Ears format question

[Bags]

I am buying one of the WD ears 2 tb drives and an external hd case. My plan is to copy my data to it first, clean up the files, and then transfer it to the shares on my server. When all this is completed I want to take out the ears drive run it through pre clear and install it in the server. I will have to format the drive using my mac mini which is using the latest ver of snow leopard. Do I need to use a jumper for the mac format or leave it alone?

[Joe L.]

I am buying one of the WD ears 2 tb drives and an external hd case. My plan is to copy my data to it first, clean up the files, and then transfer it to the shares on my server. When all this is completed I want to take out the ears drive run it through pre clear and install it in the server. I will have to format the drive using my mac mini which is using the latest ver of snow leopard. Do I need to use a jumper for the mac format or leave it alone?

leave it alone.

[Bags]

Thank you.

[PhilH]

His sig states that he is running the Plus version 4.6. Doesn't he need the jumper on the EARS drive with that version of unRAID?

 

Is the Mac format so different that it won't mess up the drive like a Windows format could?

 

Just wondering..

 

Phil

[Rajahal]

His sig states that he is running the Plus version 4.6. Doesn't he need the jumper on the EARS drive with that version of unRAID?

 

Is the Mac format so different that it won't mess up the drive like a Windows format could?

 

Just wondering..

 

Phil

 

True.  Bags, you should upgrade to 4.7 BEFORE installing the new EARS drive.  Then you can leave it alone.

[Joe L.]

His sig states that he is running the Plus version 4.6. Doesn't he need the jumper on the EARS drive with that version of unRAID?

No version needs the jumper.  It will, on some OS, result in improved performance when accessing small files.

Is the Mac format so different that it won't mess up the drive like a Windows format could?

Yes, it apparently is.  It must start its partition on a 4k aligned boundary.

 

Many people have run with no jumpers and in older versions of unRAID with no noticeable performance issues.  The disk is still faster than the networking when reading the drive, and rotational speed is the big bottleneck (for any drive)  when writing to the parity protected array.

[Bags]

Maybe I was miss leading. But thanks for looking out. I am going to take the new drive out of the box and put it into a vantec enclosure. Then format it for Mac. Copy all my files to it.  Clean up the dupe files and etc. After I clean everything up and the files are copied, I am going to take the drive out of the vantec pre clear it and add it to the array. My question was should I use the jumper to format for Mac or leave it off?

 

I am in the process of upgrading to 4.7 and I already have an ears installed that was pre cleared with the jumper although there is no data on it , I thought it was best to leave it alone with the jumper on rather that removing the jumper and running pre clear again. Am I mistaken. Does this clear things up?

 

[Joe L.]

Maybe I was miss leading. But thanks for looking out. I am going to take the new drive out of the box and put it into a vantec enclosure. Then format it for Mac. Copy all my files to it.  Clean up the dupe files and etc. After I clean everything up and the files are copied, I am going to take the drive out of the vantec pre clear it and add it to the array. My question was should I use the jumper to format for Mac or leave it off?

Leave the jumper off.

I am in the process of upgrading to 4.7 and I already have an ears installed that was pre cleared with the jumper although there is no data on it , I thought it was best to leave it alone with the jumper on rather that removing the jumper and running pre clear again. Am I mistaken. Does this clear things up?

correct. Leave the jumper in place, it will be perfect for use with unRAID 4.7.

 

Joe L.

[SSD]

Can't answer the question about which option is best for the MAC, but would recommend that you preclear it before using it. Rather than mount in an external chasis, I'd load it as the cache drive (or just mount it as a non-array disk) and do your copying and cleanup there. When you are done you can copy the files to your array, preclear again with "-n" option, and then add it to the array.

[Bags]

I thought about that bjp but aren't the writes in the array slower going from disk to disk in within the array?i have a 500 gig cache but disabled it for now till I decide how to set up the shares. Would adding the new 2 tb drive as temp cache mess things up?

[Rajahal]

There are a few ways to transfer data like this:

 

Over the network:

Data goes from the external HDD to the PC then over the network to the unRAID server.  This will be the slowest yet easiest method.

 

Direct connection to the server:

Connect the external HDD directly to the unRAID server and use SNAP to mount it as a new share.  Then copy the data directly from the external to the unRAID server (limited only by the connection speed - USB, eSATA, etc).  This way will be faster but is somewhat more involved as you have to install SNAP and learn how to use it.

 

Internal connection to the server (cache drive method):

Install the drive internally in the server and assign it as a cache drive.  The transfer the data from the cache drive into the parity-protected array via the command line (midnight commander).  This method will potentially be the fastest, but it is also the most difficult (in my opinion, at least).

 

If your external and your server both have eSATA connections, then I would go that route.  eSATA is the exact same speed as internal SATA, so the last two methods should have close to the same transfer speeds.

[lionelhutz]

I would just install the drive as the cache and go directly to the server. Sort a group of files out by name and directory structure and then do a block copy to the cache disk. You can also move a block of data over to the cache drive and then sort it out on the cache drive (like say a TV series each evening for example). FYI, you can move (but not copy) files between different directories on the cache drive (or a data drive for that matter) without having to move it across the network. You drag and drop and it moves almost instantaneously.

 

You actually just posted you have a 500gig cache drive. Moving 500gig a day would mean this sorting project would take 4 days. So, you could just install this EARS drive as a data drive and use it.

 

The move over the network to the cache drive will likely either be comparible or faster than a USB drive. To me, it makes no sense at all to transfer all the data to a USB drive just to rename and move some files around.

 

Where is this data coming from anyways?

 

If this work involves a big ugly directory of TV shows then look at using Metabrowser. You can set it to rename and sort out the files into a final resting place. The files just have to start the name like "TV_Series_Name.S01E01...." for it to work. If it can't figure out the name then it will just skip it.

 

Peter

 

[dgaschk]

I don't think that there are HFS drivers in unRaid. You can format the disk as MS-DOS on the Mac and the unRaid can read the disk.

[Joe L.]

I don't think that there are HFS drivers in unRaid. You can format the disk as MS-DOS on the Mac and the unRaid can read the disk.

hfs drivers are in unRAID.

 

You just need to make them active with a single modprobe command:

root@Tower:/# modprobe hfsplus

root@Tower:/# cat /proc/filesystems

nodev  sysfs

nodev  rootfs

nodev  bdev

nodev  proc

nodev  tmpfs

nodev  sockfs

nodev  usbfs

nodev  pipefs

nodev  anon_inodefs

nodev  rpc_pipefs

nodev  inotifyfs

nodev  devpts

        reiserfs

        ext2

nodev  ramfs

        vfat

        msdos

        iso9660

nodev  nfs

nodev  nfsd

nodev  cifs

nodev  fuse

        fuseblk

nodev  fusectl

        hfsplus

 

 

[Bags]

Man you just have to love the level of help you get from this community. Right now the files are spread out over several places. The Mac mini, 1.5 tb iosafe ext drive, 1 tb seagate FireWire ext drive and some blue ray data discs. My plan is to transfer all the files to the new temp drive then reformat the iosafe for Mac and make two partions one for the MacBook pro and one for the mini using time machine. Then reformat the seagate for Mac and make it for the I tunes lib.

 

Hopefully by then i will have made up my mind as to how I want to set up my shares. Then as I clean up and organize the temp drive transfer to clean files to the shares. Once I verify everything is in the array and stable I will reformat the temp drive and add it to the array.

[Bags]

The files are torrents, movies, some of the movies are the same but different formats, rars and PDFs, and music files with the same artist and songs in different formats.

[lionelhutz]

For one, I would suggest a Movies share with each indiviual movie stored in it's own subdirectory with the movie name the subdirectory name. You can then generally either store the movie file with the movie name or with movie as the file name, ie "Crank.mkv" or movie.mkv".

 

See here for an example of this structure;

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Split_level

 

The Music is typically stored in a share called Music with a directory for each artist and then a subdirectory for each album.

 

Peter

[dgaschk]

Here is a good explanation of split level options: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9648.msg96576#msg96576

[Bags]

After reading back over this thread I decided to do this.....I removed the existing 500 gig cache drive and plug the new un formatted/un pre cleared 2 tb ears drive in it's place. Before I did this I upgraded to 4.7. I just downloaded the new pre clear script. Now I have 2x2tb seagates LP 5900 with updated firmware, 1 wd ears 2tb with jumper and now brand new wd 2tb ears right out of the box(no jumper). The others drives had some files on them in the past under unraid but I simply deleted them.

 

Should I start all over an remove the jumper from the other drive and run the new pre clear on all 4 drives or leave well enough alone and pre clear the new drive with the -A option?

 

Right now I plan on leaving the 500 gig out of the mix and not run a cache drive. I may put it back in at a later time.

 

I know you all are thinking this guy is worse than a chick with changing his mind. Thanks for all your advice.