So fed up

[lukesaber]

Love the premise of Unraid. Fantastic solution to an expensive problem!

 

now for the vent;

 

There's no way to control on-boot behavior!

- if i need to make a hardware change, or modify my pool, or devise allocation i have to wait FOREVER for whatever is 'required' to finish.

- if part of my cache pool is missing, the unmount process hangs and turns into a zombie. GREAT for when a drive fails! I'm STILL dealing with this headache.

- having a method of boot selection (stay stopped, start array, maintenance mode) would save a TON of headaches - especially when a hardware failure causes a reboot.

 

Default settings for efficiency are non-existant!

- check out a google search for 'unraid slow' and WOW is there a lot there!

- sure, the community steps in to help out and solve problems, but why cant the default OS come with some forethought?

- plugins that should be default to array maintenance are not there

 

Cache drives and mover operation are obtusely vague

- is my cache pool a combination of drives, or a mirror?

- can i choose the operation?

- MOVER - ho wow.. what a peach this thing is - where is the status window? - where is the error log?

- took me a long long time to figure out that because my array was too full to copy-and-replace an updated file, the cache pool stayed full, CPU spiked every 10 seconds for 20 seconds due to IOWAIT issues

- an error log would be DIVINE - or perhaps a high-level notification, "yo, cache is borked because your array is full" - oh, ok great, lets (next point)

- STOP the mover! where is that button?

 

Zero testing or diagnostic tools!

- how about a transfer test of the drives?

- give a readout of the bus speeds, drive read speeds, write speeds

- make it easy to identify a bottleneck

- testing of NICs

 

i love that you guys have produced an awesome product - time to start fixing the bugs and polish the gears.

Just paid for an upgrade to add more drives, proving that this product is not dead.

 

Hoping this finds you well and hoping the future is easier

 

unraid 6.8.3 and unraid 6.5.3 (issues persist on both versions)

[nicksphone]

18 hours ago, lukesaber said:

 

- give a readout of the bus speeds, drive read speeds, write speeds

- make it easy to identify a bottleneck

dont know about your other issues but if you click the speed guage looking thing in the corner of your drives on the main page you can switch from number or reads and writes to speed of them. this will help find drive bottle necks. 

 

Unraid is slow because of the mutliple reads writes it has to do when your moving data this is the price you pay for being able to put any size drive in at any time. you can speed this up abit by enabling turbo write this limits the number of drives used to do this.

 

Im sure alot of the gripes you have, have a plugin made to handle it. as far as your booting issues that is what the safemode with and without plugins is for.

Edited June 25, 2020 by nicksphone

[lukesaber]

nicksphone -- thank you!

 

The drive read/write toggle helps out a LOT with bottleneck diagnosis - it would be nice if there were a decent manual explaining these features

 

I will investigate turbo write - i'd be happier to see a feature that mimics a raid10 array (mirror striping for twin-drive read speeds but this will help when transferring.

 

Thanks for your tips and reading my gripe.

 

Love unraid, but can be so much more.

 

Luke

[trurl]

20 hours ago, lukesaber said:

a high-level notification, "yo, cache is borked because your array is full"

There are utilization thresholds for each disk/pool. Have you set up Notifications?

[nicksphone]

39 minutes ago, lukesaber said:

nicksphone -- thank you!

 

The drive read/write toggle helps out a LOT with bottleneck diagnosis - it would be nice if there were a decent manual explaining these features

 

I will investigate turbo write - i'd be happier to see a feature that mimics a raid10 array (mirror striping for twin-drive read speeds but this will help when transferring.

 

Thanks for your tips and reading my gripe.

 

Love unraid, but can be so much more.

 

Luke

Check out this channel dude has all kinds of tuturials watch all the intro videos he has you should have a better grasp of unraid if you follow along. if you want raid 10 speed unraid is not for you. the hack is have cache drives large enough for a days worth of data and let it move it to the spinning rust at night.

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZDfnUn74N0WeAPvMqTOrtA

 

Edited June 25, 2020 by nicksphone
added stuff

[lukesaber]

turls - i have tried notifications, emails etc but when i did it seemed the feature was broken - no emails were ever sent to my address.

I could try it again, times have changed? Thanks for the tip

 

nicksphone - i'm a youtube junkie so i will give him a go! thank you

 

Achieving raid10 speeds wont be possible with unraid, i get it... its why we all chose unraid - cheap hardware!

Later on, providing a mirroring array as a feature would be a stunning blow to the raid hardware community.

 

Thanks for your help guys

[Squid]

3 hours ago, lukesaber said:

i have tried notifications

Did the test email succeed?  If you're using something like gmail, you also have to allow in your account settings to allow insecure connections (not that it's "insecure", but rather that it's not an email client using it)

[trurl]

3 hours ago, Squid said:

Did the test email succeed?  If you're using something like gmail, you also have to allow in your account settings to allow insecure connections (not that it's "insecure", but rather that it's not an email client using it)

Or you can set up gmail Notifications on your server with an "App Password":

 

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en

 

 

[lukesaber]

notifications work well now trurl, Squid - thank you. Made a gmail account specifically for the purpose and now its doing well.

 

I decided to devote some more time to tuning and would like to share some things i learned - there's another thread on MD_ tuning

 

link: 

 

 

using this, excel and some reading i was able to SIGNIFICANTLY increase my read, write and parity check speeds - also the ease of use while performing a parity check.

Usual speeds were 50-60mb/s and now i get about 100mb/s... which is an incredible improvement.

Not 4k uncompressed, and probably 'burst' (testing was done with a 750mb file) but still an impressive leap in throughput.

 

While i think the road for Unraid is uncharted, with many improvements to come - i ask... why are these tunable settings not investigated and made dynamic?

 

If the default system build was for 512mb of ram, why cant the OS detect on boot how much ram there is?

Providing an option to further tune these variables without having to make a .cfg file by hand would probably be pleasing to many.

 

Again, thanks for listening to my gripe - you both improved my experience significantly, and perhaps someone may stumble on this and add features to the OS.

 

Luke