About 3:00AM this morning, I was unzipping with winrar several zipped TV episodes (That were stored in a temp folder on unRAID.) About 10 minutes into the process the PC lost communication with unRAID, No matter what I tried, nothing worked. So I had to do a hard reboot of unRAID. (I didn't know any other way of getting it back up and running.)

 

 I then went to bed about 4:)) AM, when I got back on my PC parity was running, and had been for about 2 hours. (7 hours later it is at just 19.3%) At the rate it is going 15-16 MBs it will take another 20-30 hours.

First of all, is it normal to run parity on its own?

 

 Also the folder that the zips were in are gone, I will wait until parity is complete before rebooting. I hope they are just in limbo and will return, as I have more then 300 Gigs of media in that folder.

I will add an Cache drive, but in the mean time had to get those un-named (Or miss named) media files off the hard drive that will become the cache drive.

I am running 4.5.3, and I have seen others have similar issues with this version.

 

 Is there a way to NOT allow parity to run at will? I don't know anything about command line mumbo-jumbo. If parity is going to run every day or two, and take 25-35 hours to run, this is NOT going to be acceptable at all.

 

 Thanks in advance for any help and advice.

Hi MikeL, if it is automated parity checks that you'd like to setup, have a read of the link below:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5567.0

 

I integrated this into my system, and now I have a monthly parity check occur the 2nd day of every month starting at 2am in the morning. Hope this helps.

I don't care if unRAID runs parity on its own, but I DON"T want it running all the time. I ran it on Friday, and it took 21+ hours. It is running again (This time I did not invoke it.) and after 14 hours it is at 37.9%.) This is unacceptable to be running this often. That means it will be running pretty much round the clock 24/7

In your original post, you didn't reboot your unraid server gracefully. Having said that, if you don't gracefully power down your server properly (ie: web gui, main page, stop array shut down unraid server) or issuing the 'powerdown' command pending it is installed, you'll get a force parity check as the file system on all your disks we're not unmounted properly.

You can schedule this at a monthly date and time when it suits you, which in fact is a good idea, but it isn't something that occurs unless you did what you did. Depending on size of your array, disks, speed of the buses/interfaces, it can take a few hours to even up to a whole day.

Since you forced a shutdown un-gracefully unRAID has no way to know parity is correct.  Therefore upon reboot it will automatically perform a full parity check.  It is only because you did not cleanly stop the array first before powering down that the parity check is being performed.

 

You probably ran out of memory when you were un-raring the TV episodes.  When you run out of memory unRAID starts terminating processes that have been idle the longest...  It is possible that emhttp, the unRAID web-interface was idle the longest and one of the first to be terminated in the attempt to free up some memory.

 

Son yes, it is very normal for unRAID to run a parity check if it is not shut down cleanly.

 

Some others have posted on how you can schedule an automatic monthly parity check, that is a different subject. 

 

If all the files you were un-raring are gone, it indicates to me you may have some file-system damage.  You'll need to run a file-system-check on each of your file-systems.  Odds are one or more may have some corruption.  Instruction on how to check the file-systems are in the wiki here :    http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Check_Disk_Filesystems

 

You asked if there is a way to not have parity run after a non-clean shutdown.  Basically the answer is no.  Parity will not run every day if you stop the array first before powering down. But, first it must complete a full parity check Until it does that and marks parity as good it will want to run the parity check.

 

So... Step # 1.  Post a syslog.  Instructions under troubleshooting in the wiki.

Step 2.  Let the parity check complete.

Step 3.  Stop running un-rar processes. 

Step 4.  Run the file-system checks.  Fix any file-system damage.  Odds are the first check will suggest additional options.

Step 5.  Run a full memory check, preferably over night, to ensure it is not the cause of your system crashes.

 

Joe L.

Thanks for the explanation.  I ran the mem check for 24 hours just before I started the transfer of files last week.

Here is my unRAID specs.

 

  Case: NORCO RPC-4020

  PSU: Corsair TX750W

  CPU: Athlon II X2 240 ADX240OCGQBOX 2.8GHz AM3

  Stock Cooler

  Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA785GT-UD3H AM3 AMD 785G chipset ATX

  Memory: G.SKILL F3-12800CL9D-2GBNQ DDR3-1600 2 x 1GB Kit

  Graphics: Radeon HD 4200 (integrated in the chipset)

  HBA: Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port SATA Controller PCI-X Card

  OS:  unRAID 4.5.3 on a preconfigured 2 gig pen drive (Lime-Tech)

  Parity drive:  2TB Seagate ST32000542AS (5900rpm)

  Storage drives: six 1.5TB WDC WD15EARS (5900rpm)

  four 1.5TB ST31500341AS (7200rpm)

 

 Drive temps for the WD 5900 Green drives never go above 33-35*C while the older 7200 rpm SG drives go to 41-42*C.

If this is accurate, the new green drives run a lot cooler. (The server is in its permanent home, the basement that never goes about 65*F, and never below 58*F)

 

 Would it be a good idea to up the memory to 4 gigs?

 

 The files that weren't showing up in the shared folders are there if I look in the drive folders. (I didn't know this at the time of my OP.) This must be some sort of bug in unRAID 4.5.3

That motherboard doesn't have a PCI-X slot, so how are you running a 'Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port SATA Controller PCI-X Card'?

 

Upgrading your RAM to 4 GBs won't affect your transfer speeds at all.  It will only be useful if you run particular add-ons, such as torrents.

That motherboard doesn't have a PCI-X slot, so how are you running a 'Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port SATA Controller PCI-X Card'?

 

 

The card will run in a normal PCI slot.  Might explain the relatively slow parity speed.