Sanity check - 24 drive bays

[uaeproz]

1 minute ago, SSD said:

That is awesome! Nice setup, and ready for more!

Can’t wait to fill it up with drives. I’m thinking of These drives. What’s your opinion on these drives. These are HE12 SAS 4Kn

[uaeproz]

http://store.supermicro.com/hdd-a12t-sm0f29580.html

[SSD]

4 minutes ago, uaeproz said:

http://store.supermicro.com/hdd-a12t-sm0f29580.html

Never seen supermicro branded drives. They probably don't make them. Likely manufactured by WD, Seagate, HGST or Toshiba. 

[uaeproz]

1 minute ago, SSD said:

Never seen supermicro branded drives. They probably don't make them. Likely manufactured by WD, Seagate, HGST or Toshiba. 

Yeah it’s HGST HE12

[SSD]

Hgst heliums are great drives! Just don't stick a pin in them!

[uaeproz]

7 minutes ago, SSD said:

Hgst heliums are great drives! Just don't stick a pin in them!

Lol why do you say that. I’m assuming because it’s helium filled?

[SSD]

Yes, just s joke. Balloons are filled with helium, and a pin will make them pop! 

[CHBMB]

Yes, just s joke. Balloons are filled with helium, and a pin will make them pop! 

So do air filled balloons!

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

[uaeproz]

[uaeproz]

Guys, can you please have a look on the bios setup and confirm everything is in order?

 

 

[uaeproz]

FWIW I’ll be installing windows VM. 

[uaeproz]

Is there a benefit of having 2 parity drives? Or is it just about size.

 

I mean, is it going to be faster in backup?

[pwm]

1 minute ago, uaeproz said:

Is there a benefit of having 2 parity drives? Or is it just about size.

 

I mean, is it going to be faster in backup?

The number of parity drives is all about how many drives that can fail without any data loss.

[uaeproz]

1 hour ago, pwm said:

The number of parity drives is all about how many drives that can fail without any data loss.

Gotcha

[SSD]

1 hour ago, uaeproz said:

Is there a benefit of having 2 parity drives? Or is it just about size.

 

I mean, is it going to be faster in backup?

 

If you have 2 parity drives and two drives fail at the same time, you can rebuild them both. That is a pretty unlikely scenario if you are keeping on top of your drives' health. Slightly more likely is you have a drive fail and while rebuilding it a second drive has a read error, and the second parity can engage to make sure that you do not have corruption in the rebuild. This has actually happened a few of times in unRAID history. And if you have a flood, and are lucky enough to only loose 2 drives, dual parity is helpful (happened once or twice). If you don't have hot-swap drive cages, it is QUITE likely that when you have a drive fail, and while swapping out the disk with a new one, you will knock a cable loose on another disk. If a second drive drops offline (even it it didn't actually fail) while the first drive is building, the second parity allows the rebuild to complete anyway. And then afterwards you can fix the second failure, which is likely a loose cable. (You could have recovered from this second failure with some effort, but the second parity makes it much easier and less likely you'd have any corruption as a result). 

 

If you have hot-swap cages and have been around the block with unRAID, the second parity protects you from such an unlikely scenario that having it is of little value IMO. You are exposed to other low probability risks like fire, theft, falling Chinese space stations, etc. These are as likely to cause total loss as limiting loss to just two. 

 

If you didn't devote a disk to second parity, what could you do with those funds or that disk? One - you could buy some of those hot swap cages. They are extremely useful in preventing the almost inevitable cabling snafu that happens when you stick your fat hand into a jumble of cables to unplug one. And swapping a disk is a 5 minute exercise. With the cages, it is the cages that are plugged and the drives go in from the front. You never touch the cables and never have a risk of them getting jostled (except on the rare occasions you are installing a new motherboard or another cage or moving to a different case - things that happen very rarely). If you can't tell I think they are a necessary investment - and would come before second parity if it were my money. A second parity disk could easily run $300, and for that you could get 5 5in3 cages.

 

What else could you do? You could use that second parity disk as a backup disk. Backup the most valuable data that you say is backed up but you know the backup of woefully old and incomplete. A 8T, 10T, or 12T disk would back up all of your non-media files, and even a lot of media too. Take it to your parent's/sibling's/friends house for safe keeping. That backup would protect you from virtually anything that you would survive.

 

So you have good backups, you have drive cages, and you have this extra disks you are doing nothing with? Second parity is a great idea. Or say you are a new user and subject to making mistakes? A second parity would protect you from some of them? Or say you have a maxed out array of 20 or 25+ drives. Maybe then it makes sense to have that extra parity.

 

That's my $0.02 on dual parity for what it is worth.

 

(#ssdindex - Do I need dual parity?)

[uaeproz]

Thank @SSD

 

I don’t think I’ll be using dual parity for the probability of risks being minimal and it doesn’t call for it. 

[trurl]

12 hours ago, SSD said:

if you are keeping on top of your drives' health.

 

This is pretty easy to do with V6. Setup Notifications.

 

12 hours ago, SSD said:

If you don't have hot-swap drive cages, it is QUITE likely that when you have a drive fail, and while swapping out the disk with a new one, you will knock a cable loose on another disk. If a second drive drops offline (even it it didn't actually fail) while the first drive is building, the second parity allows the rebuild to complete anyway. And then afterwards you can fix the second failure, which is likely a loose cable. (You could have recovered from this second failure with some effort, but the second parity makes it much easier and less likely you'd have any corruption as a result).

 

While actual multiple disk failure is unlikely, this scenario happens quite frequently on the forum. So I would say it depends a great deal on the diligence of the individual whether or not dual parity is worthwhile.

 

 

[uaeproz]

5 hours ago, trurl said:

 

This is pretty easy to do with V6. Setup Notifications.

 

 

While actual multiple disk failure is unlikely, this scenario happens quite frequently on the forum. So I would say it depends a great deal on the diligence of the individual whether or not dual parity is worthwhile.

 

 

I’ll take my chances with one parity. I’ll try to be diligent though, those 12TB HDD are not cheap lol. 

 

Having said that, my M.2 SSD cards are running extremely hot at idle. Without even being assigned, in the range of 62-63 Celsius. Is that normal? What is the normal peak during write/read?

[uaeproz]

Ok never mind, I found the data sheet for those NVMe card. 

 

Operating: 0 °C to 80 °C (components temperature) Non-operating: -40 °C to 85 °C 

XG3.pdf

Edited March 11, 2018 by uaeproz
Typo

[uaeproz]

Remaining things to do:

-having 2x cache in Raid 0 with XFS file structure. I’m trying to locate a post that talks about that. 
-Automated frequent balancing. Complete command just copy and paste. I’m not expert in command lines. 
-Automated frequent cache backups. Complete command just copy and paste. I’m not expert in command lines. 
-Automated frequent scrub. Complete command just copy and paste. I’m not expert in command lines. 

[JorgeB]

14 minutes ago, uaeproz said:

having 2x cache in Raid 0 with XFS file structure. I’m trying to locate a post that talks about that. 

Only btrfs is supported for cache pool, xfs only for single device cache.

[trurl]

56 minutes ago, uaeproz said:

Automated frequent balancing. 

Why?

 

59 minutes ago, uaeproz said:

Automated frequent cache backups.

CA Backup plugin will backup your appdata. Whether or not it makes sense to backup other things on cache depends on your usage. The original purpose of cache was to speed up writes, with data written to cache then later moved to array. In that scenario, backups become more of a question of what / how do you backup array data. And of course, now we have redundant cache pools, so what / how do you backup anything, cache and array. Different people have different methods according to their needs, and unfortunately some seem to think redundancy is a substitute for backup.

 

1 hour ago, uaeproz said:

I’m not expert in command lines. 

There are some example scripts around the forum. Check the threads for the User Scripts and Unassigned Devices plugins.

[trurl]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

1 hour ago, uaeproz said:

Automated frequent balancing. 

Why?

Coming back to this, distributing files across disks is the purpose of user shares and can be controlled at the time files are originally written by use of the settings for each user share. The most obvious setting for this is Allocation method, and I recommend keeping the default setting of High-water.

[uaeproz]

On 3/13/2018 at 3:16 PM, trurl said:

Why?

 

 

I read somewhere in the forums @johnnie.black is saying cache needs to be balanced every month.

 

On 3/13/2018 at 3:16 PM, trurl said:

CA Backup plugin will backup your appdata. Whether or not it makes sense to backup other things on cache depends on your usage. The original purpose of cache was to speed up writes, with data written to cache then later moved to array. In that scenario, backups become more of a question of what / how do you backup array data. And of course, now we have redundant cache pools, so what / how do you backup anything, cache and array. Different people have different methods according to their needs, and unfortunately some seem to think redundancy is a substitute for backup.

I will get the CA Backup plugin, Thanks!

 

 

[uaeproz]

Ok, this is what I have done. I made a single cache with XFS FS and I added the other NVMe card in the list of drives and I will dedicate it for VM. How's this for a configuration?