My unraid is doing its parity check right now, at 45000kb/s so that is good for IDE drives.

 

Now, once it is done, I have a few hundred gigs of media to copy over, how do I go about doing that?

 

Do I have to telnet into the box, or can I do this all through windows?  Please tell me windows can access these drives!

 

*edit* been reading about user shares in 4.1, but I need to figure out how to view unraid from my windows box, I don't know how to do this, I think I might have my workgroups not matching?

If the only way you could move around files in unraid was via telnet, none of us would be using unraid.

 

Yes, you can use windows.  There may be faster ways of transferring files, but it isn't like you are going to sit in front of the machine watching them so just copy/paste/leave.

 

 

Bill

So how do I do it from windows, //tower takes me to the management tool, how do I get to the drives themselves to copy files to?

If the only way you could move around files in unraid was via telnet, none of us would be using unraid.

 

Yes, you can use windows.  There may be faster ways of transferring files, but it isn't like you are going to sit in front of the machine watching them so just copy/paste/leave.

 

My favourite way is to use robocopy (a Microsoft utility that you can google to download).  It allows you to do all sorts of neat things like MOVE your directory structure over to the Unraid box, or MIRROR it (leaving the original files/folders intact) and you can also set it to run in the background so that if any files are added/changed on your windows box, it'll synch up the differences to the Unraid server.

 

Oh, it's also VERY fast.  It's a command line utility and much faster than using the Explorer shell drag 'n' drop method.  Also supports recoverability.  I had started robocopy to transfer some files over to the unraid box, and then in the web gui I had brought down the drive I was writing to (forgot I was transferring a hundred gigs of files!) and Robocopy just said "Waiting for remote server to re-appear".  Not a bit lost, and as soon as I brought the share back up Robocopy continued on it's merry way.

 

 

Now that my parity check finished, the drives appear just fine, lol.  I feel silly, guess it is bed time!

 

I will check out robocopy, sounds like it would be worth the speed boost for those large transfers.

 

 

It wasn't the parity check I guess, it was changing my workgroup to match, then it appeared just fine.

 

So I have created my user shares, now my question is, can I write to those user shares, or only read?

 

For example, if I want to rip a dvd, do I need to point to a specific drive still, or can I just point to the user share?

i think you can go right to a user share but it has to be made to export read/write in the Web gui options of Unraid.

 

Craig

i think you can go right to a user share but it has to be made to export read/write in the Web gui options of Unraid.

 

Craig

DO NOT WRITE TO USER SHARES on version 4.1 of unRaid.

Although the web-interface will allow you to create writable user-shares,  the unRaid server will create files written to them in RAM if the share folder exists holding files from more than one physical drives. 

 

If you write a file to RAM

1. It will crash the server if it uses up all the available ram.  (tough to create a 6 Gig file in RAM when you only have 512 Meg of RAM)

2. The file written to RAM will NOT have parity calculated and is not protected against a disk failure by unRaid.

3. The file created in RAM will disappear when you reboot or  power cycle the server.

 

The user-share is create in a ramdiisk. It contains links to the actual files on the physical disks. (similar to shortcuts on windows)

If a share folder exists on a single physical drive, the link might be to a folder on the physical drive instead of to individual files. If a share folder exists on multiple drives, links are made to individual files and the folder holding those links is in RAM.

 

If you write to a user share there is a strong possibility you will be writing to the folder in RAM. If you create a new file in a folder located inn RAM, the file will also be created in RAM.  Once you use up all your ram your server will crash. When you use all the RAM in your unRaid server for files and leave none for the operating system it reacts by shutting down processes randomly to try to make room for your file.  Eventually, a critical process will terminate and you will lose connectivity with the server.  At that point, you will probably need to power cycle or hit the reset button to regain  control.

 

So far, no release of unRaid has writable user-shares working.  It was supposed to be in version 4.1, but Tom recently released 4.1 with an operating system kernel upgrade and with the ability to handle 16 drives instead of 14 in preparation for his newest server hardware offering.

 

We are guessing the 4.2 release of unRaid will allow writable user-shares to work properly.

 

For now, make your user shares READ ONLY.

Export your disk shares as writable and create your files there.  Then, press the SCAN button on on the web-interface to see the new files in the user-shares  (the SCAN step creates all the links I  described)

 

Joe  L.

there you go, what the heck do i know anyways, thanks Joe 

Thanks Joe, good thing I asked!