX , going to reuse the power supply and one of the Adaptec 1430sa card for a total of 16 sata connections. Plus I bought a total of five 3TB HDD’s Well 1st thing I did before taking anything apart was do a parity check, update to the latest unraid 5.x, backup my USB Flash and print out my drive config. I then installed new motherboard, memory and adaptec 1430sa card. Installed all the old drives just the way they were in my old system. Booted up and WOW, everything was so much faster. I put the array on line and everything seemed the way it should be. My next step was to replace an old 300GB Maxtor drive that was amazingly still going strong with a 2 TB Hdd (my parity drive was 3TB FYI) but this is where things started to go wrong. I got a bad drive error (red dot) on the drive. I ended up playing around with things to get it to work. I would sometimes reboot and have missing drive /drives in Unraid that were listed in the Bios. I would get red dots on several Hdd’s I tried. What I ended up doing is doing a New Config and put the 300gb Maxtor back in and not running a parity drive. This was the only way I could get my array and shares to work correctly. Every time I would redo parity sync there were 4 drives that would get errors and the log stated that it could not read those drives. I’m not able to post log at this time. So I then moved the drives around and tested the new config again with parity sync and it was four new drives the server couldn’t read. I figured it would be the same connections on the MB but only three were. One was a totally new connection but the same SATA controller (MB has three of them) Oh, also once the errors started to happen I would stop the parity sync and stop the array. Once the array was stopped the four drives that were green dot, but reporting errors, all disappeared and the red dot with unassigned listed was there with no Hdd’s. Basically the drive just disappeared. On reboot they would be in bios but only if I hit New config would they show up again. And even then sometimes one of them wouldn’t. Well I just confirmed today it is defiantly a hardware issue. I ripped all the new hardware out and put the old stuff back in. booted up (took forever, lol) and did the new config again. Parity sync was 100% completed with zero errors. My array is running like it was before. So my next step is going to be changing out cables and testing connections on the new hardware. Only other thing I could think of is that there is some sort of compatibility issue with this server series board and Unraid. Well, comments are welcome. Hopefully I can resolve this issue or the board is going back. I really liked the 12 SATA’s though.
March 5, 201412 yr I had issues with my board and I had the 8 core version. I had slow reads and write. 20-40MB versus 60-100MB on my old q9450. Returned the board and got haswell i7 4770s and working perfectly. I think it will take awhile for those types of boards to have bios fixes and/or any drivers needed. Also, your power supply might not be able to hand that many hard drives. Look at the 12v amps for it as most people say you should have about 3 amps per hard drive (more power to bootup) and a few amps for motherboard and fans.
March 5, 201412 yr What version of unRAID ? I have the C2750 version and had some similar problems. Unlike hackztor my write speeds have been 70-100. I had a couple red balls that I attributed to bad power cables and a hard reboot but drives rebuilt successfully. I replaced all my sata cables and bought a new Molex to 3 sata power cable. A few things you can try are, make sure the bios is updated, I turned off aggressive link on the sata ports in the bios and I turned off the hot swap on every port. I have an older 2T green drive that was too slow sometimes for the bios to pick up so I made it the third drive behind two other sata II drives. I am running unRAID 6/xen with an app vm and mythth backend vm for almost 2 weeks now with no problems. The only thing I ever see in the log is once in a while a particular sata port will resync. I don't see any drive errors and have run several parity checks in the 90s with no errors.
March 5, 201412 yr Also I think there may be a similarity between both of your experiences since I am just using the on board sata controllers and you guys have add-on cards. Also there is an option in the bios to allow above 4GB on pci or 64bit or something to that effect. And my power supply is 400 watts with 33A on 12v. Make sure your sata power connectors are tight as well as cables. My power supply came with 6 sata power cables that are nice and tight but I used some old Molex to single sata power cables that weren't and had problems.
March 5, 201412 yr Author Also I think there may be a similarity between both of your experiences since I am just using the on board sata controllers and you guys have add-on cards. Also there is an option in the bios to allow above 4GB on pci or 64bit or something to that effect. And my power supply is 400 watts with 33A on 12v. Make sure your sata power connectors are tight as well as cables. My power supply came with 6 sata power cables that are nice and tight but I used some old Molex to single sata power cables that weren't and had problems. Thanks for the tips. I actually removed the add on card 1430sa to eliminate that as the issue. I only transfered one file to test write speeds to cache and it was +60mb/s on the write with an old 200gb HDD I had been using. Once I have everything solved I will install the new Samsung 128gb ssd drive I bought. I will test out some of the setting after I flash the bios. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
March 5, 201412 yr Author The version of unraid I'm using is 5.05. And as for my power supply. I should be fine. It is a Corsair VX series single rail 550 watt rated 41amps o the 12v 80 plus rated Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
March 8, 201412 yr Author i updated the bios from 1.1 to the latest 1.4. i turned off the hotswap and aggessive link. Speeds seem normal and parity check is running good without dropping drives like it was before. i will report back final speeds once i have all my new drives in place. but so far so good. my final config is going to be: seven 3TB 7200rpm drive (one of these is parity) 6gb/s sata two 2TB 5900rpm drives 6gb/s sata five 1TB drives 5400rpm 3gb/s sata one 128gb SSD Cache drive 6gb/s sata total of 27TB of storage spanned over 13 drives plus cache and parity (15drives total) all in three 3x5 istar hotswap bays
March 10, 201412 yr I wonder which solution fixed it for you. Be a shame if you couldn't turn on the hot swap and use those nice bays you have there like they where intended.
March 22, 201412 yr I've also been struggling with getting my server upgraded with a new C2550D4I motherboard, and it sounds like I'm having similar issues. I had several disks redball, and I noticed a lot of ata resets, and other read errors with disks attached to the Marvel 9230 controller. It looks like the SATA ports coming from the Atom chip work fine though. I'm going to try a BIOS update and change some SATA settings for the Marvell controller, and see what happens. This is a big upgrade in terms of performance and features from my old Atom 330-based NAS, so I really hope I can get it working!
March 23, 201412 yr Update the bios and turn off Aggressive Link Power Management on the sata controllers. Not sure if turning off hot swap helps our not. But I was getting the ata resets even on the Intel sata controller. I have been running for a month now with no problems. I have the 8 core version.
March 23, 201412 yr Nice to see the Avoton board is working well with the latest BIOS and a few "tweaks." I know a few folks simply returned the board, but it's nice to see that by "hanging in there" you've got it working nicely. It's certainly a VERY nice board with superb power consumption -- a nearly "perfect" choice for UnRAID Plus systems. Could you post your average read, write, and parity check speeds?
March 23, 201412 yr The first few days with 2 red balls were fun. I think the ALPM was causing file system corruption. My power usage sits between 30 & 35 watts right now. It hits 60 when doing a full movie scan in plex. I haven't had time to make sure some non array drives are spinning down. The write speeds are about 70MB/s, last parity check average was 79MB/s but read speeds are still not right which are the same as previous system at 40MB/s. This is reading from an array drive or cache directly. Might be network related or tunables. Haven't had time to check out. I have a separate SSD for vm's. I'll can try copying from the array to it.
March 24, 201412 yr Superb write speeds ... disappointing read speeds still. This board certainly has a LOT of potential ... hopefully a couple more BIOS updates and it'll be a home-run
March 24, 201412 yr I did some tests copying from array to SSD cache and VM SSD and got in the mid to high 80s.
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