cepler Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 Been reading up on unRAID and at first must say I didn't think much of it and moved on to FreeNAS, OpenFiler etc. But I've thought about it more and am seriously considering a nice server build around it...so, I'm researching my hardware... Drive trays, motherboards, cases, power supplies etc, aren't any problem, I can figure those out... USB Flash drives however concern me. Especially with the requirement for registration. What also causes me concern is the horribly LONG boot times I'm experiencing with my 256 meg Cruzer Micro flash drive. Granted, it's not the fastest drive out there but I'm curious, what are YOUR boot times? With what flash drive? I'm almost thinking this is running at USB 1.1, it's that painfully slow...let me time it... Holy cow that was long....11 minutes! This HAS to be doing USB 1.1..gonna have to go check that, tell me you don't take that long to boot this! And my other concern is I'd like a flash that is small as well as fast. So given those, what would people recommend? How are the Super Talent drives? They look pretty small and the Picos claim a decent xfer rate...but not sure on their quality of chips used, likely not that great I'm sure. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 Been reading up on unRAID and at first must say I didn't think much of it and moved on to FreeNAS, OpenFiler etc. But I've thought about it more and am seriously considering a nice server build around it...so, I'm researching my hardware... Drive trays, motherboards, cases, power supplies etc, aren't any problem, I can figure those out... USB Flash drives however concern me. Especially with the requirement for registration. What also causes me concern is the horribly LONG boot times I'm experiencing with my 256 meg Cruzer Micro flash drive. Granted, it's not the fastest drive out there but I'm curious, what are YOUR boot times? With what flash drive? I'm almost thinking this is running at USB 1.1, it's that painfully slow...let me time it... Holy cow that was long....11 minutes! This HAS to be doing USB 1.1..gonna have to go check that, tell me you don't take that long to boot this! And my other concern is I'd like a flash that is small as well as fast. So given those, what would people recommend? How are the Super Talent drives? They look pretty small and the Picos claim a decent xfer rate...but not sure on their quality of chips used, likely not that great I'm sure. What options did you use when invoking "syslinux" on it? Iknow that use of the "-s" option will slow things down a lot. Other than that, look in your BIOS. That is where the USB 1.1 vs USB 2 are set. Also, sometimes, not all the USB ports are the same speed. If you have more than one, try it. Boot times should not be 11 minutes. a minute or two is more likely. Sounds like you are at USB 1.1 speeds. Joe L. Quote Link to comment
cepler Posted April 27, 2009 Author Share Posted April 27, 2009 It's something with this motherboard. I tried it on my desktop and it booted a HECK of a lot faster. (That's the board I'd probably end up using for the storage server anyhow so...) Not sure what's up on that system...it's set to enable USB 2.0 etc etc..did recently replace the CMOS battery so maybe it's time to just do a total clear on the CMOS...*shrug* Tried all the ports on-board, they should all be USB2 anyhow. Quote Link to comment
jupilerman Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 How old is your mobo ? 11 minutes, that's 4 minutes less then me. You can try a kicker disk for booting or a HD (now i boot from a HD and it only takes 30 seconds). Those thread can help you out. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=244.0 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=244.msg21554#msg21554 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=267.0 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2487.0 Quote Link to comment
aaronjb Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 Takes a couple of minutes to boot here, and that's with the bigger BubbaRaid image (+100Mb or so over the standard initrd image), my own custom kernel, and vmware starting up and autobooting a couple of VMs.. and that's on a cheap (slow!) PNY USB key.. Quote Link to comment
cepler Posted April 27, 2009 Author Share Posted April 27, 2009 How old is your mobo ? 11 minutes, that's 4 minutes less then me. It's a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Rev 1.0, guess somewhere around the 2003-2004 timeframe. It's a decent board, for a P4 anyhow, 2.8 GHz P4. It's gotta be running in USB1.1 mode. My DFI LanParty desktop (main system) board boots it up lightning fast by comparison. But I know this board supports USB 2.0, must be a bug in the BIOS where it gets stuck in 1.1 mode on boot or something. Oh well...just have to wait until I do my system upgrade and swap parts around but at least now I feel better about the boot times Quote Link to comment
Romir Posted April 27, 2009 Share Posted April 27, 2009 I have a pro key on a 512mb Cruzer Micro and an 8gb Corsair Flash Voyager. The difference is night and day. My Cruzer is garbage and hopefully is in the process of dying, because the performance is unacceptable otherwise. Copying BubbaRaid onto it took 45 minutes for a point of reference. Different motherboards and bios seem to vary wildly in boot up speeds. The three Asus boards I've used load the bzroot image rapidly while another loaded it slow enough to count the individual dots. When unRAID fully loaded on that board, the flash benched at its full USB 2.0 speeds. Edit: Yeah, it's dying. Its always been slow from day one though! Quote Link to comment
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