October 18, 201015 yr Hi all I built my Unraid server around Toms original Intel motherboard. I've updates the software over time and added SATA cards. It has been 100% reliable for years. I have a mixture of PATA and SATA drives. So far no drives have failed but I am planning for the day when my luck runs out. I have 2 more SATA ports open but it occurred to me that if I fill all of my drive ports I will be in trouble when a PATA drive fails as new PATA drive seem scarce. The options as I see them at that point are: 1) restore the data from the failed PATA drive from the parity drive to an existing SATA drive that has enough room on it to hold the data from the failed drive. (I do not believe Unraid can do this. It would be great if it could, so please correct me if I am wrong). 2) Try an find a new PATA drive to replace the failed drive. If PATA drives are no longer available I'd be in trouble. 3) Anticipate a PATA failure and copy the data from the largest PATA drive to an existing SATA drive and remove the now empty PATA drive from the system to have a backup if one of the remaining PATA drives fails. Are there other options? Would it be wise to use one of my remaining SATA ports to add a large SATA drive and copy over the data from all of the existing rather small PATA drives and then remove the PATA drives from the system? Thanks in advance for your advice.
October 18, 201015 yr 1) restore the data from the failed PATA drive from the parity drive to an existing SATA drive that has enough room on it to hold the data from the failed drive. (I do not believe Unraid can do this. It would be great if it could, so please correct me if I am wrong). No can do in unRAID 2) Try an find a new PATA drive to replace the failed drive. If PATA drives are no longer available I'd be in trouble. 3) Anticipate a PATA failure and copy the data from the largest PATA drive to an existing SATA drive and remove the now empty PATA drive from the system to have a backup if one of the remaining PATA drives fails. Are there other options? Would it be wise to use one of my remaining SATA ports to add a large SATA drive and copy over the data from all of the existing rather small PATA drives and then remove the PATA drives from the system? If you still have PCI slot available, why not use a PCI SATA card. There is not an issue to use PCI SATA as long as you understand its limitation.
October 18, 201015 yr I too started with the Intel board. I think at some time you will have to replace your motherboard. For now I would recommend option 3. Since I don't know the size of your drives or how many you have it is difficult to advise beyond that, for me parity check times became an issue forcing me to upgrade my motherboard.
October 18, 201015 yr IDE drives are fast becoming extinct. Most new motherboards are coming with zero IDE ports. The IDE drives you own are getting older, and replacing one of the drives will become increasingly more expensive, especially compared to the cost of buying SATA drives. And the largest IDE drive ever made (as far as I know) was 750G - and I'm not even sure you can buy them anymore. The beauty of unRAID is really in its ability to adapt and expand into the next generation of hardware. If your data stored on my unRAID server is valuable and you want to continue to use unRAID, now woulld be a good time to make a hardware upgrade. Buy 2 2T drives ($180), and add them (one as parity and one as data) to your existing array using your last 2 remaining SATA ports. Once added, consolidate all of the data on your smaller drives onto the 2T data drive, and drop the IDE and smaller drives from the array. Depending on your needs, you might find that you can operate with your existing motherboard and controller in this configuration, buying more 2T drives as needed. But you would be limited to the PCI bus and likely start to run into performance issues. If so, I would recommend upgrading your MB, CPU, memory and PSU (~$250) to a current vintage. Find a MB with 6 SATA ports and PCIe slots with the expandability you forsee needing. No guarantees, but such a new system would likely keep you for 4-5 more years until disk technology evolves again. By then we'll be looking at 8T drives and 4x speed improvements and no one will want to run those ancient SATA drives anymore!
October 18, 201015 yr Author Thanks for the advice Right now I have 12 drives (4 PATA, one is a cache drive) and the rest are SATA. I think that I will copy the contents of my largest PATA drive over to a SATA drive and remove the large PATA drive and keep as a spare. I appreciate that I may need to upgrade to a new motherboard soon. I've been contemplating a 15 drive set up. The death of my first PATA drive will likely motivate that move.
October 18, 201015 yr Thanks for the advice Right now I have 12 drives (4 PATA, one is a cache drive) and the rest are SATA. I think that I will copy the contents of my largest PATA drive over to a SATA drive and remove the large PATA drive and keep as a spare. I appreciate that I may need to upgrade to a new motherboard soon. I've been contemplating a 15 drive set up. The death of my first PATA drive will likely motivate that move. I am not familiar with the specific Intel board that Tom originally used. Does it have some PCIe slots? Or just PCI? How many SATA ports on the MB? What size is your parity?
October 18, 201015 yr Thanks for the advice Right now I have 12 drives (4 PATA, one is a cache drive) and the rest are SATA. I think that I will copy the contents of my largest PATA drive over to a SATA drive and remove the large PATA drive and keep as a spare. I appreciate that I may need to upgrade to a new motherboard soon. I've been contemplating a 15 drive set up. The death of my first PATA drive will likely motivate that move. I am not familiar with the specific Intel board that Tom originally used. Does it have some PCIe slots? Or just PCI? How many SATA ports on the MB? What size is your parity? The original Intel board Tom used has PCI slots only. PCIe did not yet exist. It has 2 SATA ports on the motherboard. Joe L.
October 18, 201015 yr The original Intel board Tom used has PCI slots only. PCIe did not yet exist. It has 2 SATA ports on the motherboard. Joe L. Did it have a fast (66 MHz) PCI bus? thebobs, sounds like you are running 10 drives off PCI bus (one cache so that would mean 9 array disks). Would be interesting to know your parity check speeds. Some recent users have asked about running a few PCI-based drives and there is really no good "real-world" data on parity check speeds with PCI bus drives with a modern unRAID version.
October 18, 201015 yr The original Intel board Tom used has PCI slots only. PCIe did not yet exist. It has 2 SATA ports on the motherboard. Joe L. Did it have a fast (66 MHz) PCI bus? Unfortunately, No. I have 11 data disks + parity i do not use a cache drive at all. Never had the need for more "write" speed. The two largest disks are 1TB and are SATA connected to the motherboard SATA connectors. (one of them is the parity disk) Parity checks with all disks involved are around 12 to 13 MB/s at the start. The speed gets up to around 30 MB/s when only the two largest SATA drives are being checked.
October 18, 201015 yr Author In terms of parity check speeds. I get around 15 mB/s so its a bit slow, but I only do this once a month so it has not been an issue for me.
October 24, 201015 yr Author Well I removed my largest PATA drive after moving the data off and all is well. Well nearly so. The removed drive is listed as not installed. Everything seems to work fine, but this is just a tad inelegant. Is there a way to re-order the existing drives and have the system ignore the "missing" drive. I searched and did not find instructions on this. Thanks
October 24, 201015 yr Well I removed my largest PATA drive after moving the data off and all is well. Well nearly so. The removed drive is listed as not installed. Everything seems to work fine, but this is just a tad inelegant. Is there a way to re-order the existing drives and have the system ignore the "missing" drive. I searched and did not find instructions on this. Thanks Did you try moving the last drive into the empty slot. unRAID may give you an option to start the array. (You'd have to click a checkbox under the start button to enable the start button.) If that doesn't work, refer to this wiki article. This is will definitely work. Just make sure to take your time and follow the procedure correctly.
October 25, 201015 yr Well I removed my largest PATA drive after moving the data off and all is well. Well nearly so. The removed drive is listed as not installed. Everything seems to work fine, but this is just a tad inelegant. Is there a way to re-order the existing drives and have the system ignore the "missing" drive. I searched and did not find instructions on this. Thanks You are removing a drive from the array. You must initialize a new disk configuration without the disk you removed and (presumably un-assigned) Stop the array un-assign the drive you removed Log in via telnet or on the system console and type: initconfig to set a new disk configuration. (basically it will forget about the un-assigned drive) Respond to its prompt with "Yes" (Capital "Y" and lower case "es" ) A side effect of this is the immediate invalidation of the parity calculations based on the prior disk configuration. Then, back on the web-browser, go back to its main page (refresh the browser if already there) All the drives will appear as "blue" (don't worry, the contents are unaffected) Then press "Start" to start the array. It will perform a new parity calculation based on the new disk configuration. When it is done you will have parity protection once more. Joe L.
October 26, 201015 yr Author I went through the initconfig procedure and parity was rebuilt, but I only remember the unassigned drive having a blue dot. Maybe I typed yes instead of Yes during the initconfig. I'll try again
October 27, 201015 yr Author Joe I repeated the initconfig procedure. I did not get a prompt where I could reply "Yes". I types initconfig and hit return. The system came back with an "x". When I typed "Yes"if came back with a command not found error. All drives had a blue dot except for the removed unassigned drive which is designated "uninstalled" and has a grey dot. Parity calc is underway. It will take about a day. This is what happened last time so I suspect teh removed drive will still show up as "not installed" I wonder if this is because I removed a PATA drive from a mixed PATA/SATA system?
October 27, 201015 yr Joe I repeated the initconfig procedure. I did not get a prompt where I could reply "Yes". I types initconfig and hit return. The system came back with an "x". When I typed "Yes"if came back with a command not found error. All drives had a blue dot except for the removed unassigned drive which is designated "uninstalled" and has a grey dot. Parity calc is underway. It will take about a day. This is what happened last time so I suspect teh removed drive will still show up as "not installed" I wonder if this is because I removed a PATA drive from a mixed PATA/SATA system? What version of unRAID are you running? (This is important, as some commands changed over the versions) It has nothing to do with you removing a PATA drive from a mixed system. You should have Stopped the array first. Then use the "Devices" page to un-assign the disk you do not wish to remain in the array Did you perform those steps? Those are the same regardless of the version.
October 28, 201015 yr Author Jo Thanks for taking th etime I'm running 4.54. The parity rebuild is now complete. Same result. happy array but drive 6 is "not installed" I did the steps just as you say stop the array unassigned the removed drive on the devices page telnet and perform initconfig (never did get a prompt to enter yes) go back to web page (all drives show with blue dot except the uninstalled drive, is shows as gray dot and not installed) hit Start to rebuild parity The parity
October 28, 201015 yr OK... from what you described, all went exactly as expected. The un-assigned drive should show as not-installed. Your older version did not prompt for a "Yes" when invoking an initconfig command. I think the prompt was added in 4.5.6. As long as all the drives not have green indicators, and as long as the parity calculation finished, you should be just fine. Am I missing something? What looks wrong to you? Joe L.
October 29, 201015 yr Author Thanks again Joe Nothing is functionally wrong. It just seems inelegant to have a "not" installed drive listed on the webpage. I believe I have full functionality other than that. I can live with a not installed drive in my list
October 29, 201015 yr Thanks again Joe Nothing is functionally wrong. It just seems inelegant to have a "not" installed drive listed on the webpage. I believe I have full functionality other than that. I can live with a not installed drive in my list I suppose not-assigned would be more accurate... It does not look odd to me... as up until a week ago I had a slot un-assigned for a over a year, purposely, to be able to test how unMENU acts with an empty slot in the array. There is nothing that says the slots need to be assigned in order as you grown your array. Joe L.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.