Unassigned Devices - Managing Disk Drives and Remote Shares Outside of The Unraid Array

[dlandon]

11 minutes ago, TheSkaz said:

 

 

I have enabled NFS in both places, I am not trying to share out a "device", but a mountpoint/folder. for example, I want to share out /fast/ and /tank/ 

When you set up sharing as explained, you share out the mountpoint set for the device.  e.g. /mnt/disks/mountpoint is shared with NFS.

[Joegauthjr]

On 1/2/2022 at 11:47 AM, dlandon said:

Good.  I see that you are using the server name now and not the IP address.

 

The TRUENAS is responding to a ping because UD lets you click the mount button, but it looks like TRUENAS is not allowing that NFS share to be mounted.  Check your TRUENAS and verify that the share '/mnt/Skywalker/Nikki' is set for NFS sharing.

 

From what I recall, you started having these issues with a sudden power down of the Unraid and the TRUENAS.  Something probably got messed up from that.

Yep, I reinstalled TrueNas VM and now it works

[dlandon]

8 minutes ago, Joegauthjr said:

Yep, I reinstalled TrueNas VM and now it works

Glad you got it working.

[Kurzee]

Quote

Add: Sort UD disk devices by Dev X and not sdX on Unraid 6.9 and greater.

Any chance this could be made optional?  I'm new here, but don't find the Dev X label to be actually useful in any way because it appears to me to be assigned completely randomly.  Before updating this plugin, my unassigned devices were sorted in the order in which they are connected to the backplane in my server, and then the devices connected directly to SATA ports.  They did occasionally change order slightly on reboot, depending on what spun up first, so some consistent sorting is welcome.  But, in my case at least, sorting by Dev X is basically just random and makes identifying specific devices much more difficult.

 

Edit: If I were making a wish list, sorting by mount point would actually be ideal for my use case.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Kurzee

[CamStans]

hi,i mounted an ssd as an UD and formatted it as XFS and copied some files onto it. Then i had to unplug it to plug another one in (not enough sata ports), but now i have all drives sorted and plugged in, the first ssd show up but i cannot access anything on it.the mount button is greyed out and the setting cogs and not clickable. it can see the drive but it is just stagnant . . .If i unplug the device it appears as a historical device where i can see some settings and it looks fine , it is set to share, show partitions and not pass through.

thanks for any insight here as although not critical the files on there are not backed up . . .

[dlandon]

8 hours ago, Kurzee said:

Any chance this could be made optional?  I'm new here, but don't find the Dev X label to be actually useful in any way because it appears to me to be assigned completely randomly.  Before updating this plugin, my unassigned devices were sorted in the order in which they are connected to the backplane in my server, and then the devices connected directly to SATA ports.  They did occasionally change order slightly on reboot, depending on what spun up first, so some consistent sorting is welcome.  But, in my case at least, sorting by Dev X is basically just random and makes identifying specific devices much more difficult.

 

Edit: If I were making a wish list, sorting by mount point would actually be ideal for my use case.

The 'Dev X' label is assigned by Unraid to all unassigned devices.  The device is tracked by serial number and always assigned the same 'Dev X' when it is attached to the server.  The idea behind the 'Dev X' label is similar to the array disks being designated 'DiskX'.

 

How many UD devices do you have that makes identification so difficult?

[dlandon]

1 hour ago, CamStans said:

thanks for any insight here as although not critical the files on there are not backed up .

Linux does not recogize the file system on that disk.  What is the history of that disk?  Was it formtted in UD?

 

FYI, a disk that is passed through will show 'Passed' on the mount button.

Edited January 8, 2022 by dlandon

[dlandon]

Today's release has a fix for SCSI disks that don't show in UD with the dynamix.scsi.devices plugin installed.

[Kurzee]

10 hours ago, dlandon said:

The 'Dev X' label is assigned by Unraid to all unassigned devices.  The device is tracked by serial number and always assigned the same 'Dev X' when it is attached to the server.  The idea behind the 'Dev X' label is similar to the array disks being designated 'DiskX'.

The Disk X label in the array is useful because you can control which disks are assigned to which slots, making them line up to their position in the server.

 

The Dev X label in UD however is useless (from an organizational standpoint) because we have no control over which disks each id is assigned to.

 

10 hours ago, dlandon said:

How many UD devices do you have that makes identification so difficult?

Saying it is "much more difficult" may have been an overstatement.  But currently 12, with another 45 bay JBOD incoming.

 

And once I'm all setup and running, it probably won't matter much.  But if I need to unmount a specific disk later on, ctrl+f will be my friend, because finding it in a list that is not sorted in any way relative to it's physical position will be much slower.

 

I label each disks partition in a way that identifies its location in my server, i.e. 'b00d03'.

In a perfect world, an option similar to the "show partitions" switch, that instead hid the device and showed only the partitions (and sorted by partition label/mountpoint) would be ideal.

[dlandon]

11 hours ago, dlandon said:

The device is tracked by serial number and always assigned the same 'Dev X' when it is attached to the server. 

I was told today this is not true.  I find most of the time the 'Dev X' designation is the same for a device, but it is not guaranteed.

[dlandon]

49 minutes ago, Kurzee said:

Saying it is "much more difficult" may have been an overstatement.  But currently 12, with another 45 bay JBOD incoming.

That's a lot of disks.  I assume that they will end up in your array?

[Kurzee]

1 hour ago, dlandon said:

That's a lot of disks.  I assume that they will end up in your array?

Probably not, unless Unraid greatly increases the number of allowed disks in the array (or allows multiple arrays).

I'm migrating Plex and other normal NAS duties from my Synology to the main Unraid array.  While using unassigned devices for a Chia farm.

[trurl]

6 minutes ago, Kurzee said:

(or allows multiple arrays).

It allows multiple pools of multiple disks separate from the parity array.

[Kurzee]

11 minutes ago, trurl said:

It allows multiple pools of multiple disks separate from the parity array.

Yes, but pools are not really useful for a Chia farm IMO.

[Lev]

7 hours ago, dlandon said:

Today's release has a fix for SCSI disks that don't show in UD with the dynamix.scsi.devices plugin installed.

 

Works! 😃 Thank you @dlandon

[UncleStu]

I apologize if this has been discussed before. I searched but only found one thing semi close to what I was searching for. And this could be a user education moment for me too.

 

unRAID 6.9.2

UD 2022.01.03 (at the time)

UD+ 2021.12.12

 

A little history:

I had a planned power outage in my area, so before the power went out I stopped all my dockers and all but one VM. This VM was server DNS. I also spun down my HDD's as the running VM is on a NVMe drive. Power went out and the UPS estimated 45 minutes of run time. Around the 25 minutes left, I no longer needed that last VM and powered it off. I also initiated a stop to my array. The GUI sat at the dancing bars for 10+ minutes. I refreshed my screen and noticed that UD was trying to unmount the first of four NFS mounts to my Synology NAS. My Synology is on a UPS as well and was still up and running at this point. The NFS mounts are to share disks/directories between my unRAID and Syno NAS. These shares are used for backups and to my Plex docker. Also for backups (off box) and a music share. The music is on my Syno and Plex is on unRAID. I know unRAID UPS cut out before the array stopped as a parity check started when the power was restored.

 

Question(s):

Is there a way to force the NFS unmount after a set about of time so I can get my unRAID shutdown quicker?

I just learned of the Tunable timeout of 330. Seeing as these are disk shares, is it OK to set this to 0? Would it make a difference during the shutdown of my unRAID? 

 

Lastly, the power outage was 4 days ago. Not sure if the diagnostics would yield anything at this point, but happy to collect it if it would have history that far back.

 

TIA

[sixfootsideburns]

Question for the forum that I've been unable to find an answer too:

 

I had an old file server running on a Windows machine that I am trying to migrate to a new UnRaid setup.  This older server had 2x 4TB drives running in mirror via the windows utility, and everything was kosher.  I have since moved, but the Windows server stayed at my old home and my UnRaid server is at my new home (3200 miles apart).  In an effort to avoid transferring everything via FTP, I carried my drives to my new home during a visit.

 

However when I plug in either of the drives to UnRaid Unassigned Devices shows the drive, but they can't be mounted (greyed out).  It looks like UnRaid doesn't recognize a file system, but I know they are both NTFS.  I originally assumed it was an issue with the mirror not being broken, so I carried both drives back to my old home, plugged them into the old system, verified the data, broke the mirror via the windows utility, and carried both drives back to my new home.  No dice, the issue is the same.

 

I've scanned the drives with a few different utilities, and the data looks intact.  Today I scanned the partition with MiniTool and confirmed the file system is indeed NTFS, so I can't figure out what's going on.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts?  My only idea is that Unassigned Devices doesn't like that it is set to a dynamic disk, but don't want to convert to basic without confirming.

 

If anyone has ideas I would be grateful!

[dlandon]

1 hour ago, UncleStu said:

Is there a way to force the NFS unmount after a set about of time so I can get my unRAID shutdown quicker?

NFS and SMB shares are forced to shutdown when the array is shutdown.  Unfortunately, I just found a typo that was preventing that.  I'll fix that in today's release.

[dlandon]

34 minutes ago, sixfootsideburns said:

Does anyone have any thoughts?  My only idea is that Unassigned Devices doesn't like that it is set to a dynamic disk, but don't want to convert to basic without confirming.

It's really not a UD problem.  UD depends on Linux for determining the file system on a disk partition.

 

Does the UD page show anything in the 'FS' column?

[UncleStu]

42 minutes ago, sixfootsideburns said:

However when I plug in either of the drives to UnRaid Unassigned Devices shows the drive, but they can't be mounted (greyed out).

Can you set them to pass through and spin up a virtual Windows machine that can read them? Or do you by chance have an external enclosure that you can put them into and read them off your machine? My initial thought was the Windows Mirror as well, but you have proven that wrong. Aside from putting them into another Windows system and transferring the data that way, the only additional thing I can think of is taking a 4TB USB drive back to your original home and transferring the data to this USB drive. Preferable formatted in something that UD and Windows will like.

 

One more thought, if the mirror pair is identical, you could try converting one to basic and leave the other one alone. And if you are really concerned about data loss and have a spare drive laying around, you could play with the conversion on that spare drive and see if UD could read it.

[sixfootsideburns]

3 hours ago, dlandon said:

It's really not a UD problem.  UD depends on Linux for determining the file system on a disk partition.

 

Does the UD page show anything in the 'FS' column?

 

For sure, I just figured someone in this crew might have a brilliant thought.  Linux really isn't my area of expertise, and there are lots of people smarter than I am around the interweb!

 

To answer your question, UR shows nothing in the FS column which is why I'm so confused.  Only thing I can think of is the system doesn't the disk because it's Dynamic?  I'm not 100% clear on Basic vs. Dynamic but I understand the gist.  Though I have no idea if Linux and Windows would handle them differently?

 

3 hours ago, UncleStu said:

Can you set them to pass through and spin up a virtual Windows machine that can read them? Or do you by chance have an external enclosure that you can put them into and read them off your machine? My initial thought was the Windows Mirror as well, but you have proven that wrong. Aside from putting them into another Windows system and transferring the data that way, the only additional thing I can think of is taking a 4TB USB drive back to your original home and transferring the data to this USB drive. Preferable formatted in something that UD and Windows will like.

 

One more thought, if the mirror pair is identical, you could try converting one to basic and leave the other one alone. And if you are really concerned about data loss and have a spare drive laying around, you could play with the conversion on that spare drive and see if UD could read it.

 

Setting up a Windows VM is a good idea, I'll give that a try first.  But even as a pass through wouldn't I still have to mount the drive?  I never bothered setting up VMs on the new system because I didn't really need them.

 

No spare drives at my new home to mess with unfortunately, but that is a good idea.  I'll keep that in my back pocket for sure.

 

I have hooked up one of the drives via a empty, shucked, WD easystore enclosure but even on a Windows machine it didn't show up except with recovery tools like Minitool.  Any reason to think hardware wouldn't register a non-WD drive?

 

I did consider just messing around with one of the drives because the data is mirrored.  But if I have to bring the drives back to my old home again then I'm a bit paranoid about something happening in transit.  There are a lot of photos on those drives (poor practices, I know) and my wife would probably bury me in the backyard if I did something stupid.  If we lost them to nature or a fluke event?  Maybe I'd survive... but negligence?  Not a chance.

Edited January 10, 2022 by sixfootsideburns

[Vr2Io]

1 hour ago, sixfootsideburns said:

I have hooked up one of the drives via a empty, shucked, WD easystore enclosure but even on a Windows machine it didn't show up except with recovery tools like Minitool.  Any reason to think hardware wouldn't register a non-WD drive?

 

Those WD easystore / element SATA-USB bridge were proprietary, you can't swap normal partitioned disk between shuck partitioned disk or vice versa, no matter disk are WD or not. ( attach picture show partition shift 127MB )

Edited January 10, 2022 by Vr2Io

[sixfootsideburns]

29 minutes ago, Vr2Io said:

 

Those WD easystore / element SATA-USB bridge were proprietary, you can't swap normal partitioned disk between shuck partitioned disk or vice versa, no matter disk are WD or not. ( attach picture show partition shift 127MB )

 

So maybe that's my issue at least for the windows machines, I'll try and get my hands on an external mount.

 

Any thoughts on why I can't mount with UD though?  I would much prefer to transfer files that way to speed things up.  I'll do whatever I have to, but 4tb via network transfer just feels messy.

[Vr2Io]

1 hour ago, sixfootsideburns said:

 

So maybe that's my issue at least for the windows machines, I'll try and get my hands on an external mount.

 

Any thoughts on why I can't mount with UD though?  I would much prefer to transfer files that way to speed things up.  I'll do whatever I have to, but 4tb via network transfer just feels messy.

 

I have make some test on mount Windows format NTFS disk, sdb ( dynamic single disk ) and sdc + sdd ( dynamic mirror disk ), all could mount by UD individual, so no much idea for your case.

 

[sixfootsideburns]

8 hours ago, Vr2Io said:

 

I have make some test on mount Windows format NTFS disk, sdb ( dynamic single disk ) and sdc + sdd ( dynamic mirror disk ), all could mount by UD individual, so no much idea for your case.

 

 

This is super helpful, thanks for doing some testing on my behalf!  I remain stumped, but it seems next steps are to get another external SATA-to-USB hookup and see if that changes anything on a windows machine.

 

In the mean time, anyone have any other thoughts on what I might do to get it mounted?  I'm still stumped as to why my file system shows up correctly in MiniTool but not in UR.