Limetech un-Raid Media Storage Server support thread [Text View] - Page 4

ednigma

12-10-05, 02:17 AM

Thanks for the tips guys,

BLKMGK, I was forgetting the HTTP:// thing.

Jim, I might look into the Knoppix thing, eventually.

TCIII, I think you may be right. Using a crossover cable, I get a peak xfer rate of about 38 - 40MB/s which is about right for the max xfer rate of 7200rpm IDE, but the average ends up being about 9-10MB/s, sometimes even as low as 5MB/s average as shown with NetStatLive. I tried using my 10/100 router and got a peak xfer of about 10MB/s (probably right for 100Mb), but the average xfer rate is 8-9MB/s. GigE seems to suffer from a high variability in xfer rate. Installed a second drive in the unRaid and the file copy was no faster, in fact it was very similar to previous copies, so that tends to eliminates the disk1 and parity disk on the same IDE cable as a source of the problem.

Something else very strange. I decided to copy some files from disk1 to disk2, thinking this should be pretty fast. It looks like the files are coming across the GigE link??? NetStatLive shows lots of traffic and it looks as though files are being routed through my main system (the incoming traffic waveform looks like the outgoing waveform with very similar xfer rates on both)

My system is a Celeron 2.8Ghz (533Mhz FSB) with 1GB of dual channel RAM in a D865GLCLK and 3 250GB HDs (1 Maxtor and 2 WDs) so far.

Basically in the end, GigE is only slightly faster than 10/100 because of the high variability in the GigE xfer pattern.

Regards.. Ed

jimwhite

12-10-05, 08:47 AM

sonofdbn

12-10-05, 10:05 AM

RADIatiON

12-10-05, 10:22 AM

I bought the starter set from Tom, and finally got most of the other bits (note to self: next time, remember to buy the IDE cables!) and am about to start assembling the server.

I recall that many posts ago, someone asked which drive is the parity drive, but I don't think that it was answered, and I can't find this information on the website. Which drive does the OS set as the parity drive when it boots up?
IIRC the first drive (or top most one) is the parity drive. Or more specifically, the first HD on the first IDE cable from the first on-board IDE controller.
Tom (or anyone else) please correct if I'm mistaken.

jimwhite

12-10-05, 11:48 AM

that's correct.... MB Primary IDE port, Master drive...

:cool:

BLKMGK

12-10-05, 03:56 PM

that's correct.... MB Primary IDE port, Master drive...

:cool:

Yup! Tom has posted some pretty good tech articles that explain most of the setup etc. on his WEB site. I found that his docs answered a great deal of my questions once I took the time to do some reading.

sonofdbn

12-10-05, 07:47 PM

Yup! Tom has posted some pretty good tech articles that explain most of the setup etc. on his WEB site. I found that his docs answered a great deal of my questions once I took the time to do some reading.

I think I read through most of the docs on the lime-technology web-site, and googled the site using "parity" as the search word and couldn't find the answer to my question. There's also no page with both "parity" and "channel" on it. So if you could point out where the docs covering this sort of detail are, I'm sure it would save me and others a lot of time.

erikatcuse

12-10-05, 08:02 PM

The only reference to parity I found was it is the first drive bay. http://www.lime-technology.com/management.htm talks about how the drives are arranged so to me it made sense they went in order to the mobo/promise channels

I took a look at the Flash software notes that shipped with my flash drive and it has the table of drives associated with name and then on the last page it then talks about the slots parameter list and that the slots are ordered parity, disk1,disk2............disk11

tap1932

12-10-05, 08:22 PM

I believe that the parity drive can be any drive in the system. It is defined by the first pair of numbers (major,minor) that is defined in the "slots=" line while loading the unraid module.

This is the line (in the go script) that goes something like this:
modprobe md-mod super= 8,2 slots =3,0,3,64.....

So in the above case 3,0 is the first drive on the primary channel. If the slots went something like 3,64,3,0 then the parity drive would be the secondary drive on the primary channel.

I could be totally wrong of course!!

Thomas J. Coyle

12-10-05, 08:46 PM

tap1932,

In an email exchange Tom indicated that the parity drive could be any drive you want to make it by adjusting the drive "slots=".

Also, when I replaced one of my 200GB drives with a new 300GB drive, the OS said that the new 300GB drive was bigger than the existing 300GB parity drive and gave me the choice of swapping the parity drive with the new 300GB drive.

Regards,
TCIII

Thomas J. Coyle

12-10-05, 09:15 PM

Hi all,

Does anyone know if it is possible and/or necessary to defrag the drives in the unRaid server? I assume that it would have to be done using telnet if it is possible to do so.

Regards,
TCIII

ednigma

12-10-05, 09:21 PM

"Something else very strange. I decided to copy some files from disk1 to disk2, thinking this should be pretty fast. It looks like the files are coming across the GigE link??? "

not so strange at all.... sure they're going through your main machine - you're copying from one network share to another.... use telnet and log into the servers console and do the copies there.... cp /mnt/disk2/file.ext /mnt/disk4 or mv /mnt/disk2/file.ext /mnt/disk4 :)

:cool:

Thanks again Jim,

I know my way around PCs, overclocking, and MODing pretty well but networks are still pretty new to me. :)

Do you have an opinion regarding the xfer performance that a few others and I have noticed when doing large file copies - frequent intervals where the xfer rate goes to zero for a time?

Regards.. Ed

erikatcuse

12-10-05, 09:47 PM

ednigma,

Around 8-9Mb/sec is what I got when transferring files from one of my original XP Pro based servers to the unRaid server and Tom confirmed that this was about right. It is interesting that your connection between the unRaid server and the source PC was virtually straight through while mine was through four switches and one router.

I think that this performance demonstrates that the LAN is not the limiting factor for file transfer speed when moving data from a source PC to the unRaid server. It appears to be the unRaid OS.

Regards,
TCIII

I just finished copying a 4.86gig file in 10 minutes using a crossover cable from my laptop. It ends up being about 8megs/sec

On a side note could you just hook up a usb hard drive to the unraid server and copy files over from that? Or would the unraid os not be able to see it? I know when I open up my network places I can see the usb flash drive.

Never mind I tough the D865GLCLK supported firewire....guess I'm thinking about my htpc

sonofdbn

12-11-05, 08:20 AM

Thanks for all the answers to the parity drive question. Children permitting, my server will be up and running any day now.

Something I've learnt while assembling the starter kit: be careful when using old cables. The 40 wire IDE cables behave differently from the now standard 80 wire cables, so when you use "cable select" the master/slave drives are swapped around (if cable select works at all). Just don't use the old cables; it's not worth the headache.

Would it be possible to use a firewire connection straight to a computer?

I'm not saying this isn't desirable, but this possibility might get a lower priority if only because the standard Intel motherboard used (D865GLCLK) doesn't provide onboard Firewire capability.

Thomas J. Coyle

12-11-05, 02:45 PM

Hey Lime Tech,

How about some status for this last week and as to what is on tap for this coming week?

Do you plan to put the OS upgrade on your website this week?

Regards,
TCIII

sonofdbn

12-12-05, 06:15 AM

Can the unRaid server work with a non-unRaided disk (for want of a better term)?

Here's what I would like to do (Option 1): put an NTFS-formatted disk which has my data files on it into the unRaid server and then telnet into the server and copy the data from the NTFS disk (which at that point is not part of the unRaid array) to one of the unRaid disks.

Option 2: Assume I have a hard disk which is Reiser-FS formatted and has data files on it. Can I put it in the unRaid server and make it part of the array, generating parity and whatever else needs to be done, while keeping the data intact?

jimwhite

12-12-05, 06:28 AM

option 2 is easy..... insert the disk, start the machine, reset the array, wait for parity check to complete....

option 1 can only be done by booting an alternate Linux OS such as knoppix, which boots from a CD or USB-Flash drive...

:cool:

sonofdbn

12-12-05, 10:00 AM

jimwhite, just to clarify the Option 1 scenario:
Assume I have my unRaid server with the parity drive and 2 array drives. I now add my NTFS drive to the server, but boot up under a live Linux version like knoppix, and copy the data from the NTFS drive to the array.

I think that at this point I'm then in a similar position to the starting point of Option 2, because now I have additional data in the array which has not yet had parity generated for it. Is that correct?

Now when I boot into the unRaid system, can I generate the parity information for the new data and then initialise the now redundant NTFS drive after that (without a reboot)?

My interest in this is that for someone like me with a lot of data on NTFS drives and without a lot of spare hard disk space, this might be a relatively easy and quick way of transferring the data without a lot of data shuffling.

Let's say I have four 400GB NTFS drives with data. I then buy two new 400GB hard drives for the unRaid server and install them so that I have a 400GB parity drive and a 400GB blank data drive - call it A. Now I add my four drives, B-E, and boot into knoppix, copy the data from B to A, boot into unRaid, generate parity for A, and initialise B for use. The back to knoppix, copy C to B, boot into unRaid, etc. (All this of course assumes that parity generation doesn't take a huge amount of time.)

This might sound tedious, but consider the alternative, which would involve transferring the data (via network, which I think would be slower than doing it via the onboard controllers) one drive at a time and installing the drives one at a time. This would definitely be easier if you had drive trays, but it still involves dismantling the existing machine(s) with the drive(s) one at a time.

Or is there an easier way to do this?

Richard_P_Harvey

12-12-05, 10:25 AM

Many of us here struggled with the network data copy process, some more than others because of volume. I myself had 11 various sized drives all around my network that all migrated to the UnRaid, some 250 ripped DVD's and around 800 MP3 based full CD rips. The entire process took me nearly two weeks to complete and was a major pain in the butt. I have told Tom that this single issue is going to make this product difficiult sell into a market where it's intended to replace some existing storage solution. Several others here started way smaller than I did with only one or two Windows based data drives to copy so I don't think they found it to be that big a deal. For someone starting out with little or no existing data, the UnRaid is a great solution, drop in a big parity drive and one or two data drives and you're off.

I really like the idea of some non-networked based internal UnRaid copy solution be it Knoppix or something that Tom can code into his own Linux code (better). Just think how sweet it would be if you were to power up the UnRaid with a newly installed NTFS drive in a slot, the UnRaid Linux code would see that it was an NTFS formatted drive, would mount it and ask you what you wanted to do with the drive, like copy the data to the existing array drive(s) then add the new drive to the array etc. There would obviously be a few other options as well. If Knoppix can mount an NTFS volume I would think this would be possible with Tom's code too.

Additional Hot Issues for me in the current build are:

Security or total lack there of
Share out of the Flash Drive, this should be hidden
Read & Write Performance, you can't write data and stream a movie for example
Seperate shares for each installed drive, I would rather see a single share ONLY in the windows world however NOT in the web admin page

smeehrrr

12-12-05, 01:19 PM

Let's say I have four 400GB NTFS drives with data. I then buy two new 400GB hard drives for the unRaid server and install them so that I have a 400GB parity drive and a 400GB blank data drive - call it A. Now I add my four drives, B-E, and boot into knoppix, copy the data from B to A, boot into unRaid, generate parity for A, and initialise B for use. The back to knoppix, copy C to B, boot into unRaid, etc. (All this of course assumes that parity generation doesn't take a huge amount of time.)

Or is there an easier way to do this?

You really only need to go into Unraid when you're finished. You can format disks with reiserfs from Knoppix or SLAX, so just move the disks one at a time, then format the disks you just copied data from, then repeat. When everything is on reiserfs and you have no NTFS disks left, go into Unraid and build parity, and you're done. I've done exactly this, it worked like a champ.

sonofdbn

12-12-05, 06:41 PM

smeehrrr, thanks for the advice. This will save me a huge amount of time.

Thomas J. Coyle

12-12-05, 07:20 PM

Hi all,

Sometimes it makes sense to run a server to server data offload especially if the target server is new.

I decided to send all of my ripped files on my original Windows XP Pro server to my first unRaid server drive by drive over my LAN. Moving the files from the source server took about six hours per drive and had all of the drives spun up on the unRaid sever to create the parity.

I consider this a good way to weed out drive infant mortality especially since my parity drive and most of the the drives in the unRaid server were brand new. I would rather heavily load the unRaid server initially to weed out any weak drives now than find them later when they are out of the warranty period. Also it is a good time to determine if more than one drive has a problem being on six or more hours at a time.

Just a thought.

Regards,
TCIII

sonofdbn

12-13-05, 06:09 AM

TCIII,
It's a matter of trade-offs. I can only do a server-to-server data transfer if I had or could afford a lot of spare/new drives, which I don't and can't.

In my case (literally), I have only two new drives. I could test them out separately first, but I have no way of knowing whether 6 hours or 60 hours is adequate. So for me at least, the drive testing is a nice-to-have but not something I want to spend a huge amount of time on.

A lesser problem is what would I then do with the original drives? I don't want to load them up with unRaided data. (Did someone say another unRaid server :) ?)

Thomas J. Coyle

12-13-05, 09:01 AM

sonofdbn,

Ya, I put the original server's drives in a second unRaid server once I had transferred all of my ripped DVD files to the first unRaid server.

Regards,
TCIII

sonofdbn

12-17-05, 09:27 AM

You really only need to go into Unraid when you're finished. You can format disks with reiserfs from Knoppix or SLAX, so just move the disks one at a time, then format the disks you just copied data from, then repeat.

For anyone trying this, it seems that Knoppix 3.9 and 4.2 can't boot from a USB CD/DVD drive. According to a comment on Slashdot: "The Knoppix kernel has the ub module compiled in, which breaks usb-storage and prevents the kernel from seeing the CD-ROM drive."

smeehrrr

12-17-05, 12:13 PM

For anyone trying this, it seems that Knoppix 3.9 and 4.2 can't boot from a USB CD/DVD drive. According to a comment on Slashdot: "The Knoppix kernel has the ub module compiled in, which breaks usb-storage and prevents the kernel from seeing the CD-ROM drive."

I'm using SLAX to boot from USB, it has ntfs and reiser support built-in and appears to work great.

matterw

12-18-05, 06:34 PM

for those of you using xcopy, consider using robocopy. it comes with the NT server resource kit, but I think you can probably also find it for download on the net.

it offers more copy options, including a mirroring option. i find it faster than xcopy. you can set it to keep retrying on errors and if you have to kick it off again, it figures out what needs to be copied to complete the mirror, instead of trying all files again.

sonofdbn

12-19-05, 12:34 AM

I'm using SLAX to boot from USB, it has ntfs and reiser support built-in and appears to work great.

Unfortunately the latest SLAX didn't work for me. I presume you're booting from an external USB CD drive? I think there was some crushfs(?) read/write error. Sorry I can't remember the specifics, but I couldn't get any distro except Ubuntu to work, and my lack of Linux skills made this quite painful.

smeehrrr

12-19-05, 02:17 AM

Unfortunately the latest SLAX didn't work for me. I presume you're booting from an external USB CD drive? I think there was some crushfs(?) read/write error. Sorry I can't remember the specifics, but I couldn't get any distro except Ubuntu to work, and my lack of Linux skills made this quite painful.

I'm actually booting from a 512MB USB flash drive. I used My Slax Creator to help build the ISO and set up the drive for me. I didn't need to do any customization.

I included a handful of modules, but looking at the list none of them are really necessary for doing the file transfer, I just put them on there in case, for example, I needed emacs to edit a config file or something.

The only downside to using SLAX is that the more drives you add, the longer it takes to boot. I haven't figured out how to tell it to stop searching every drive for modules.

Thomas J. Coyle

12-19-05, 10:49 AM

limetech

12-19-05, 02:27 PM

Hi all,

Just tried to get on Lime Technology's website this morning and found that it is off line.

Hopefully they are in the process of updating the website and will be back on line soon.

Regards,
TCIII

Yep, we're alive and well. Seems the domain registration expired :mad: Back online soon as domain propagation completes.

notandor

12-20-05, 03:24 PM

Hi Tom,

Any update on SATA stuff?

You were also about to post the pictures of 2U rackmount w/ some details, I'm eagerly waiting on that...

Thanks

Thomas J. Coyle

12-20-05, 06:45 PM

Hi all,

Yes, it would be nice if Tom could give us an update on what is going on at Lime Technology.

It has been over two weeks since anything substantial was posted by Tom.

Regards,
TCIII

Richard_P_Harvey

12-20-05, 07:14 PM

Hi all,

Yes, it would be nice if Tom could give us an update on what is going on at Lime Technology.

It has been over two weeks since anything substantial was posted by Tom.

Regards,
TCIII

Please keep in mind that Tom and his family just moved into a new home and I trust you all can understand how disruptive that can be....! He will be as responsive as he has always been once he gets his feet planted.

DeathtoToasters

12-21-05, 03:18 PM

Richard_P_Harvey

12-21-05, 03:20 PM

I have read most of the pages in this thread....but I need to ask this anyway.

Do I basically need only two drives to start?

1 for parity and then 1 for data?

Then as I add drives....they server software will format, install file system and update parity?

Thanks

Exactly, but make sure to get a rather large parity drive if you can as it MUST be as large or larger than any of the data drives.

DeathtoToasters

12-21-05, 03:26 PM

Exactly, but make sure to get a rather large parity drive if you can as it MUST be as large or larger than any of the data drives.

That I understand from reading this thread.

Is it not possible at all to upgrade the parity in the future? Or is my data just at risk while the new parity drive is being written for the first time?

Richard_P_Harvey

12-21-05, 03:32 PM

That I understand from reading this thread.

Is it not possible at all to upgrade the parity in the future? Or is my data just at risk while the new parity drive is being written for the first time?

In the senario you describe your data will never be at risk at all. When you fire it up with just a parity drive and one data drive the system will format both drives and build it's first parity. At this point there is still no data on the drive but as you add data to the only data disk in the system, parity is updated on the fly.

So now you add data disk number 2 to the system, it will do a clean of the new disk, format it and then expand the array to include the new disk. I think that during the short time that the clean and format is underway that existing data may be a risk but I'm not 100% sure. That process takes about 45 minutes and you can do more than one new drive at a time and it still takes the 45 minutes.

I have only had my system a few weeks so I'm not 100% sure on the at risk part, anyone else...?

DeathtoToasters

12-21-05, 03:43 PM

What I meant is if I have 2 drives in the system:

1 for parity (320 gb)
1 for data (300 gb)

Then I get a 400 Gb. Obvioulsy I need that new drive to be the parity. Can I replace the 320gb current parity drive with the new larger one?

If yes...how do I go about that?

Richard_P_Harvey

12-21-05, 04:21 PM

Right from the Lime Tech webpage

But what if the bigger disk is also bigger than my parity disk?
Then you must first use your new disk to replace parity, and then replace your small disk with your old parity disk:

Stop the array.
Power down the unit.
Replace smaller parity disk with new bigger disk.
Power up the unit.
Start the array.
Wait for Parity-Sync to complete.
Stop the array.
Power down the unit.
Install your smaller old parity disk as a new data disk.
Power up the unit.
Start the array.

DeathtoToasters

12-21-05, 04:32 PM

J. L.

12-21-05, 07:22 PM

That makes alot of sense.....I thought their site was still down so I didn't bother looking.

Has anyone had a chance to burn the software to a cd and boot from that, just in case my MB cannot boot from a USB drive?The unRaid management software is tied to a serial number in the config that must match one in the USB drive. Even if you could get the OS to boot from a CD, it would not run the management software and not start the unRaid array.

So... before you build your machine from any old motherboard, I would suggest you check if its motherboard bios can boot from the USB port. You might even download and install a standard "mini-linux" distribution (pick one, there are many out there) that can be installed on a USB drive and check it out.

As far as I know, Limetech only sells the unRaid software installed on a USB drive he provides, and each customer's config file on the USB drive is custom configured to work on that specific USB drive. The unRaid OS is not available without the associated hardware USB memory drive. It will not work if you copy it to an alternate USB drive as each USB drive has its own internal serial number.

Joe L.

DeathtoToasters

12-21-05, 09:06 PM

Now I remember reading that....I will have to see if my MB works that way.

jimwhite

12-21-05, 09:22 PM

What does it mean when a drive has a few errors in the error column after a Parity Sync? Also, does a parity sync ever change the data drives or only the parity drive??

:confused:

sonofdbn

12-21-05, 11:50 PM

So... before you build your machine from any old motherboard, I would suggest you check if its motherboard bios can boot from the USB port. You might even download and install a standard "mini-linux" distribution (pick one, there are many out there) that can be installed on a USB drive and check it out.

I've wasted more hours than I should have trying to install Linux (mini- or otherwise) on a USB drive. In my case, this is a 20GB USB hard disk, not one of those thumbdrives like the one unRaid comes on. And I'm using the Lime Technology starter kit, so the hardware innards are unRaid standard, but please also note that I have limited Linux experience and haven't started up the unRaid software yet.

I thought it would be useful to have an alternative boot option: if unRaid crashes or a drive crashes, it will be convenient to be able to boot up the machine and transfer files from it or poke around. So I've been trying to install Linux on the USB HDD, but no success so far. I've tried DSL, Slax (including the wonderfully named Kill Bill version!), Kanotix, Ubuntu, Austrumi and Knoppix. But to be fair, this might be because initially I tried installing off an external USB CD-Drive. I think this confused many of the distros. I'm now retrying from an internal IDE CD-Drive.

jimwhite

12-22-05, 01:41 PM

"What does it mean when a drive has a few errors in the error column after a Parity Sync?"

.... bump....

I'm getting nervous.... :(

mpenton

12-22-05, 04:31 PM

I have no idea where the error info is derived from in this distro but I also had an older drive that showed read errors when I was bringing up my server. I swapped it out with another drive and no more errors. However, the same drive seems to work fine in windows. Linux seems to detect the slightest problem with hdd's while windows doesn't report anything until it is almost too late. I've run across this in a few linux installations so I wasn't really surprised. If you have another drive I'd swap it out when you get time. YMMV

jimwhite

12-22-05, 08:43 PM

CANNON-FODDER

12-22-05, 11:18 PM

all checks good with the actual data...I am confused, this is what the system is supposed to do, right? Other than the management page status, I didn't think you could verify anything about the data on the disk itself unless you turned it off, removed the suspect drive and tried to read it somewhere without the array up.

Maybe those errors are the statistical soft-read errors (1 per 10^x bits or something).

v/r,
C-F

limetech

12-23-05, 05:08 AM

actually, it's two drives, one is well seasoned and reliable, and the other is virtually brand new..... it seems to ONLY occur when a parity check is running.... I've copied a zillion files back and forth to one of the drives and cannot increase the error count.... and it's not hard errors, since I did an MD5 check on all of the files on one of the drives to the outside drive the files came from and all checks good with the actual data....

guess I'll pull one of them and run the maxtor diagnostics on it...

.... sigh :rolleyes:

The error counters increment each time a disk i/o operation issued by the UnRaid driver gets a fatal error. Operationally, here's what that means.

1. The UnRaid driver is layered atop the linux disk drivers. Whenever an actual media error occurs, first the drive itself retries "x" number of times. If it can't succeed, the linux disk drivers retry "y" number of times. So by the time UnRaid driver is told that an I/O has failed, there have been "x" times "y" retries already. (The value for "x" varies per drive manufacturer, certainly > 1, and the value of "y" is, I believe, 8, but I haven't looked at the code to verify.)

2. Virtually all errors which occur are read errors. This is because after each write, neither the disk itself, or any software layer, verifies the data written. About the only way to get a "legitimate" write error would be if it were actually a seek error. (A "non-legitimate" error would be something like a loose cable which is causing constant errors.)

3. When the UnRaid s/w gets a read error and parity is valid, it will "reconstruct" the data of the bad block and pass that back along with "success" status to the layer above it (the filesystem in our case). Meanwhile, the s/w will then write the reconstructed data back to the block. Re-writing the data will eliminate many "marginal" read errors.

4. When the UnRaid s/w gets a write error and parity is valid, it will "disable" the drive (mark it bad).

5. When the UnRaid s/w gets a read or write error, and parity is not valid, it will just pass the error to the layer above it (filesystem).

If you run parity-check and notice the error counter(s) increasing, then that indicates blocks on the disk which got actual errors. If no disk got disabled, then they were for sure fatal read errors. If you run a second parity-check, and you still get read errors on the same drive(s), then you should consider replacing the drive(s).

As for the drive not reporting errors under Windows... well I guess I don't know what to say about that. Probably if you run the "long" version of format under Windows, where it does a complete media scan, you would see errors.

Finally, it is possible for an enviromental condition to occur which would cause a disk error, such as:
- heat (#1 killer of hard drives)
- bad power supply (ripples or low voltage)
- bad or loose cables
- mechanical shock
- pure random chance (they do have a published error rate)

One more thing: if you telnet into the system after an error has occurred, you can look at the system log file and perhaps find more info about the error (depends on the error). At the command prompt you would type:
cat /var/log/syslog

limetech

12-23-05, 05:16 AM

I've wasted more hours than I should have trying to install Linux (mini- or otherwise) on a USB drive. In my case, this is a 20GB USB hard disk, not one of those thumbdrives like the one unRaid comes on. And I'm using the Lime Technology starter kit, so the hardware innards are unRaid standard, but please also note that I have limited Linux experience and haven't started up the unRaid software yet.

I thought it would be useful to have an alternative boot option: if unRaid crashes or a drive crashes, it will be convenient to be able to boot up the machine and transfer files from it or poke around. So I've been trying to install Linux on the USB HDD, but no success so far. I've tried DSL, Slax (including the wonderfully named Kill Bill version!), Kanotix, Ubuntu, Austrumi and Knoppix. But to be fair, this might be because initially I tried installing off an external USB CD-Drive. I think this confused many of the distros. I'm now retrying from an internal IDE CD-Drive.

Yep, for some reason none of the standard distros make it easy to boot off a USB drive (that I'm aware of). Interesting, because there's an almost trivial patch you can apply to a certain file that makes it possible. Irregardless, the current UnRaid s/w requires the "first" USB disk drive to be the Flash. Future s/w will lift this restriction (of it being the first USB disk), but you'll always have to have the Flash installed.

jimwhite

12-23-05, 07:43 AM

I'm looking for the day when your raid-driver can be used in another linux boot via the key-drive being installed but not booted on.... possible?

:cool:

DeathtoToasters

12-23-05, 12:05 PM

notandor

12-23-05, 05:52 PM

Hi Tom,

It looks like you are selectively replying on the stuff...

We are eagerly waiting on some updates on SATA config... etc.

Also, you had mentioned about 2U rackmount pictures and some info (capacity, dimensions etc.) on that would be helpful too...

I have 5 SATA drives sitting from almost last 2-1/2 months... which have depreciated 10-15% in there value... :-(

Thanks

sonofdbn

12-23-05, 09:55 PM

Tom,

I am using NasLite + for a basic file server now. I am not sure the file system it currently uses. I assume it is ext2/3 because it is a Linux based system.

What happens if I use that disk as one of my drives in the UnRaid system? (not the parity drive)

Does Un-Raid automatically format it?

I have about 100gb worth of stuff on there already and don't really want to have to erase and re-copy everything.

Thanks

From my limited experience, if the drive or more accurately, partition, is not in reiserfs format, the drive will appear as unformatted to unRaid. I don't believe formatting is automatic; at least I don't recall it happening in my case, but something this important requires a more definitive answer.

I believe that there is no way of avoiding having to move the data off a drive (in order to use that drive in unRaid) if that drive is not in reiserfs format.

Having transferred some 2TB around in the past few days, I DREAM of having only 100GB to transfer :)

sonofdbn

12-23-05, 10:10 PM

Yep, for some reason none of the standard distros make it easy to boot off a USB drive (that I'm aware of). Interesting, because there's an almost trivial patch you can apply to a certain file that makes it possible. Irregardless, the current UnRaid s/w requires the "first" USB disk drive to be the Flash. Future s/w will lift this restriction (of it being the first USB disk), but you'll always have to have the Flash installed.

I've resorted to installing an internal CD/DVD drive and using a "live Linux" distro - Simply Mepis. Yes, it takes up a drive bay, but what to do? Btw, booting the CD/DVD drive is easiest if it's attached to one of the on-board IDE controllers. The Promise BIOS seems to recognise that there is a bootable CD if the drive is attached, but I couldn't get it to boot that CD.

Works quite nicely following smeehrr's suggestion: installed a few new drives and old drives in NTFS with data on them. Boot up in Mepis, format the new drives in reiserfs and copy data from NTFS drives to the new drives. (Of course, you need an extra drive for the parity.) Then if the space is needed, format the NTFS drives as reiserfs (once the data has been copied of course) and continue as before. It's not a trivial exercise, but it's not too difficult.

(It seems that Knoppix doesn't recognise the Promise controller cards, so you can't access the drives attached to them.)

And the next time someone wants to complain to limetech about documentation, try reading Linux documentation :) I now appreciate much better why the unRaid software is "certified" for such a limited range of hardware.

melechmet

12-27-05, 11:34 AM

Tom,

I'm also waiting for the SATA option- actually I'm in a bit of a fix, I'd like to buy at least the HDs before the year's end for deduction reasons. I was wondering if you can publish at least a list of compatible drives. If not then perhaps you can ok this series for the application:

Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD4000YR 400GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 RAID-specific Hard Drive

I've read elsewhere that these drives are a little fickle in non RAID configurations; will your software based RAID/MAID accommodate them?

Thanks,
Alex

shokunin

12-28-05, 03:23 AM

WD4000YR are only fickle because they have a much shorter error recovery window. However, since the Unraid calculates parity, I suspect the Unraid OS log file will show a drive error should a block not write correctly because the TLER setting was too short to correct it.

In that case, the unraid parity could be used to recreate the bad block and correct the issue.

I'm currently using 12 of the RE2 drives (not using Unraid) and so far no problems. I'd suspect they be great drives to use with the unraid OS as well.

jimwhite

12-28-05, 08:04 AM

I ran both of the drives that UnRaid was reporting errors on through both MaxBlast (Maxtors diagnostics) and Spinrite6 in the mode where it reads and writes every sector multiple times including inverting all of the bits.... no errors, no problems.... I think I'll just ignore unraids error column for now.... :confused:

DeathtoToasters

12-28-05, 08:00 PM

Has anyone used those IDE to SATA converters for IDE Drives??

I wonder if it convets the transfer speeds to the SATA speed of just changes the form of the plug but has not other changes.

shokunin

12-28-05, 11:35 PM

Has anyone used those IDE to SATA converters for IDE Drives??

I wonder if it convets the transfer speeds to the SATA speed of just changes the form of the plug but has not other changes.

I use a few of the ATA to SATA adapters and all it does is change from parallel ata to serial ata. Speed is the nearly the same with or without the adapter. The numbers on SATA 150 or SATA 300 or ATA 100 or ATA 133 is the speed of the connector, not the drive. There is no single (S)ATA drive that would exceed a sustained 100mb/sec transfer which would bottleneck an ata connector.

melechmet

12-29-05, 10:26 AM

Has anyone used those IDE to SATA converters for IDE Drives??

I wonder if it convets the transfer speeds to the SATA speed of just changes the form of the plug but has not other changes.

Well the physical converters really don't get you SATAI speeds much less SATAII on the newer drivers. In fact the first gen of SATAI drives had these built in, in a sense and actually ran fairly slow compared to native SATA interfaces.

I used them BTW, but I'd be wary of using them in a RAID application. 2c.

George Jetson

12-30-05, 12:06 AM

Tom,

I've been following this thread with great interest and think I might want to give your Unraid a shot. I'm in the "roll your own" crowd, so I'd be getting just the flash drive. Before I take the plunge, I had a couple of questions. I went over the thread pretty thoroughly and didn't see these answered, forgive me if I missed it.

1) I have an ASUS P5P800 that I'd like to use for this. It has the 865PE chipset and the Marvell 88E8001 LAN chip so it sounds close to the Intel board you're using, as well as the P4P800 that you commented on earlier. Do you think this board would work? (I don't mind being a guinea pig)

2) My media library is in it's early stages size-wise. I was thinking of starting out with 4 drives and just using the onboard IDE to begin with, then add the controllers and additional drives later as I need them. Will the system run without the Promise controllers installed?

3) Do you have estimated release date for your next version? It sounds like you've been working on some pretty nice enhancements. Also, have you established an upgrade policy for your software?

Thanks in advance and good luck with this great product.

erikatcuse

01-01-06, 10:02 AM

Geroge

I think this came up before on the promise cards. I belive you can use the server without them in. However you can get 2 cards off of ebay for less than $30 for both. Also the chipset issue has also been discussed (very early on in the thread) and in theory it should work. There just might be some strange quirks that could happen.

George Jetson

01-01-06, 12:12 PM

Thanks, I didn't realize the cards were so cheap. I'll check it out.

DeathtoToasters

01-02-06, 06:57 PM

Ok, now that this thread has gotten over 28 pages long, some of us NEWBIES, or what I would love to call (NON-NEWBIES = people who only know that linux is a species of animal in a cold place!)

Is it possible to make a FAQ or Instruction page for people who cannot afford the WHOLE Un-Raid system.

For example, I have a system that will allow a boot from USB and I have (3) 300GB Drives (2 WD and 1 Maxtor) , Gigabit Ethernet Card (Linksys) etc.

I just don't know if all I need to purchase now is a Un-Raid key and then install or what exactly I need to do.

At first I was motivated to do this Un-Raid system because of a wanting of a Media server for a HTPC I was building...BUT here is my last 36 hours of my life:

My Fujitsu Notebook (tabletpc) got a virus somehow, and would not allow a windows boot. I tried to recover etc....but during the windows restore...the disk crapped out and corrupted everything...

I figured not a big deal...I had a full backup on one of my network drives that I setup with a very basic linux build as a NAS server....

Well that machine was an old P3 800mhz and of course it crapped out at the same time as the laptop.
Now when I try to bring it up it gives me all sorts of errors and gives me the only option of formatting it.
I am sure there is a linux program to fix the errors, but like I mentioned above, I am a NON-Newbie in linux, so I have no idea what do to! (hint hint)

Also the modded XBox fried!!

So basically I am building a whole new strategy, and I am trying to fit an Un-Raid server into that strategy.

(BTW for any of you IT people....a Backup Strategy Guide for us who have never done a backup system before would be great. IE: I am a laptop user, who has 2 desktops at home (one for the wife and another for the kids) To have a strategy to backup all 3 computers with little of no worry of actually being in my current situation again (no solutions at all) would be a great help.)

Maybe this is not the forum or site for this discussion, but it is something that I think is very crucial to have when using/creating a Un-Raid situation.

The idea of the parity drive (not being dependant on a single drive for the backup) is VERY appealing to me in my situation. The ability to add drives (whenever there is a great deal going on somewhere) is also very appealing.

Through my last 36 hours, I have decide to build a BART PE CD or USB Key...have not decided which one yet, for a windows recovery on the desktops and my laptop http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_your_pocket/index.html

I was also going to make another cd or usb key with Knoppix, http://www.knoppix.net/ on it as another option.

I know the benefits and the value of the Un-Raid system, but what I am not so sure about is why a Linux system is best versus a Windows OS box.

One of the most frustrated things in this whole situation I am in is this. Normally I would have my backup on one of the desktops (on a 2nd drive) and I would pop it out of the box, insert it into a external drive case, hook up the usb cable to the laptop and restore.

Well with the backup drive being a EXT2 files system, that was not an option (very frustrating)

How would I normally fix this situation in the Un-Raid system? The restore program won't read a image from a network only a local drive (internal, usb or firewire) So am I using the WRONG backup software then? Are there other backup programs (WinXP format) that can read a restore image across a network?

I am sorry if this post has turned into something it should not have....but I am sure you all have wanted to be therapists :)

Anyway...full or partial answers are welcome....
Once again, thanks for the help and patience!!

FYI - LimeTech - I am not sure if you are working on a Guide or FAQ about how to use the Un-Raid software in the situations I explained above, with people building their own box etc....if you are...GREAT...if you are not I think it would be a GREAT opportunity for you to really hit a forgotten market!!

Thanks again !!

mkerdman

01-02-06, 07:24 PM

I apologize in advance if the answer to my question is known, or, if it continues to be a long awaited unreleased product enhancement.

I want to attach an un-Raid Media Storage Server to a Scientific Atlanta 8300 HD High Definition Cable TV Set Top Box which REQUIRES a SATA external hard drive (such as the single drive Maxtor) to expand the storage form 160GB to N-GB.

Has anyone spec'd this application and has the company announced a date for a SATA compatible solution?

Thank you in advance.

CANNON-FODDER

01-02-06, 07:42 PM

mkerdman,
The UN-RAID system is set-up for a network share via ethernet. The SATA compatible solution mentioned here would allow SATA drives (in addition to PATA) to be a part of the array, and would not change the interface presented to other devices on the network.

The SA8300HD is looking for a single drive connected through the eSATA connector directly to the SATA bus, and will format it with a proprietary [encrypted] filesystem.

I do not think the UN-RAID would work without some extra controller chip to emulate a single HHD and some expert coding. There were some suggestions that one of the multiple drive external SATA products or other device that directly connects to the SATA bus could function, but I think most are SATA repeaters or relays and do not aggregate drives into one large [emulated] HHD that the SA8300HD expects.

There is also the theory of large HHD address spaces incurring a memory overhead cost that impairs the playback quality of the SA8300HD (depending on how much memory the local cable company uses up).

v/r,
C-F

mkerdman

01-02-06, 09:19 PM

mkerdman,
" There were some suggestions that one of the multiple drive external SATA products or other device that directly connects to the SATA bus could function"

v/r,
C-F

Were any of the multiple drive external SATA products tested and confirmed with the SA 8300HD ?

CANNON-FODDER

01-02-06, 09:28 PM

As I mentioned, most are repeaters or relays or whatever SATA calls daisy-chaining, and these will most likely not work. I know of no confirmed reports, only just suggestions for [someone else] to [purchase and beta test] these [costly solutions]. Here is the thread (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=516559) if you have not yet seen it.

v/r,
C-F

Edited to add first sentence.

mkerdman

01-02-06, 11:27 PM

HyPyke

01-03-06, 10:24 PM

Guys,

Can those of you who are hammering Tom@Limetech for answers on the availability of the SATA option please let up.

It is ready when it's ready.

We know you want it. I know I do but let up for goodness sake.

I have read every page of this thread and at no point has Tom said "I promise" with regard to SATA availability or any other feature requested. If you have hard drives sitting around that you ordered months ago who's fault is that? Go with another raid solution that offers the same kind of features/cost as UnRaid. Whoops! There isn't one.

It is unique. They are doing something unique in the marketplace and they want to take their time to do it right.

My guess is that techies who start companies like Lime Technology do so to get away from pinheads who make promises that can't be met and HARD release cycles with no wiggle room.

They are not refusing to set a firm date just to piss you off. It is not because they are lazy and not working hard enough.

Tom takes his time on these forums for four reasons that can tell:

1. To promote Lime Technology and it's products.
2. To assist with technical issues
3. To interact with users and get feedback
4. Because he enjoys the communication with customers, people, peers, etc.

I don't know how big or small a shop Lime Technology is but I have a feeling that they are just getting started and based on the kind of interaction they have been giving here they need and welcome our input and support. What they don't need is grief.

Forum members:
If this is not what you meant and I am taking some of the comments made here the wrong way then I sincerely apologize. At the very least this can serve as YOUR a message to Tom to let him know that and this little rant was not wasted.

Tom:
Thanks for the time spent here listening to us, answering questions, providing support, and putting up with us in general.

DeathtoToasters

01-03-06, 10:41 PM

I agree...not that it matters much :)

I believe that it all of our wives fault that we are so impatient......I have been asking my wife things everyday for 12 years and STILL don't get a response...

They make us the way we are :)

sonofdbn

01-04-06, 12:53 AM

Well said, HyPyke, even if I am one of those who was badgering Tom (although in my defence it was about not hearing from the company after putting my money down).

Perhaps would-be purchasers should also understand that this is not a generic software system which you can just install on a "likely-to-be-compatible" system. Anyone who has fiddled with Linux even a little soon comes across the problem of lack of device drivers. UnRaid works fine on the hardware specified - for anything beyond that, you need good fortune. And even if the hardware works, you have to be sure that the BIOS on the motherboard allows unRaid to set things up properly.

Lime-technology is unlikely to have the resources to test a wide range of hardware. Sure, I'd like to have it working on more widely available hardware, but you CAN buy the specified hardware from the company. (I'm referring to the "Starter Kit".) While the price might not be the cheapest, I don't think there's a big markup on the price. It's certainly the safest way of ensuring you will get a working system if you can't easily source the parts yourself.

DeathtoToasters

01-06-06, 12:35 PM

Well I got my starter kit from Tom yesterday. Packaged VERY well.

Instructions were detailed with alot of information.

Well I got the system up and running with only 1 snag.

For the record it was not Tom or his software that gave me the snag...it was Bill's software that did it to me. (Bill Gates that is...)
Although I am sure I did something to make this happen also :)

I opened the cfg files to just look at them and in the process, windows ended up saving one of the files as a different file extention that the original opened one.

Boy what a headache!! Tom was VERY patient with me :) He is really someone unique in this industry. Someone who knows his stuff, has a great product, and gives great customer service.

One thing I was very impressed with, after talking with him last night, is his knowledge and understanding on what is missing in the Backup/Restore/Fault Tollerence area of the personal and small business computing areas.
With his knowledge and understanding of the above things, we should be seeing some great updates and progress on this system!!

It took a few hours to get all the drives setup for the first sync.

I have a 320gb WD Parity, 300 GB WD, 250Maxtor, 250 MAxtor. Adding another older 40gb and 30gb drive I found later today.

It is running without issues...just the way I wanted.

The question I have is how hot is TOO hot for hard drives? I noticed that during the inital sync that the Parity Drive got to about 51 degrees at one point. I have been transferring things alot so far and it has never gotten about 32 degrees.
The parity drive is in the rack enclosure I got form Compusa, which I hear is a KINGWIN rebranded for them.

Should I be worried ?

Thanks again TOM for all the help!

BTW Tom...when is the SATA version coming out? :) lol J/K

Thomas J. Coyle

01-06-06, 01:45 PM

DeathtoToasters,

During the initial parity sync the parity drive got up around 42 deg C, but that was on a warm day (75-80 deg F) in my garage.

I originally had the parity drive in a mobile rack similar to the Compusa enclosure. I later changed the rack to a Kinwin KF-101 with the bottom fan and the drive temperature has stayed well below 35 deg C even on a warm day.

32 deg C is about right for normal file transfer operations on a warm day.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
TCIII

HyPyke

01-10-06, 08:30 PM

Ok a nice post from me for a change. I was wondering about perhaps putting a linux box in front of the UNRAID to add some functionality.

I currently have the 100mbit version of the intel board recommended by Lime Tech and was thinking of adding a GIG interface to the PCI slot. Then having a direct crossover from the gig card to my personal machine, since most of the data will be dowloaded there. The only time the gig interface would be used would be when I have new files to copy over and most of the time I will only be streaming DVD's and maybe HD to my main network over the 100mbit and only one stream at a time.

What I was thinking of doing though is having that 100mbit interface plugged into a linux box and another interface facing my net. Then using the linux box for security, indexing, etc.

I have not seen anyone mention NFS when it comes to UNRAID so I guess it doesn't work. Ideally there would be NFS mounts on the linux box that would then be shared with samba to windows clients. Then you could authenticate users however you wish or just firewall the box off.

If I could find a good file indexing proggie for linux then having that would be a huge help as well.

You could also mount all the folders on the unraid in one linux directory and then share that dir giving you a single point of access for windows clients.

Anyone have an ideas if this is possible? I am not yet ready to invest but I am close.

I added up my combined space and I think I really need unraid.

550 gig (formatted)- raid 5 (4x200) - promise controller card
300 x 3 in USB 2.0 cases
400 - Main machine
300 - Main machine
300 - HTPC box
300 - Sending this one back to maxtor for replacement
300 - Brand new and no where to put it
= ~ 3 terabytes!

Plus I have a few 80 gigs that are sitting around doing nothing. This does not even include system drives in my machines which are all 80 gigs. Add all those up and it's probably ~300 gigs.

HyPyke

01-10-06, 09:59 PM

UPDATE! Well well. I had a motherboard that I got with a 50$ stripped Gateway pc off the net several months back and never hooked it up. Came with nothing but the case (SFF) and mobo.

So I took out the mobo remounted in a temp case and added proc and mem that I had laying around.

The BIOS did not match the one recommended by Lime so when I tried to upgrade to p24 it would not let me. Seems intel did not like me flashing a gateway machine with their bios even though it is the same board. So I did the bios recover procedure and was able to get the real Intel bios on the board. Booted up knoppix and I have GIGABIT! Tested with my gigabit switch and it works. What luck!

Jackpot! So now it seems I have the EXACT board. A mem test and application tests checked out.

That being the case I wonder what the impact of going gigabit into a linux box and gigabit out would be?? Since there should be no disk access I would imagine very little but you never know. Any experience with this?

Woot! That much closer to UNRAID! Now some promise cards, case and software and I am off and running.

dpeart

01-11-06, 01:20 PM

Question for you Unraid users.

I've found that for XP I need to format my video drives with a 64kB cluster size to get clean video playback within SageTV. With this cluster size I don't have to bother with defrag.

Anyone seen an issue with the Unraid system? Anyone know what the cluster size is and does it have to be consistant across all drives? Ideally I only want the large cluster size on the video drives, and not on the "normal" data drives. Of course if there is no issue with it as is, then I'm fine.

thanks,

HyPyke

01-11-06, 10:22 PM

UPDATE: I have been looking into this as a file indexer for the UNRAID proxy/frontend or whatever you call it that I proposed - http://www.beagle-project.org/Searching_Data

scroll down to see the web interface.

Interesting....

DeathtoToasters

01-11-06, 11:27 PM

I am just going to build a small windows xp box, hard wire it to the router where my un-raid server is.

Then I am going to use LiteServe from http://www.cmfperception.com/liteserve.html to run basic web, ftp, telnet services.

Should be simple enough. Also using Dyndns.com services.

Any better ideas??

dpeart

01-12-06, 12:38 PM

Well I just pulled the trigger and ordered the flash drive from LimeTech and all the hardware to build me an UnRaid.

Hopefully my build will be as successful as others here.

madpoet

01-12-06, 01:23 PM

I have to admit that after a few weeks mine still isn't finished ;). I keep building it in bits and pieces when I have spare time. Almost there though I think.

imlucid

01-12-06, 06:33 PM

Whew, just finished this thread that I started reading this morning (don't tell my boss).

One question I had that didn't appear on this thread:

Does UnRaid support NFS? I have Mac clients and it seems like perhaps having an NFS solution would be better than SMB.

DeathtoToasters

01-13-06, 12:54 AM

Anyone Got any further ideas for making the server Internet accessible?

I want to setup FTP server access and use the un-raid server a server to hold family web pages.

Would I have to setup a WinXP box connected to the Router or Linux?

I don't know a thing about Linux, so please keep that in mind.

Anyone? I could really use the advice.

Aaron Oz

01-13-06, 01:19 AM

This product is excellent. Perfect solution to a lot of my problems. I'm certainly going to be putting one of these together for my movie storage.

Does anyone know of a similar system for Microsoft OS's? I would love to have this on my 'daily runner' PC.

DeathtoToasters

01-13-06, 01:36 AM

madpoet

01-13-06, 09:38 AM

Death, if you run a web server on a windows box and simply point it to the directories on the Unraid for file locations it will work just fine. You will have to deal with a firewall exposure for your web server. Same would also work with a Linux web server for that matter, but I don't know Apache well enough to help you.

BLKMGK

01-14-06, 12:26 AM

J. L.

01-14-06, 10:20 AM

Alright, stupid question time... Been running my unRaid for awhile now and am loving it. I've decided to begin storing some DVDs on it and am looking at playback options. MythTV, XLobby, not sure what I'm going to use. One thing I've discovered works pretty well, though no menus, is ripping DVD to a single VOB and streaming via UPNP software to my Buffalo LinkTheater. I worked at getting WizD working on the array previously but even when working it was never as easy to use as the streaming support on my (hacked) Linkstation using the Buffalo streaming software. However that software is obviously not running on my array and the Linkstation's drive is only 300Gigs w/no parity protection yadda yadda.

Now then, two Linux boxes right so surely there's a way to get them to talk together? I'd like to make the Linkstation think that at least one drive on the array is actually a part of the Linkstation's OS. Trouble is I'm less than Linux smart here :( I'm thinking a Mount command or some sort of Symlink is what I need. Those of you considering front end Linux boxes etc. are likely in the same boat. Now I've only got a commandline on the Linkstation so no GUI to help me out, I'd appreciate some advice from those more savvy at this than I. I know it can be done but umm, how?

In the end this may not be my final solution but it does occur to me that such a link may allow me to use the nice convenient drive letter of the Linky as a front end as has been discussed here. When I need the higher speed of the Gig link I can go around it and access disks directly.... :)
Here is a link to instructions on mounting a SMB share on a linux mount-point:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Linux_Networking/Q_20841951.html

I just tried an experiment on the unRaid box since I do not have a linkstation, but things should be the same... I typed these commands to link a shared folder on my htpc to an empty directory on the unRaid server I created to mount it

# first, I create the empty directory in the linux box.
# I made it in the /tmp directory and named it "joe", but it could be almost anywhere
mkdir /tmp/joe

# next, I mounted the remote HTPC's shared folder using the mount command
#if your account on the PC being mounted needs a password you will need to supply it here. (It is case sensitive)
#I log into the HTPC using an account named "JOE", you should use an account that exists on your PC. MEDIA_DRIVE is the name of the shared folder on the HTPC.

mount -t smbfs -o username="JOE",password="",lfs,ro //htpc/MEDIA_DRIVE /tmp/joe

# then, I could use the "ls" command to see the mount command worked as expected.
ls /tmp/joe

Here is a screen capture:
http://tinypic.com/k99dhy.jpg

Hope it works for you...

Joe L.

BLKMGK

01-14-06, 08:57 PM

A VERY big help Joe! So close, yet so far though <sigh> Attached is the output from the command and the commandline I'm using. Experts Exchange is a pay per view subscription site I'm not a member of - drives me nutz since Google often points to it when I search :p

Here's the output:

bash-2.05a# mount -t smbfs -o username="root",password="",lfs,ro //Beast/disk2 /mnt/share/linkstation/DVD2/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //Beast/disk2,
or too many mounted file systems

Beast is the name of my array, disk2 my intended drive - I didn't try to hit a subdirectory under that share although I'd like to. Root is my target account, no password. <shiver>

I realize this is a little bit out of the scope of this thread but I also think that others are likely to encounter this or something close to it so hopefully of some use. I feel like I'm close though and I truly appreciate the assistance as well as th equick response! The error seems a little nonsensical to me as the FS ought to be right and too many mounts seems a bit bizarre :p

P.S. Loaded up KnoppMyth(TV) and couldn't quite get it working. XP with Xlobby is also a royal PITA overall (lol). The Linkstation\Linktheater setup may do what I want easiest although sans menus.

Update: Okay, my Linkstations has no SMBClient on it and -t smbfs apparently calls that command! The commandline ought to work fine for anyone else though..

01-15-06, 05:11 PM

I've been reading through the posts and looking on the lime tech web site. This product looks really great especially for those who want to take the advantage of fault tolerance raid without losing a bunch of JBOD drives they might have. This is my case.

The one question I have is with read/write speeds across a gigabyte network. Can HD content be recorded and then played back adequately using this unraid solution? I am currently using an MyHD 120. I suspect that you can but I thought I better ask to be sure.

Thanks.
JP

madpoet

01-15-06, 05:52 PM

Absolutely. The network speed is more than sufficient.

01-15-06, 06:17 PM

Absolutely. The network speed is more than sufficient.

Thanks. I think you have alluded to it here but my concern is with the unraid server itself. Is anyone using a MyHD card with an unraid server and seeing any issues?

Thanks again.

dpeart

01-15-06, 10:23 PM

I record and playback HD content over a 100Mbit network without any problems. Granted it is to an XP box and not a linux box, but I have no problems at all.

I do this with Sage so the 100Mbit network is actually handling the stream twice, first time from the XP box with the drive, to the Sage Server, which then serves the stream to the client machine over the same network. I do this at the same time as recoreding a HD stream back to the same XP drive.

So that is 1 stream recorded to the drive.
1 stream read from the drive, and streamed to a 3rd computer. Works great!

I'll be using my unraid box for the same thing when all the pieces get here, hopefully this week :)

BLKMGK

01-15-06, 11:37 PM

EXT2\3 RW driver (http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html) for Windows! Not sure if this was one brought up earlier but I spotted this one compliments of Digg and it apparently provides both reading and writing. Not tried it yet, and hope I don't have to, but thought this might be helpful to others...

imlucid

01-15-06, 11:44 PM

Is there one for Mac OS X?

imlucid

01-16-06, 12:04 AM

Well, I just bit the bullet and ordered one. Got a gigabit switch on order too, just need to get a couple of new drives and start migrating some of that 2.7 TB of data...

jimwhite

01-16-06, 10:11 AM

"EXT2\3 RW driver for Windows!"

UnRaid doesn't use EXT, but rather ReiserFS....

:cool:

imlucid

01-16-06, 11:58 AM

I can't remember if this was asked previously but:

1) Can the UnRAID mount an external firewire drive?

2) Any chance that it would/could also support HFS+ drives (in the above mentioned firewire drive).

I suspect I'll be better off just copying all my data over gigabit instead of trying a direct copy but figured I'd through the question out there (all my data is on two 8 bay firewire enclosures, non RAID, formatted as HFS+ on Mac OS X)

Kevin

01-16-06, 07:08 PM

Newbie alert here.

1. So if ANY single drive fails it can be rebuilt...correct? Even if the parity drive fails you can rebuild it...correct?

2. You can use PATA and SATA drives...correct? I think I have seen some previous posts where this been done.

3. Hypothetical question, what if you start your server out using a 200 gig parity drive but later you want to add a 500 gig drive? I would assume you would have to make the 500 gig drive your parity drive. You could then use the 200 gig drive as a data drive. Is there a process that can be used here so you don't lose any data but can add the data drive and parity drive without having to export the data somewhere else (like an external drive)?

imlucid

01-16-06, 07:37 PM

1) Correct

2) Only PATA drives, they are working on a SATA version...

3) Yes. I believe you would pull the 200 Gb drive, put in the 500 Gb drive, rebuild parity drive, add 200 Gb drive and reformat/add to UnRAID.

01-16-06, 08:10 PM

3) Yes. I believe you would pull the 200 Gb drive, put in the 500 Gb drive, rebuild parity drive, add 200 Gb drive and reformat/add to UnRAID.

Thanks! One more question. So in this scenario you wouldn't lose ANY data...correct? I assume all the other data drives simply keep their data, the 200 Gb drive is a new data drive that is formatted and then of course the 500 gig parity drive never had any data on it to begin with.

This brings up one more thought. Can you start the unraid server with data on the data drives? For instance, I have a number of JBOD drives that have data I plan keeping on my unraid server: i.e. web server files, dvd backups, photo albums, etc.. As long as I can format the parity drive can all the others keep their data or when starting the unraid server do you have to start from a clean slate and format everything?

Thanks again.

imlucid

01-16-06, 09:00 PM

Right, no data loss. The parity drive is re-created from all the other data drives.

As to the other question, I have no idea. You'd have to format them with the ReiserFS but I believe you'd have to make sure that all the free blocks were zero'd out? Maybe not as the drive would just be paritied with those blocks as they are.

I'll leave that last question to someone who knows the particulars.

llogan

01-16-06, 11:42 PM

Don't quote me on this but from my prior extensive reading of this thread, the drives are reformatted so you would lose any prior data in your initial setup of the array. However, various people have described the process they've gone through to make this process less painful (i.e. no data loss). Obviously you'd need an extra drive or two to make it work but transferring of data would be required. Sorry, I don't have the exact post number but it's in this thread...trust me.

sonofdbn

01-17-06, 10:01 AM

llogan is right; unless your drives are already in reiserfs format before you put them into the unRaid array, you have to shuffle the data around.

This is based on what I did (slightly simplified for ease of explanation): Let's assume you have 9 NTFS drives (with data), 1 parity drive and 1 blank drive, all the same size. You stick them all in the unRaid server, boot up into some other Linux and copy the data from NTFS 1 to the blank drive. Then format NTFS 1 as reiserfs, and copy data from NTFS 2 to NTFS 1 (now in reiserfs format). Now format NTFS 2 as reiserfs, copy data from NTFS 3 to.... you get the idea.

Please keep in mind that during this process there is no unRaid parity protection. If a disk crashes, the data's gone.

So essentially you need only two new drives (of sufficient capacity of course).

After that's all done, you start up the server with unRaid and it sees a bunch of new disks with data. I can't recall exactly what the screen said, but you have a choice either to format the new disks (which is what you DO NOT WANT TO DO) or calculate parity for the existing data on the disks. This second option is what you want to do.

I have to add that I couldn't find a distro which would install onto an external USB drive or run off an external USB CD-ROM drive (but someone with more Linux experience might know how to do this). In the end I sacrificed a primary IDE channel temporarily to install a CD-ROM and used Simply Mepis.

I also ended up with some strange file permissions which made files appear hidden when accessed from Windows and a .reiserfs file (directory?) popped up on some drive, but only on one drive, where I think I must have done something weird during the drive formatting.

I have to admit I'm not sure what the zeroing of new drives does. It's not something I consciously did, but everything seems to be working OK.

BLKMGK

01-17-06, 03:15 PM

"EXT2\3 RW driver for Windows!"

UnRaid doesn't use EXT, but rather ReiserFS....

:cool:

Ya' know - I should have known that having posted about it awhile ago. Sorry about that <sigh>

On the plus side I can tell you what occurs when a Parity drive is lost... NOTHING. Array runs fine, you lose data protection. Swapping in a new drive and rebuilding Parity restores protection. Likewise swapping in a bigger data drive - data is still there and you build the Parity drive. I'm in the process of doing the latter right now but haven't powered it back up yet. I expect no trauma :)

smeehrrr

01-17-06, 03:48 PM

I have to add that I couldn't find a distro which would install onto an external USB drive or run off an external USB CD-ROM drive (but someone with more Linux experience might know how to do this). In the end I sacrificed a primary IDE channel temporarily to install a CD-ROM and used Simply Mepis.

SLAX worked quite nicely for me running from a USB thumb drive, I highly recommend it for this application.

dpeart

01-17-06, 06:20 PM

I read the question about the differences between the CM Stacker STC-101 and the newer 810. I decided on the 810 because it had 2 120mm fans. I just got it from Newegg and see that it can only handle a single psu. :mad:

Unfortionately, I also ordered two sparkle 300watt psu. Not sure what I'll do now, but will probably go with the single power supply, and when I add more than 6 drives get a bigger one.

Unles of course someone knows how to put in two psu in this case. I went back to coolermaster webpage and it says it does support redundant psu, maybe this is a different thing than two psu?

Thought I would mention this so noone else makes the same mistake.

UPDATE: The documentation says it supports a matx motherboard. Unfortionately, the standoff options don't allow you to support the matx motherboard fully. There are two standoffs by the expansion cards, these two have no where to connect to the case. This means that all the expansion cards and that part of the motherboard are hanging in the air. Contacting Coolermaster about a fix, but don't expect to hear anything from them. Their forum tells a bad story regarding customer support. But I'll give it a shot.

ohlwiler

01-18-06, 08:20 AM

I read the question about the differences between the CM Stacker STC-101 and the newer 810. I decided on the 810 because it had 2 120mm fans. I just got it from Newegg and see that it can only handle a single psu. :mad:

Unfortionately, I also ordered two sparkle 300watt psu. Not sure what I'll do now, but will probably go with the single power supply, and when I add more than 6 drives get a bigger one.

Unles of course someone knows how to put in two psu in this case. I went back to coolermaster webpage and it says it does support redundant psu, maybe this is a different thing than two psu?

In this post (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6474148&highlight=seasonic#post6474148) I made the case for using just one power supply. I am still using the same Seasonic 430 watt power supply with 12 drives and have had zero issues.

Scott

dpeart

01-18-06, 10:19 AM

I'm fine with using a single power supply, just thought I would let others know.

The biggest concern now is that the micro-atx motherboard is not compatible with this case, even though it is advertised as such. Guess I'll be calling NewEgg as they advertise matx support for this case, hoping they will cover the return cost. If not I'll figure something out to get the board fully supported.

BLKMGK

01-18-06, 09:05 PM

The biggest issue with a single P/S is the large amount of current required at startup with a large number of drives. Apparently some of the new drives can be started without instant spinup. A thread on the SnapStream forums talks about this http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/showpost.php?p=176646&postcount=28 Apparently this is something found on some WD drives but this is the first I've ever heard of it. May certainly help with the spinup power issues ASSuming that the Lime software has no issues with this power up sequence...

BTW - SnapStream has some pretty interesting media handling stuff I may yet checkout if an XBOX frontend doesn't work out. I'll find a good way to playback my ripped DVDs yet! :p

jimwhite

01-19-06, 07:15 AM

J. L.

01-19-06, 07:52 AM

I'm getting VERY slow transfer copying from one unraid disk to another via a gig-connected windows pc.... 3 hours to copy 27 gigs from drive 8 to drive 6 !!!! ????? the networking tab of taskmanager shows spikey transfer at about 4% utilization... my SMC gig switch shows gig connections but the data lights for the two channels are blinking on and off simultaneously.... jumbo frames (9k) set on the windows PC.....

:confused:Jim,
If you did the copy using windows explorer you are copying the data from the unRaid server to the windows box over the network and then back to the unRaid server to its other drive over the network. This would be slow. You are network bound.

Copying from one unRaid disk to another is best done by logging into the unRaid server using telnet and then doing the copy there. I'll bet it will be MUCH faster.

You will need to look up the syntax of the unix "cp" command, but I think it will be something like this:

cp -r /mnt/disk8/* /mnt/disk6

Joe L.

dpeart

01-19-06, 08:02 AM

Has anyone automated the process of getting data from a ntfs drive onto the Un-Raid system?

I was think it would be nice to put the drive in the Un-Raid box, the management window would recognize it as an ntfs drive and give you the option of copying it to a array drive, reformat it and add it to the array. Seems pretty straightforward and would very much ease the data transition.

Any reason why I could not do this manually myself via telnet? Will the linux image from Lime mount an ntfs volume?

thanks,

jimwhite

01-19-06, 09:07 AM

Joe... I realize the traffic pattern, BUT, that seems AWFULLY slow on a Gig link.... add to that, after 1 hour and 33%, it failed saying the network share was no longer avaiable !! I wonder if my SMC switch has gone south?

daveP.... Lime's setup does NOT support NTFS drives, unfortunately.... that's the missing piece to simply do what you are asking...

:cool:

CANNON-FODDER

01-19-06, 09:33 AM

mpenton

01-19-06, 09:58 AM

dpeart

01-19-06, 10:02 AM

This is a bummer, not sure what the trade-offs of supporting ntfs read-only access in the kernal would be. I guess that is why it may make sense to boot of cd, format new drive as reiserfs, copy over contents then tell Un-Raid to add data. I believe this flow was supported by Un-Raid. Maybe quicker than 100Mb copies, but not simpler.

audiomaniac

01-19-06, 10:13 AM

Jim,
If you did the copy using windows explorer you are copying the data from the unRaid server to the windows box over the network and then back to the unRaid server to its other drive over the network. This would be slow. You are network bound.

Copying from one unRaid disk to another is best done by logging into the unRaid server using telnet and then doing the copy there. I'll bet it will be MUCH faster.

You will need to look up the syntax of the unix "cp" command, but I think it will be something like this:

cp -r /mnt/disk8/* /mnt/disk6

Joe L.

Not only that but Windows explorer must be one of the slowest ways of copying anything known to man. This is the cases whether you are copying from disk to disk on the same windows machine or across a network. The last obviously makes it worse. Often you could copy much faster using ftp, but that of course requires you to have both ftp servers and clients installed.

BLKMGK

01-19-06, 05:55 PM

depart, I asked about something similar (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6544200&&#post6544200) a bit back when Tom was still posting regularly here (post) (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6649318&&#post6649318)

FWIW, while Tom may not be here quite as often as he had been previously he HAS been VERY responsive to me via e-mail with regards to a support situation and on a Sunday no less! He worked with me over a few days to troubleshoot what turned out to be a hardware issue and was quite professional about it. Oh, and I lost no data :p I'm going to continue to work this issue with him a little longer but I have to say he's been quite patient and very helpful. I can only hope that he's continuing to work on improvements to even further polish this system for us. Heh, I almost got the guys at work to buy one but they chose another solution just so they wouldn't have to write a sole source justification - argh!

As for copying - Explorer is a piece of TRASH. Drives will disconnect, data is slow, it just doesn't seem to work well for large volumes of data. ExplorerXP, Xplorer2, and would you believe XCOPY in a DOS window ALL work better! ExplorerXP has some GUI glitches but is what I have used to organize and handle data. XCOPY I've used to move a TON of data via USB2 on a PC to my array - it seems fastest of all <shrug> Explorer seems to cache things poorly with regards to throughputting lots of data.

P.S. Not sure that Large Frames are supported in this config. I'm pretty sure Tom said he saw no throughput gains in testing. :( I'm using a small SMC 8 port switch...

CANNON-FODDER

01-19-06, 06:47 PM

err, just noting the time-frame, and (hopefully) not raising expectations that Tom currently answers support or future product related posts routinely in this forum instead of through contacting tech/sales support at the company.

v/r,
C-F

jimwhite

01-19-06, 09:19 PM

well, (blush), just before I did that 3 hour copy, I rebooted the server and didn't notice that it decided to do a parity check :eek:

well, after the parity check completed, I got these very interesting results.... I was copying a "representative" folder of music files.... lots of ape's and flac's, cue's, jpg's, m3u's, and md5's.... big and small files, 2000 files, 26.3 GB:

//server/DiskX to //server/DiskY via client with explorer 65 min
//server/DiskX to D:/ on client with explorer 17 min
D:/ on client to //server/DiskY with explorer 42 min
/mnt/DiskX to /mnt/DiskY using telenet into server 58 min

I found the last one intriguing..... :D

:cool:

sonofdbn

01-20-06, 12:17 AM

Any reason that booting off of a Live-CD distro that supports NTFS & Reiser won't work for what you want to do? I haven't tried it myself because the copying didn't seem that slow to me since I was moving from a software based Raid 5 system to this one. I think Ubuntu supports both file systems. Of course the suggestion isn't that useful if you don't have a usb based CD to try it with.

I couldn't find a Live-CD which would run off a USB-based CD attached to the standard unRaid motherboard. I tried a lot of distros. I think in fact only the Ubuntu DVD version worked, but that was so painful to use because you can't (easily) make yourself root and the permissions kept on getting in the way.

If anyone can point me to a Live-CD which definitely works with unRaid hardware, I'd be grateful. Right now, I think smeehrrr's Slax suggestion is the best if you don't want to give up a drive bay.

jimwhite

01-20-06, 05:28 AM

I found that a $25 USB Flash drive and Kill Bill (SLAX) comes in VERY handy..... :D

:cool:

strutton

01-20-06, 10:41 AM

I've been following this thread for quite awhile and I'm planning on purchasing an unRaid server in the next 3-6 months. I have started an IDE hard drive collection (using rebates) etc over the past 2 months I have 1.15Tb so far for average of $0.28 per GB. The drives are currently living in a cheap multi-bay firewire enclosure I've also picked up 3 EyeHomes for an average of $119 each... Ok, enough of that...

I'm interested in adding a WEB/PHP server and MySQL to the unRaid server (see SwissCenter (http://www.swisscenter.co.uk/content/view/51/56/)). This application supports many media clients; LinkTheater, Eyehome, Linkplayer2, and Momistu to name a few.

So here's my questions:

Has anyone added any applications like this to their unRaid?

Would you recommend doing this?

Is it possible to tap into the web server that's already running to add PHP support?

SwissCenter on Linux prefers Apache (obviously). What web server is used on the unRaid?

Also if it is possible to do the above, I assume I will have to store my PHP and DB data on one of the hard drives not the flash?

thanks,
-mike

BLKMGK

01-20-06, 12:28 PM

Okay, what you're talking about is running a suite of pretty "full" apps. Not going to happen unless the way the UnRAID is built is totally changed. Currnelty it boots from a 128meg USB FLASH drive and has NO swap space. None of the OS is written to the drives although it's possible to run a program and have it access the data drives. Chances are VERY good you'd run out of memory long before this system was up and running and with there being no swap the whole thing would probably crash or run very poorly. The UnRAID is primarily meant to be storage and not run apps, if it ran apps it would likely have to be loaded on a disk (eating storage and making recovery harder) and be a more complicated install. It's possible to run SOME small apps off the FOB, and some of us have done that, but that's pretty much unknown territory and not the primary focus. I'm surprised that this software runs on something as thing as a Kuro\Linkstation since those generally don't have much CPU or memory but DO at least have swap space :O

Since the software you're interested in (thanks for the lead!) can run on other OS I'd suggest running it on a more fully loaded up box and storiing the data on the array instead.

My .02

madpoet

01-20-06, 02:44 PM

Agreed, it's too much. I know people are using WiZD for instance, but that is a really light program.

dpeart

01-20-06, 02:51 PM

What about running a FTP daemon?

Mark J. Foster

01-20-06, 03:32 PM

Hi, Gang!

It's not my intention to derail the unRAID thread, but after I waited a few months beyond the promised SATA solution's arrival date and finally timed out, I built a solution using a H/W RAID6 controller (Areca ARC-1230), and can copy 26GB from anywhere to anywhere in about seven-eight minutes via GigE...

FYI!
MarkF

P.S. I wouldn't have posted this, if it weren't for the fact that Tom seems to have started ignoring us after his initial advertisements (and admittedly very impressive early support posts), and has generally stopped posting here since...

strutton

01-20-06, 04:04 PM

Since the software you're interested in (thanks for the lead!) can run on other OS I'd suggest running it on a more fully loaded up box and storiing the data on the array instead.

My .02

Thanks for the advice. I don't have a problem putting a server in between, but it would have been nice not to...

Yeah SwissCenter is pretty neat. It answers some things I was looking for like movie meta data and an improved UI. Plus the flexibility to mod it however I want...

thanks again,
-mike

madpoet

01-20-06, 04:09 PM

Hey Mark, if you were so concerned did you ever email him? He's very responsive to emails. Glad you're happy, but instead of subtely insinuating Tom isn't provding support why not just enjoy your setup.

Mark J. Foster

01-20-06, 04:17 PM

Hi, Madpoet!

If you check my prior posts, you'll see that I very rarely post anything negative, and in fact, I previously posted in this thread how very impressed I was with Tom's initial support! This is still an impressive product (for IDE users), but the fact is that the situation's changed, for reasons that I don't understand. Yes, I emailed Tom, and offered to buy an SATA solution regardless of price, but he never responded at all...

I'm by no means perfect, and I'd certainly never blame anyone who complained on the forum when I've messed up in this sense (which I in fact have), for what it's worth. Again, Tom's initial responsiveness on the forum was exemplary, but something's changed...

Best Regards,
MarkF

dpeart

01-20-06, 04:29 PM

Hopefully he is busy selling, making, shipping, and continuing to develop the product :)

pischke

01-20-06, 05:14 PM

What about running a FTP daemon?

I'm running proftpd on it - no problems so far (knock wood). Of course, I don't really use it that much - only set it up so my wife's backup software had somewhere relatively safe to back up her powerbook to.

-mike

Thomas J. Coyle

01-20-06, 05:46 PM

madpoet,

I have two unRaid servers and agree that Tom has been very supportive via email, but I have to agree with Mark J. Foster in that it would be nice if Tom could pop in every once in a while and provide some status.

I think that it would be very encouraging to new comers to this thread to be able to see what Tom is doing and has planned for the future.

I myself would like to know when there is going to be an update to the unRaid OS to address some of the constructive comments and concerns that have been voiced on this thread.

Just a thought.

Regards,
TCIII

BLKMGK

01-20-06, 05:59 PM

I'd think an FTP Daemon would be pretty easy to run but would suggest pushing memory up to a Gig just to be sure there's enough. Good to see that someone has already tried it - Mike are you doing this on 512meg?

I'll admit I'd like tosee faster GigE performance from the box, it does seem slower than I'd hoped. However I'm not often needing to move large bulky files around and generally just needed bulk storage is all. Tom has been very responsive to my recent needs and for me at least SATA isn't an attraction - especially with no spindown. RAID has downsides I don't want too so for now I'm not bitching. I too hope that Tom is continuing development and that we will see something that answers the GPL issues and SATA in the future. For now I'm a happy camper, if that ever changed I could always slap a RAID card in this box but somehow I don't see that occuring anytime soon :p Hopefully Tom will stop by and visit sometime to tell us what's up, I hope business is going well for him...

P.s. Will likely be setting up this Swiss thing shortly. It really does look flexible and a good UPNP streaming solution. If it works half as well as the screenshots look and does it well on my Linktheater I may be able to skip a whole lot of work! :D

pischke

01-20-06, 06:59 PM

dpeart

01-20-06, 07:29 PM

I was planning on using the FTP server for exactly the same thing, backup software. I'm glad to hear it can be done.

HyPyke

01-21-06, 03:03 AM

.... but after I waited a few months beyond the promised SATA solution's arrival date and finally timed out....

P.S. I wouldn't have posted this, if it weren't for the fact that Tom seems to have started ignoring us after his initial advertisements (and admittedly very impressive early support posts), and has generally stopped posting here since...

I am searching the thread but having a hard time find where Tom promised you or anybody anything. Can you direct me to the post or was this via e-mail?

Also, my understanding is that Tom has been very responsive to paying customers. Ignoring "us" implies that he is ignoring all of us who having been posting to this thread yet several people who own unraid systems report having communicated with him in a timely manner via e-mail.

John Spicer

01-21-06, 06:08 AM

I had a quick email response to a support query a couple of days ago with the initial setup of my unraid.

Its up now, just a couple of TB to transfer onto it, a disk at a time.

Mark J. Foster

01-21-06, 08:34 AM

Hi, HyPyke!

That's a very good point, and I apologize if it came across incorrectly. Tom had posted the arrival date of October 17 on his website for the SATA version - when that appeared, I bought 4.8TB of SATA drives. In my mind, posting the arrival date of a commercial product on an official website is "promising". though I'm fully aware that such "promises" are often not kept. It's quite obvious that there was no ill-intent on Tom's part, the SATA version just required far more effort than he'd planned (including a rewrite for GPL adherence, and moving to the Linux V2.6 kernel). I really did try to become a paying customer...! ;)

Also, I believe my comment pretty clearly was restricted to referring to postings here - I didn't refer to email.

Regards,
MarkF

jimwhite

01-21-06, 11:56 AM

I recall that the deveopment of and forum discussion of that wonderful DS filter, AC3Filter, by a prolific Russian programmer suffered an equivallent "permanent pause" when the subject of GPL compliance came up some months ago.... I hope this is not a replay...

:(

imlucid

01-21-06, 02:43 PM

Well my un-Raid was picked up by FedEx last night and is on its way. I've received my starter two 500 Gb drives and my gigabit switch so I'm eagerly awaiting the un-Raid for next week!

notandor

01-22-06, 01:18 AM

Mark,

I think you have well said your point. My queries earlier were also not in regard to hammer Tom (Limetech), but just a common consumer curiosity (who wants to give business) and has some expectations to atleast some things which were promised. Yes, HyPyke, this time I'm saying promise as Tom mentioned on 12/03:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6649572&&#post6649572
for some 2U SATA related pictures after putting up the christmas light ;-)
Again, he never mentioned the words "promise", but generally no one uses in that word in every sentence anyways, but one generally means to do what they speak... its ok if its a day or two late, or even a week or two late but later on selectively replying and ignoring the things all together... not a good way to handle business.

Anyways, no hard feelings and no more issues at all... as I took the plunge on something else:
http://www.infrant.com/
Model No: ReadyNAS X6

I was recommended for another model ReadyNAS 600 by a friend almost 2-3 months ago, at that time I never listened as I was decided on Unraid, but when they came up with this new model (X6), which I read about on slashdot, I was blown away. I immediately overnighted one to try. And from last week onwards, I couldn't be happier... one more is on the way. This is what a user wrote at slashdot:

" The ratings and reviews on their homepage http://www.infrant.com/ [infrant.com] say it all. This thing blows a Terastation away in terms of ease of use, supported protocols, and goodies. Buy an empty ReadyNAS X6 from http://www.eaegis.com/ [eaegis.com] for $579 (no tax, free shipping). Fill it with two of whatever drive is dirt cheap this week (cough-newegg-cough). Here's the kicker...ReadyNAS will expand the drive array automatically each time you add a drive. So buy a couple 300GB's for $100 each and you'll have 300GB of mirrored storage. A few months from now, you run out of room, you just drop in another 300GB drive and now you've got 600GB of redundant storage. Add another drive and you'll have 900GB with redundancy. Still need more room? Replace those 300GB drives one at a time with higher capacity drives and watch it automatically resize the set to use the extra space. Without ever having to rebuld the array! Trying to backup a TB of data so you can move your NAS from 300GB drives to something higher really sucks the big one.

Of course it does CIFS(SMB). But it is one of the only NAS products to support Apple File Protocol, which is a must for networks with Mac/OS X users that insist on using filenames with colons, slashes and question marks and other things that make CIFS/SMB explode. It also supports NFS and rsync for the UNIX/Linux crowd and both FTP and HTTP for the web browser crowd (hi, grandma). It also streams in both flavors of home media server protocols (UPnP and the HMS) so you can buy a $100 Linksys media extender and watch anything you have stored on your RAID. It also has a SlimServer plugin for streaming music to those SlimServer devices that you can hook up to your stereo or a cheap pair of speakers.

It's also supports Gigabit with Jumbo Packets (write only currently) so you can copy 200GB of HD camera footage to the NAS in a couple hours instead of a couple days. The RevB case is cable-less with just thumbscrews between you and swapping a drive. It also holds the drives vertically because who is the idiot who thinks stacking heat factories horizontally on top of each other is a good idea. Also, I can't tell you how many RAID products only lets you specify an alert SMTP server name but no authentication information, which means e-mail alerts don't get delivered (boo Promise, boo 3Ware). ReadyNAS has its own MTA so the mail gets through without a problem, and it can also let you set login/password to authenticate to your ISP's SMTP server. It looks nice, clean, and it certainly not the noisiest thing I've had in my room, although I will be happy when future firmware lets you put the drives to sleep so the case fan can be completely turned off when you aren't using it.

I spend three weeks shopping for a NAS for my network, and I'm glad I looked past everyone telling me Terastation. I've had this ReadyNAS X6 for a few weeks now and I love it. I'm already shopping for a second so I can recycle the old drives from all my other rag-tag household systems into one nice neat package."

The difference in terms of drives between this and unraid server is it just supports 4 SATA drives. I think its ok considering the limetech's pricing of $1300... (i can buy 2+ of these units). But the advantages and features of ReadyNAS X6 are a generation ahead, its support of Apple protocol (I have a mac laptop too), its features of its own MTA to mail, it is really modular in terms of small unit instead handling one beast like stacker and hopefully low power bills. And the biggest of all, it streams in flavors of home media server protocols (UPnP and the HMS), so I don't need a PC at the other end to access my hard disks, just a $100 Linksys Media Extender near my TV is enough, which is on the way for me.

Not meaning to discourage Tom (limetech) as I always had the intention to give my business and to not hammer anyone (as per HyPyke), but as it is aptly said, in today's world its always a buyer's market.

Thanks

Hi, HyPyke!

That's a very good point, and I apologize if it came across incorrectly. Tom had posted the arrival date of October 17 on his website for the SATA version - when that appeared, I bought 4.8TB of SATA drives. In my mind, posting the arrival date of a commercial product on an official website is "promising". though I'm fully aware that such "promises" are often not kept. It's quite obvious that there was no ill-intent on Tom's part, the SATA version just required far more effort than he'd planned (including a rewrite for GPL adherence, and moving to the Linux V2.6 kernel). I really did try to become a paying customer...! ;)

Also, I believe my comment pretty clearly was restricted to referring to postings here - I didn't refer to email.

Regards,
MarkF

notandor

01-22-06, 01:42 AM

there is more on ReadyNAS X6, this was also posted by same user later on at slashdot:

"Oh, I alsost forgot...just about the coolest feature is that the thing has a PCI slot and two USB ports. This means that you can add a wireless card or a firewire card if you want to use firewire storage devices or a wireless USB adapater or even USB storage devices and printers!

For USB printer connected to the back, the ReadyNAS works as a print server. If you add USB storage (almost everyone already has a USB drive kicking around somewhere) then that storage is available as a volume on the ReadyNAS. You obviously can't use it for part of the RAID but it is fantastic for loading up a drive of movies to take over to someone's house or bringing data from other homes/offices to backup on the RAID.

The ReadyNAS can also be configured to automatically copy data from any flash storage to a specified directory. So you have a camera with a CF or SD card, right? Get a USB card reader, and every time you plug your camera's flash card into it, it will copy the pictures over to your /Pictures volume so you can pull them up on your Media Center in the living room.

Since the underpinnings are all Linux, it's a sure bet that the PCI and USB ports will provide all sorts of cool amazing things as time progresses. I fully expect that you'll someday be able to add a second NIC and have the ReadyNAS function as a firewire...sorta like that big ugly yellow banana slug NAS that was reviewed on here a few months ago."

I plan to add/configure wireless on the PCI slot, no more cable running in the house. Also, I forgot to mention earlier in my post, my 100 GB portable USB disk and 1gb and 4gb flash w/ USB reader is amazing used now as I can copy/transfer pictures/songs really fast for my camera and portable player. Basically, it has made me PC free.

Also, I don't have to buy an Network Laser Printer w/ ethernet port (for which I was looking, and they are generally costly) as I can setup a print server on USB without a need of a PC!!! and not just one as the unit is modular and wirelss I can decide to put whereever I want (soon my 2nd one will be here).

I still have to discover its all uses and features, its already blowing away my old thoughts of how I was planning to configure my house. :-) I'm rethinking of modularizing things like where is the convenient location for the printer (one nas unit) and one currently at the back of the tv and all are going to be wire/cable free and PC free to even access them through media extender on TV!!!

Thanks

01-22-06, 10:02 AM

That ReadyNAS X6 is a neat product. Thanks for passing it along.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think there is one thing the unraid can do that the X6 cannot. In my case I have just a bunch of drives in my current htpc. A 40 gig, 120 gig, 200 gig, and a 250 gig. I hate the thought of just throwing away all these drives since the X6 will require drives of all the same size. I am of course on a budget and if I put together the unraid I would most likely just buy another 250 gig drive as my parity drive and then set things up so that I would have the same space as I did before but now with the bonus of fault tolerance. The X6 would cause my initial investment to be fairly high whereas with the unraid I could buy the $469 option from Tom (mobo, cpu, ram, unraid flash, etc..). Then add the case of my choosing which would of course increase the price a bit more but I think I could stay away from the cost of $1300 that you alluded to.

If I am way off base here please enlighten me. I don't pretend to fully understand all my options here.

Fallen Kell

01-22-06, 10:55 AM

Here is some performance information.

Sustained reads from a single disk share to a Windows XP machine via GigEthernet gets about 26 MB/sec (mega-byte = 1,000,000 bytes). The bottleneck here is the GigEthernet.

Sustained writes to a single shared disk get about 12 MB/sec. The bottleneck here is the un-raid disk subsystem.

Don't know if someone has already pointed this out or not, but your math is very wrong....

1) 1 MB = 1024kB = 1048576 bytes = 8388608 bits

2) 1Gbps = 1000000000 bits/sec = 125000000 bytes/sec = 122070.3125 kB/sec = 119.20928955078125 MB/sec

That is theoretical performance of a GigEthernet network. Actual performance is usually 40-60% of the theoretical performance, so between 47 MB/sec to 72 MB/sec is probably a good estimate of what you will expect to see over a GigEthernet network. And again, that is lowballing the number. We get speeds of just under 100MB/sec on our worksite's GigE backbone, and that is a network that spans several acres of land (in the primary building facility).

Even in a home network using true GigE switches (not the super cheap $40-60 ones, but ones in the $100-600 range, yes, there are ones even that cheap which will give full speed), you should easily see 60-80% theoretical network transfers between the systems due to the extreme simplicity of the network (usually 2-4 systems, with network runs less then 30 feet each, and even in some homes where all the computer equipment is in the same room...).

So please don't go saying that 26MB read speed is limited by GigE, it most certainly is not. I would check your network engineer because there is an obvious issue in your GigE network that was used to get those numbers, as that is bairly 2x the speed of a 100base-TX network.

Mark J. Foster

01-22-06, 11:21 AM

Hi, Fallen!

You're correct, of course! In fact, using benchmarks, I can achieve 99% line utilization on GigE, and 97% going through three SMC-8508T (less than $100 street price) switches. The real limitation that Tom probably ran into is in the Windows XP TCP/IP stack. If it isn't initially "primed" by running high-throughput tests, it'll typically deliver only about 200M bps when copying from WinXP to WinXP. When copying to/from Linux, Windows Server 2003, or even 64-bit XP, this seems to go away. Even on normal XP to XP transfers, though, after I've "primed" the network by running benchmarks at 97%+ line utilization, I've seen sustained file copy transfers of up to 530M bps between two single drive machines.

Cheers!
MarkF

imlucid

01-22-06, 12:12 PM

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think there is one thing the unraid can do that the X6 cannot. In my case I have just a bunch of drives in my current htpc. A 40 gig, 120 gig, 200 gig, and a 250 gig.
This was a big factor in my purchasing the un-Raid. I've now got 14 drives spanning sizes from 160 GB to 500 GB. That I can put them all to good use is essential and that I can upgrade any individual drive is awesome.

BLKMGK

01-22-06, 02:37 PM

That NAS is actually what my office is likely going to be purchasing so I hope to have some firsthand experiences with it soon. There are some things about it that I don't like over the unRAID though - for one thing the data is striped across disks. If you have a multiple failure that's it - toast, all data GONE. Not so with the unRAID and that's VERY important to me. I also like that the unRAID can spin down drives, individual drives even, seems those guys have the SAME issue Tom is experiencing doesn't it? On top of that even if they get spindown working it won't be for individual drives, the data is striped and to access ANY of it the whole thing shebang has to be spinning - that SUX.

BTW, poking around a little on their site and their forums I see some dancing around on the GPL question too -> http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=411 and it seems that getting their modified source wasn't exactly encouraged. Interesting that it's work for them to seperate GPL and proprietary code but that it has now been made available. Would be interesting to see a diff done on their released source....

Anyway, yeah that company seems to have had some time to further develop their product. Terrific and I can see some uses for it, might even want one myself, but I still see advantages to the unRAID. SATA support isn't a big deal to me, I don't even own any SATA drives at this time for that matter and won't for awhile I suspect - there's no advantage to it.

Would I like to see Tom further develop this system? Sure! I'd like to see GPL compliance and lots of other things too. Those things take time, resources, patience. My system does what it needs to, what *I* bought it for, storing data....

stevetoney

01-22-06, 03:05 PM

Thing I dislike on the unraid is having 14 drive letters - share points, versus just 1-3 volumes..

Something they say may be fix in future software -- may be work a look then for reuse of stacks of drives I have from upgrades to larger ones

This was a big factor in my purchasing the un-Raid. I've now got 14 drives spanning sizes from 160 GB to 500 GB. That I can put them all to good use is essential and that I can upgrade any individual drive is awesome.

BLKMGK

01-22-06, 03:23 PM

J. L.

01-22-06, 04:39 PM

Multiple share points are indeed a PITA, using UNC naming helps a TON! Some programs cannot help it, PSPVideo9 for instance flakes over it - the MPEG encoder it passes arguments to fails I think. Most of the time though it's pretty seamless. Since ostensibly most of us are using this for things like video storage for a front-end device or for backing up devices unattended this is okay I think. A single share point with folders beneath it for all the drives would be my prefrence and hopefully Tom can do it. For now I'm dealing with it...We can get the bulk of the functionality you are looking for of having one drive to mount under windows right now by creating symbolic links to the other disks from the first.

cd /mnt/disk1
mkdir disks
ln -s /mnt/disk2 disks
ln -s /mnt/disk3 disks
ln -s /mnt/disk4 disks

#repeat as needed for others disks in your unRaid array

Now, a listing of the disk1 drive from a windows based machine will show a sub-folder named disks, and in it will be sub-folders for disk2,3 and 4.

This might make it a lot easier for some of the media software as it will only need to deal with one drive letter in windows (the drive letter for disk1 can get to all the data on all the data drives through the sub-folder).

Joe L.

CANNON-FODDER

01-22-06, 04:54 PM

BLKMGK

01-22-06, 05:22 PM

stevetoney

01-22-06, 05:23 PM

[
I do this now in windows server 2003

one drive is shared out -- then in the disk manager all the other drives are map as folders under that one drive versus assigning the a drive letter

did not see how to do this on the unraid

I understand a little of the linux mnt and pointer, but I'm not that good at that os

QUOTE=J. L.]We can get the bulk of the functionality you are looking for of having one drive to mount under windows right now by creating symbolic links to the other disks from the first.

thanks for the advice

in the end I still think a proper raid volume with protection and sparing would be easier

cd /mnt/disk1
mkdir disks
ln -s /mnt/disk2 disks
ln -s /mnt/disk3 disks
ln -s /mnt/disk4 disks

#repeat as needed for others disks in your unRaid array

Now, a listing of the disk1 drive from a windows based machine will show a sub-folder named disks, and in it will be sub-folders for disk2,3 and 4.

This might make it a lot easier for some of the media software as it will only need to deal with one drive letter in windows (the drive letter for disk1 can get to all the data on all the data drives through the sub-folder).

Joe L.[/QUOTE]

J. L.

01-22-06, 05:24 PM

Could you have done that by sharing out a folder (or second partition?) on the USB drive that only contains the symbolic links? Maybe even better - if the distro sets up a ram drive then that could have folder/share with only symbolic links to all of the active mounting points - and maybe even dynamically created as drives added/removed to the array. Would this cause needless churn, or break something else?

v/r,
C-FYup... you could do almost any of the above... If you set up a ram drive then the drive, folders in it, and symbolic links would all need to be re-established every time you re-started the array. Tom could probably add that to the unRaid start-up script if the ram-drive did not use too much system resources. Or... we could add those commands to the bottom of the unRaid "go" script run at start-up.

I don't like the idea of using the flash drive, as I like leaving it entirely read-only, not even sure if it supports symbolic links as it is a FAT32 filesystem.

What you might do is define an "SMB share" to share the newly created folder with all the symbolic links to the other drives. You would then make it the attached drive from within windows.

Joe L.

J. L.

01-22-06, 05:32 PM

Sounds good Joe! Are you actively doing this now? Not exactly the way I'd thought of doing it but quite workable and if you ignore the other shares fits the bill perfectly. I think this does the job pretty well actually, now if we just had a little bit of security (lol). I guess I had just pictured going to the "share" and being presented with one named object and subfolders - what you have though of is perfect though. I wonder how hard it would be to create a "pseudo" share that only contained folders and hid the rest? Probably scratch some itches and not others. I think I like this idea! Cannon's idea of using the RAM drive is also possible I'd suppose but I'd be more nervous about someone accidently hosing the FOB I think.

Some good ideas - thanks guys!Well, I have no need for a single drive at this point in time, but I just tried it and from windows I see the sub-folder "disks" and in it are the "folders" representing each of the other disks.

I agree, a single spanned drive might serve some better, but is has its own limitations as you grow the array.

A bunch of symbolic links as I demonstrated would let most windows software use a single drive letter to get to stored media, regardless of the drive it is stored on.

As you said, this does not solve issues regarding seciruty, and you will simply ignore the other shares that directly access disk2,3,4,etc, but it will do to provide a windows program a single folder to search for media.

Oh yes, although I did not show it in my original example, you could also type:

ln -s /mnt/disk1 disks

Now in the "disks" folder are sub-folders for all of your stored media... including disk1. (but each sub-folder is actuallt a symbolic link to one of the data drives)

Joe L.

CANNON-FODDER

01-22-06, 07:09 PM

Something like this?# create a mount point:
cd /home
mkdir /home/ONESHARE
# create a filesystem:
# does it matter if it's reiserfs
# RAM disk did not like the journal
# defaulting to ext3
mkfs /dev/ram2
# mount the ramdisk:
mount /dev/ram2 /ONESHARE
# create the symbolic links
# maybe later some sort of loop and then
# see if there is an exist statement to only share active drives
ln -s /mnt/disk1 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk2 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk3 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk4 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk5 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk6 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk7 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk8 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk9 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk10 /home/ONESHARE
ln -s /mnt/disk11 /home/ONESHARE
# Set up the SMB share
# Totally lost here.
# Set this part up later.
# VNC over SSH2 was this weekend.
v/r,
C-F

aychamo

01-23-06, 10:32 AM

Hello there!

Wow.. I've just read the entire 31 pages of this thread. It seems like this is quite a good little solution, and it's what I was looking for. Initially I was going to go some route with a backup drive for each drive I would have, because I didn't know anything about this variant of RAID 4 without the striping and only the parity drive. It's amazing to me that the missing bit for the parity can be calculated like that.

Anyway, I was curious if the rack mounted option has had any progress? Is there anything inherit in the rack mount option that forbids PATA being used? I would love if Tom from Limetech could point towards a rackmount case that he likes, and if it would be possible to buy a rack mounted option already assembled from him.

I will be using this on a Mac network.. (Anyone have yet?) I hope that I can just plug it in to the gigE hub and access shares, no problems.

Thank you
Aychamo

imlucid

01-23-06, 11:11 AM

I'll be using mine on my Mac network here at home as soon as it arrives. Shouldn't be an issue Aychamo as the SMB shares should just show up in /Network.

Kevin

imlucid

01-25-06, 01:18 AM

Well after a snafu with FedEx (their tracking site SAID it was on the truck to be delivered on Monday, but it never showed up).

Fortunately, it was here when I arrived home from work. First impression:

"Damn, that's a BIG box!"

I could barely get through the door as it was blocking the way, but I managed to squeezed through to get it inside.

I opened it up (nice packing) and that sucker is huge. Makes the G5 tower look small!

Drive installation was a snap, the only thing to watch for is the drive screws come in two different thread sizes. I didn't realize this at first and put a couple of small ones in. No biggie.

After installing my two new 500 Gb drives, I plugged in the USB flash drive, plugged a video cable into my monitor switch, plugged in my gigabit ethernet and flipped the switch.

Unfortunately I didn't get any video and was unable to detect the server via SMB or http. I tried a couple of different cables and another monitor and no go.

I emailed support (at 7pm) and got a reply after an hour or so from Tom giving me some pointers (i.e. try plugging in the monitor directly and how to modify the flash drive directly from my Mac to set a static IP address).

Booyah, that did the trick. I'm now copying 300 Gb worth of data while the parity drive is building itself.

One other note for Mac OS users. It may take a while for the server to show up in /Network. There are a couple of reasons for this:
1) The Mac OS SMB browsing solution periodically polls for new servers on the network and doesn't refresh immediately just by clicking away from /Network and back in.

2) The default workgroup of Mac OS machines is "Workgroup" while the default workgroup of the SAN is "MS-Home" (or something close). Your machine will need to detect that the new workgroup is available (which should happen on the next smb network refresh) assuming the server has properly elected itself as the local master browser. In this case, you'll see the "MS-Home" workgroup folder in the top level of /Network.

3) If you have a Windows 98 machine on the network that is hosting the "MS-Home" workgroup and is the local master browser, you won't ever see it on Mac OS X. (Issue between samba on X and Windows 98).

Anyway, I changed the workgroup of my NAS to be "Workgroup" while I was modifying the network configuration and it shows up at the top level in /Network.

:D

dpeart

01-25-06, 12:34 PM

Can the partitions on the server be mounted onto a Linux box? Is so how would I do this?

thanks,

imlucid

01-25-06, 12:51 PM

Assuming you have samba (http://us1.samba.org/samba/) installed just do the following I believe (reading this from the How To link (http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/install.html#id2520661) on samba.org).

$ smbclient //yourhostname/disk1

where "yourhostname" is the hostname or address of the NAS and "disk1" is the volume you are trying to mount.

As for creating mount records to have these automatically show up, I have no idea on Linux.

Kevin

dpeart

01-25-06, 12:56 PM

Good I'm hoping to migrate my data, but booting a Linux, Live-CD, mount my local ntfs volumes, mount the samba share on //tower/<volume>, and copy the data using Linux. The intent being that this will be faster than trying XP copies. Might be fun to play with anyway.

imlucid

01-25-06, 02:40 PM

For Mac OS X users, you can just add each volume to your System Preferences->Accounts->Login Items list and they'll automatically mount when you log in.

jcruse

01-25-06, 04:19 PM

Does anyone have the following issue?

I have 3 computers in my network, 1 desktop, 1 Un-Raid server, and 1 HTPC.

When I'm writing a file to the Un-Raid from my desktop to one disk, I am completely unable to play a video_ts file on my HTPC from any other disk on the UnRaid. The HTPC skips, stutters, freezes, etc... I only have the machines connected with a 100Mbit Router, but I never had this problem with a self-built Linux RAID-5 server I created. Is it the type of RAID that's an issue? Are people successfully writing and reading from their Un-Raid's at the same time? What kind of network hardware are you using?

I'm worried what's going to happen once I start using the Un-RAID as my PVR repository...

dpeart

01-25-06, 05:40 PM

Just got my replacement flash drive, and it boots beautifully. First one has issues that Tom is going to look into.

I'm not syncing the parity disk. Then comes moving all my PVR data over.

jcruse, I hope this works, it is one of the main reasons I bought the Un-Raid.

leonowski

01-25-06, 05:43 PM

I have the same problem. I also never had a problem with writing and reading at the same time with my Windows Raid-5 machine.

I e-mailed Tom about this and he did say that it was a known issue that they will attempt to fix the problem with an update. Unfortunately, I asked about this over a month ago and there is still no update. =(

Does anyone have the following issue?

I have 3 computers in my network, 1 desktop, 1 Un-Raid server, and 1 HTPC.

When I'm writing a file to the Un-Raid from my desktop to one disk, I am completely unable to play a video_ts file on my HTPC from any other disk on the UnRaid. The HTPC skips, stutters, freezes, etc... I only have the machines connected with a 100Mbit Router, but I never had this problem with a self-built Linux RAID-5 server I created. Is it the type of RAID that's an issue? Are people successfully writing and reading from their Un-Raid's at the same time? What kind of network hardware are you using?

I'm worried what's going to happen once I start using the Un-RAID as my PVR repository...

imlucid

01-25-06, 08:06 PM

I was seeing a definite performance slow down while modifying the same disk from two different machines (one was copying a few hundred gigs of data while on the other I was manipulating icons, etc.).

Once the HT machine had finished copying, the stuff I was doing on my other machine was instantaneous.

I assume the issues with writing has to do with updating the parity drive and perhaps needing to access all the volumes to calculate new parity?

This shouldn't be too much of an issue for me as I plan to have my un-Raid be primarily read-only media. I plan on keeping my PVR data local to my HT machine, at least in the short term.

DeathtoToasters

01-26-06, 01:44 AM

Has anyone got a gigabit card working on the Unraid Machine??

If so, name, model, etc.

sonofdbn

01-26-06, 07:30 AM

The standard motherboard has onboard Gigabit - are you looking for an additional LAN connection?

jcruse

01-26-06, 09:15 AM

I assume the issues with writing has to do with updating the parity drive and perhaps needing to access all the volumes to calculate new parity?

It's pretty obvious that the UnRaid is NOT accessing other drives during writes (why would it need to? It would just add the bits being written to the parity drive). You can confirm this by looking at the //tower/main.html page that tells you which drives are spun up. During writes, only the drive being written to and the parity are spun up.

Sounds like an issue with UnRaid as it's currently implemented that would pretty much preclude it from being used as a PVR repository. I was hoping to minimize the # of drives in my HTPC, but looks like I'll need a PVR drive.

dpeart

01-26-06, 10:03 AM

jimwhite

01-26-06, 10:15 AM

"the main selling point of the Un-Raid is to be used as a PVR repository."

it is????

hmmmm....

:confused:

dpeart

01-26-06, 10:34 AM

"the main selling point of the Un-Raid is to be used as a PVR repository."

it is????

hmmmm....

:confused:

From their webpage:

"Highly reliable and expandable Network Attached Storage system specifically designed for digital media storage"

jcruse

01-26-06, 10:38 AM

This is very bad as the main selling point of the Un-Raid is to be used as a PVR repository. I was expecting to be able to stream two recordings to the tower and server at least two addiontal simultaneously. I can do this from my SageTV box and it is doing everything. From what you are saying, this is not possible?

thanks,

Well, since I can't even write to one drive and read from another at the same time, I assume this means PVR is a no-go for UnRaid. Unless for some reason it responds better to reading and writing from the SAME drive than it does for different drives.

For people just serving movies and music, this won't be as big an issue.

jcruse

01-26-06, 10:45 AM

From their webpage:

"Highly reliable and expandable Network Attached Storage system specifically designed for digital media storage"

Well, technically there's nothing wrong with that statement. It is reliable, expandable, and stores digital media. In their defense they've made no claims as to simlutaneous read/write performance. I'm not trying to discredit UnRaid, as I think it's a very cool solution for me. I live in an apartment and my former RAID-5 server just made too much heat/noise when I was using it (16 drives and the fans needed to cool them ain't exactly quiet). Having some level of data protection, but being able to access single drives while the rest of the disks are spun-down is exactly what I needed.

It just has a current limitation that prevents it from being used with PVR software. I can deal with it, and you can too. You'll just have to be a little more proactive in managing your PVR library. Hopefully they'll address this in a future release.

DeathtoToasters

01-26-06, 11:02 AM

The standard motherboard has onboard Gigabit - are you looking for an additional LAN connection?

Of course it does...I am just an idiot!!! :rolleyes:

DeathtoToasters

01-26-06, 11:08 AM

Well, since I can't even write to one drive and read from another at the same time, I assume this means PVR is a no-go for UnRaid. Unless for some reason it responds better to reading and writing from the SAME drive than it does for different drives.

For people just serving movies and music, this won't be as big an issue.

I don't have tons of experiance in the PVR dept, but drives are so cheap these days, why not just get a large 250gb drive, install it, then schedule a transfer once a day to the server.

The Unraid server works perfectly fine for playback, at least for me.

dpeart

01-26-06, 11:37 AM

I don't have tons of experiance in the PVR dept, but drives are so cheap these days, why not just get a large 250gb drive, install it, then schedule a transfer once a day to the server.

The Unraid server works perfectly fine for playback, at least for me.

I don't think anyone will say there is not a work around. But I would say that there is an expectation of all NAS solutions to be able to read and write to the drive at the same time with enough performance to support multiple digital media streams. Even HDTV streaming media should not be an issue. I was surprised that Un-Raid has issues here as XP can do this over the network.

I have not had mine running long enough to see if I personally have issues. I'll track it and see if I run into any problems. I have my SageTV server running 1Gb through the NetGear GS108 hub, to the Un-Raid server.

imlucid

01-26-06, 06:21 PM

I'm seeing the following messages in syslog on the un-Raid:

Jan 26 14:46:26 NASCAR smbd[1032]: [2006/01/26 14:46:26, 0] lib/sysquotas.c:sys_get_quota(386)
Jan 26 14:46:26 NASCAR smbd[1032]: sys_path_to_bdev() failed for path [.]!

While copying large amounts of data to one of the disks (using Tiger's Finder copy).

I also get periodic notifications on the Mac that the disk is un-responsive, though the connection returns with no other issues.

Anyone else see similar issues?

sonofdbn

01-27-06, 12:13 AM

I don't think anyone will say there is not a work around. But I would say that there is an expectation of all NAS solutions to be able to read and write to the drive at the same time with enough performance to support multiple digital media streams. Even HDTV streaming media should not be an issue. I was surprised that Un-Raid has issues here as XP can do this over the network.

I have not had mine running long enough to see if I personally have issues. I'll track it and see if I run into any problems. I have my SageTV server running 1Gb through the NetGear GS108 hub, to the Un-Raid server.

jcruse has a 100Mb network, so it might be a network bandwidth issue. I might have missed some detail in a posting, but has anyone with a Gigabit network reported the same problem?

I do agree that there's clearly some overhead associated with unRaid when compared against other solutions, but I think lime-technology has consistently said that a Gigabit network is required for best results. (There was also some talk about how jumbo frames didn't appear to make much difference in what they tested.)

pischke

01-27-06, 12:31 AM

jcruse has a 100Mb network, so it might be a network bandwidth issue. I might have missed some detail in a posting, but has anyone with a Gigabit network reported the same problem?

I do agree that there's clearly some overhead associated with unRaid when compared against other solutions, but I think lime-technology has consistently said that a Gigabit network is required for best results. (There was also some talk about how jumbo frames didn't appear to make much difference in what they tested.)

I'm running my unRaid on gigabit and I have the same problem - can't watch any of my ripped DVDs without stuttering while I'm ripping more of them to the server.

-mike

Thomas J. Coyle

01-27-06, 01:54 AM

Hi all,

The problem of stuttering DVD playback while trying to rip a DVD to the unRaid server was reported early on and Tom said that he would look into it at that time.

I have my two unRaid servers hooked to Linksys Gigabit switches on a Gigabit backbone and can run four streaming media clients off of the servers at the same time so there is no bandwidth problem when reading from the servers.

Regards,
TCIII

CANNON-FODDER

01-27-06, 01:05 PM

Slightly confused at some performance expectations, maybe I am way off target but:
- Is it not apples and oranges to compare this to a striped RAID solution? Striping is naturally faster - especially with hardware RAID cards.
- I do not see how this could be faster than just running a linux OS with all the disks shared out and writing to them as reiserFS.
...- If parity must be calculated, something is slower than if you simply had just a bunch of disks in there, parity may not be the limitation because the parity calculation may be faster than writing to the disk, but the limitation is there waiting for someone to bump into it.
...- If you are writing/reading two streams to a single disk it cannot be faster than the disk.
...- If you are writing/reading two streams to two disks, it cannot be faster than either disk respectively, but chipset bandwidth and buffer size limitations are much more likely to become the limitation here.

Not necessarily defending the implementation, but for folks with dashed expectations, I guess how is performance in SLAX without the unRAID driver? Because that as an upper bound has to be capable of what you want.

v/r,
C-F

Richard_P_Harvey

01-27-06, 01:09 PM

I'm running my unRaid on gigabit and I have the same problem - can't watch any of my ripped DVDs without stuttering while I'm ripping more of them to the server.

-mike

I'm running on a plaing old 100Mbps network and I can't even stream and MP3 file at the same time I rip a DVD :rolleyes:

Tom is aware of this and has said he will work to make the ability read and write at the same time faster.

imlucid

01-27-06, 04:37 PM

J. L.

01-27-06, 04:45 PM

As I have been moving more of my drives over to the un-Raid, I've noticed peculiar disk activity patterns. At the moment I have 6 drives installed and am copying data to drive3. I get identical drive usage indication patterns from the parity drive and drives 1 through 3 while 4 and 5 are quiet.

Earlier I was seeing other similar behavior where a group of drives would all have their access lights blink on and off while writing to just one of them.

It also seems that drive1 is almost always in use when the parity drive is in use...Quite a while ago Tom mentioned that the activity lights on the drive trays light when either drive on the same cable was active.

Therefore, when a drive is active you will see the light lit on the other drive on the same cable too.

It is a "feature" of the specific drive trays. I don't think both drives are actually being accessed.

Joe L.

imlucid

01-27-06, 05:40 PM

Ah, thanks for the info Joe. That makes much more sense!

Kevin

dpeart

01-27-06, 11:29 PM

Ok guys, hoping someone can help me out here. My system ran the first day just great. I added a new drive today, integrated it into the array and copied over a lot of files.

This evening while my wife was watching a show of the server, it hung. Now all I get is a hung system after a reboot and a few minutes at an attempted parity check.

Any ideas? The drive I added is only about 4months old, and I have had no problems with it at all. It was my primary PVR storage device. It is hard to believe that there is a problem with it.

This drive is attached to the first Promise controller. Maybe a problem with the controller?

Can I move the drive4 to drive3 and have the array recognize it, or do I loose all my data?

thanks,

BLKMGK

01-28-06, 01:01 PM

Dave, anything showing up on the console when this is occuring? Rather than moving the drive to another slot I'd try replacing that drive with a spare. This way the drive can be built and there's no chance of losing the data.

I've not ever seen the problem you're seeing. I've had my system lock up once in awhile but never consistantly and generally it will go weeks without issue. I am not moving video right now but I move a good bit of MP3 and ISOs..

dpeart

01-28-06, 02:53 PM

Turns out it is DMA errors from the Promise card. I guess there is a bug in the IDE driver for Linux. The Promise card just does not like "some" drives.

Tom showed me how to find this info out. Not sure what I'll do now, currently I have turned off the drive on the promise card and am running unprotected. For the time being this is ok, as I have not deleted anything off my other drives yet. I wanted to give the system a couple weeks before deleting anything. Glad I did now :)

I did read that there is a patch for the problem for both the 2.4 and 2.6 version of the linux kernal. Not sure if it has been tried yet. Hopefully Tom will know.

Interesting things is that I copied some 40GB of data over to the drive with no problems, then after a few hours it started to hang. Disabling the drive has allowed it to continue to run all day so far.

BLKMGK

01-28-06, 04:36 PM

Can you tell us the make\manufacturer of the drive? I'd be interested in knowing how you were able to find out what was up too.

TIA!

dpeart

01-28-06, 05:20 PM

I started the system, and told it to stop the parity check.

I then telneted into the system, and tailed the syslog file.

tail -f /var/log/syslog

It will display in this log file.

The drive is a Seagate drive and the Promise ATA 133 card.

Thomas J. Coyle

01-28-06, 08:39 PM

dpeart,

What size Seagate drive and how new is it?

Do you have it set for cable select?

Regards,
TCIII

BLKMGK

01-28-06, 09:42 PM

Interesting, I do have one Seagate drive in my system too. Had a lockup today actually - you jinxed me ;-) Rebooted and it's checking parity, it has never failed to come back up or ever lost data though. The Seagate drive is my Parity drive as a matter of fact. ST3300831A/4NF08RMG if anyone cares....

sonofdbn

01-29-06, 09:37 AM

I have 8 Seagate hard disks of varying sizes and vintages in my unRaid, and they all seem to be OK.

On another earlier topic, I have a 100Mb network, and I DO experience droputs while playing music off the server and copying files to it at the same time from the same PC.

I'll test out Gigabit at some point. It's easier than people might think: a lot of newer PCs, motherboards and laptops have Gigabit capability built-in. Like me, you might have forgotten that you have this capability because you've never had a chance to use it. You can simply connect the unRaid to a Gigabit capable network port on your laptop/PC with a normal Cat 5e cable and you should be able to "see" the server from your machine (at least under WinXP). Note that you *don't* need a crossover cable for this; if you were doing this with a 100Mb connection, you would, but not for a Gigabit connection.

imlucid

01-29-06, 10:31 AM

Also you should make sure that you are really getting a gigabit connection. Some cables might have issues that limit the computer to 100 Mb. (Particularly if you are making your own and screw up the crimps or have a bad bend in the cable somewhere).

On Mac OS X, you can verify the connection speed using the Network Utility (be sure to pick the correct interface)

http://homepage.mac.com/imlucid/img/NetworkUtility.png

sonofdbn

01-29-06, 06:43 PM

It's even easier in WinXP - just place the cursor over the LAN connection icon in the tray and it will tell you the speed of the connection.

Thomas J. Coyle

01-29-06, 07:24 PM

BLKMGK,

Like you, I have two Seagate ST3300831A 300GB drives out of four on the first Promise controller and one Seagate ST3200822A 200GB drive out of four on the second Promise controller and have yet to have a lockup problem.

Regards,
TCIII

wfisher1

02-02-06, 03:17 PM

kinda off topic, but does anyone on this thread have a 4-in-3 bay they want to get rid of? Surely someone has one left over? :)

dpeart

02-02-06, 06:57 PM

Just to follow up. The drive I had issues on the Promise controller was a Seagate ST3120026A/3JT3FTTJ 160GB drive. One thing that I have noticed on this drive is that it gets hotter than the other drives in the system. The they are two WDC WD3200JB-22KFA0 320GB drives.

I swapped the WD and Seagate drive so that the Seagate is running off the MB, and the WD is on the Promise card and everything ran fine today. Hopefully it will continue to run well.

I have not had an issue using this system as my PVR storage, and have been recording and playing files at the same time. I will continue to monitor this and make a note if this changes.

BLKMGK

02-02-06, 08:25 PM

kinda off topic, but does anyone on this thread have a 4-in-3 bay they want to get rid of? Surely someone has one left over? :)

These are pretty cheap - Case-Mods.com had them for like $15 apiece plus shipping...

Products
------------------------------------------------------
2 x Cooler Master STB-3T4-E1 Stacker 3 to 4 Module (91-STB-3T4-E1) = $31.76
1 x *Free Gift* USB LED Light & Switch Device with Case! (gift) = $0.00
------------------------------------------------------
Sub-Total: $31.76
FedEx Live Rates (Home Delivery (5 Days)): $10.08
Total: $41.84

wfisher1

02-03-06, 05:14 PM

These are pretty cheap - Case-Mods.com had them for like $15 apiece plus shipping...

Products
------------------------------------------------------
2 x Cooler Master STB-3T4-E1 Stacker 3 to 4 Module (91-STB-3T4-E1) = $31.76
1 x *Free Gift* USB LED Light & Switch Device with Case! (gift) = $0.00
------------------------------------------------------
Sub-Total: $31.76
FedEx Live Rates (Home Delivery (5 Days)): $10.08
Total: $41.84

Thanks for the heads up! I was having trouble finding them for less than $25 - $30 a piece plus shipping.

RockDawg

02-03-06, 09:03 PM

I am looking to build an un-Raid server very similar to the one limetech offers. I will have twelve hard drives along with 12 mobile racks w/fans. How big of a power supply do I need?

Also, what is the best/fastest way to transfer data from a NTFS drive to the un-Raid drives?

DeathtoToasters

02-04-06, 01:22 AM

I am having some problems with the Hard drives staying at about 35-40c all the time. Anyone have any advice as to what to use to cool them?

They are currently in the removable rack/trays. The two fans that are in the tray/rack combo ARE working, but don't seem to be having much effect.

Any advice?

dpeart

02-04-06, 09:14 AM

I see that mine are around 25-30C and get to 40C when they are heavily used. Are your drives under constant heavy use?

As for powers supplies I went with two 300W Sparkle supplies.

Thomas J. Coyle

02-04-06, 01:26 PM

DeathtoToasters,

I found that the single 50-60mm fan mounted in the bottom of the tray was superior to the two smaller 40mm fans either mounted in the front of the tray or one in front and one in back.

The front/rear mounted fans just push or pull air around the drive case while the bottom mounted fan pulls air across the bottom of the drive where the platter drive motor is and is usually the hottest item on the drive when it is spun up.

Depending on the air temperature, I found that some of the drives can reach 40-43 deg C during a parity check, but usually run around 25-35 deg C when spun up individually. With all of the drives spun down, they are usually at 18-23 deg C when they are all commanded to spin up for a parity check.

What is your ambient temperature range around your tower case? Also, how many fans do you have in the case besides the power supply and mobile dock fans?

If you have the tower case in an area where noise is not a factor, you might want to install fans with higher speeds to move more air through the case when the drives are spun up.

Regards,
TCIII

DeathtoToasters

02-04-06, 04:10 PM

Well I have two power supplies. Then I have the 120mm fan that came stock with the case.

Then the stock roof fan. I then added the side case fan. I have a total of 6 drives all with the rack cases.

The room is NOT great for circulation. I knew that when I put in in the room. I also have one of the 'pci' looking fans. It sucks out the hot air out the rear of the case. Actually works pretty well.

I am not really concerned about noise as it is in a utility type of closet.

I was wondering if it is possible to add fans to the bottom grill area, or even if it is a good idea at all.

All the manufacture sites say that 50c is the recommended high temp. So I am not 'worried' right now, I was just wondering.

Thomas J. Coyle

02-04-06, 08:45 PM

DeathtoToasters,

I would get an inexpensive thermometer and find out how warm it is really getting in your utility room.

You might want to add a vent to the utility room door and maybe install a fan in the room ceiling to exhaust out the warm air to your attic if you have a single storey home. Otherwise you might be able to pick a location in the utility room ceiling where you can exhaust the air into a ceiling joist area that is vented to the outside.

Regards,
TCIII

DeathtoToasters

02-05-06, 07:26 PM

Is anyone else running into this problem?

The server works great. BUT when copying LARGE amounts of data to/from any drive on the server, after a while it loses its network connection and I need to reboot the server.

IT stays connected just find until the above example.

It is hard wired to teh router and I have tried another COMPLETE network setup. (new router, cables, etc)

Any help would be great!!!

Thomas J. Coyle

02-05-06, 07:52 PM

DeathtoToasters,

When I built my first unRaid array, I ran five six to seven hour long sever to server transfers to move my ripped DVD collection from my original XP Professional server to the unRaid server.

During those file transfers, the unRaid server never lost its network connection and performed flawlessly.

I suspect that you may have a heat problem with your motherboard. When either the CPU or one of the motherboard components overheats, you lose your connection.

The symptoms that you describe, during your long running file transfer, are indicative of long term heat build up which causes one of the motherboard components to trip off the line.

I suggest that you reduce the ambient air temperature of the environment that the unRaid server is in as much as possible and make sure that you have plenty of air flow through the server case.

Just a thought.

Regards,
TCIII

DeathtoToasters

02-05-06, 08:02 PM

That is a great idea and I think you are probably correct.

As part of that solution, is there a program I can run to tell me the MB temp, CPU, or anything like that?

Just wondering.

Thanks

jimwhite

02-06-06, 06:05 AM

I was having similar disconnect problems and I believe it was my SMC switch getting hot.... it has vents at each end and no fan, so I stood it up vertically and propped it up with two pencils so air could escape out the "top" and enter between the pencils at the "bottom" .... no disconnects since....

:cool:

dpeart

02-06-06, 10:26 AM

Mine has this disconnect also under heavy loads, but the disconnect is due to the system hanging as a result of a failed DMA request.

You can see this by opening a telnet session to the server and running 'tail -f /var/log/syslog'. Then run your heavy load test. What I always see prior to the system hanging (network not responding, console not responding) is one or more DMA failed requests. I then have to power cycle the machine to get it working.

This happened to me this weekend as I was doing a backup to the unRaid of about 14GB of data. About 10GB through the transfer the system hung, and I had to reboot. The backup continues after the reboot and the remaining 4GB transfered fine. Fortionately, my backup software is robust enough to seamlessly handle the reboot without error.

erikatcuse

02-06-06, 02:19 PM

Fortionately, my backup software is robust enough to seamlessly handle the reboot without error.

What backup software do you use?

On a side note what ghosting program would y'all recommend?

dpeart

02-06-06, 02:56 PM

I looked at a lot of them and settled on Dantz Retrospect from EMC. The professional version comes with 2 client licenses so I can back up 3 computers. The only thing that it did not have, that I would have liked is the ability to back up to an ftp server for offsite backups.

BLKMGK

02-06-06, 06:39 PM

What backup software do you use?

On a side note what ghosting program would y'all recommend?

Acronis for both of these. Can do automated backups to UNC shares, incremental and full, compression, works well for me. Can do file based or bit for bit over an entire disk. Supports Firewire, USB, PIX, and plenty of network cards. :cool:

Thomas J. Coyle

02-06-06, 07:29 PM

dpeart,

When I built my first unRaid array, I ran five six to seven hour long sever to server transfers to move my ripped DVD collection from my original XP Professional server to the unRaid server.

During those file transfers, the unRaid server never lost its network connection and performed flawlessly.

I suspect that you either have a flaky drive or a motherboard problem when the components start getting really warm during extended write periods.

Just a thought.

Regards,
TCIII

gnollo

02-09-06, 04:40 PM

Thinking of buying this drive for my un-raid

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st3500841a.html

outpost puts the ST3500841A-RK at 249 with rebate....

http://www.outpost.com/%7BDpjCZvSKp3M9VCmjk2C6ynhGQnL27JNSNQMwSnG2vZBPG1pTHM38!7393 29116!1623147726!1139368706502%7D/product/4697778

Anyone can spot any particular reason why I should pay 100 USD more per hard disk for a different Seagate 500GB drive?

imlucid

02-09-06, 04:57 PM

Anyone can spot any particular reason why I should pay 100 USD more per hard disk for a different Seagate 500GB drive?
Because the item is currently unavailable at outpost.com?

John P

02-13-06, 10:18 AM

I have been watching this thread and planned on building an unRaid server. However it seems Tom from Limetech has been silent for a long time, his last post was on 12/23/05. It seems promised updates have not appeared. There is another thread with posts of problems with unRaid:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=641775&page=1&pp=30&highlight=unraid
Also the Intel motherboard seems to be in short supply with no other recommended options.
Are others nervous about this product?
Would you still strongly recommend unRaid?

Thomas J. Coyle

02-13-06, 10:26 AM

Richard_P_Harvey

02-13-06, 10:37 AM

John P,

I believe that the recommended Intel motherboard has been discontinued, but it is still available from zipzoomfly.com and does show up on Ebay occasionally.

I personally plan to buy a backup spare from zipzoomfly.

I will still recommend the unRaid to those who want to roll their own, but with the caution that Tom at Lime Technology has not been too responsive lately.

However, there is a wealth of knowledge in this thread and I am sure that all of the present unRaid users/supporters will be glad to help any newcomers.

Regards,
TCIII

Tom,

I would lean more to the other side on this because I'm one of the folks that had LOTS of issues with the unRaid, I'm on my second complete unit and still have troubles. For people building NEW media appliance I think you may be in decent shape but for those like me that are looking to migrate a large number of oddly sized disk into this thing that are of various ages BEWARE. The OS in this thing is not capable of dealing with disk DMA errors at all, and the system will just hose up on you. The log files that are written and not saved on hard drive or flash drive so there will be no trail to follow. There is a major issue around writes and reads at the same time, bottom line is forget it .....! There is zero security available with the system as it stands. The quality of the flash drive Tom selected is suspect at best, I'm on #2 there too where the first on became un-readable. I need to find a way to make a spare...! Having done a ton of testing the typical disk swaps one would expect to do using this box are NEVER as planned. Only adding a new disk into an empty slot ever seems to work as expected.

Add to all the technicial issues (and there are more) where is Tom, I have sent him emails and left voicemails over the last several weeks and ALL go without response. So to someone looking at this unit as a potential large media stograge solution I would think twice. Want to see some of my woes read this thread.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=641775&page=1&pp=30&highlight=unraid

BLKMGK

02-13-06, 06:11 PM

Hrm, I had an issue with my USB FOB as well. I e-mailed Tom and got a response within hours. He asked me a few questions, I responded, and he sent out a new piece of hardware for me the next day overnihgt. I was down for a total of maybe 3-4 days total and that mostly because it occured late at night and there was a holiday in the middle. tom was VERY responsive and very concerned - I returned the hardware to him to examine.

I have had to swap disks twice in my unit. The first was a parity drive that was reporting write errors consistantly. I let it go unprotected a few days and then got to the store for a new drive. Threw it in after halting the array and all went well. The second failure was a little more hassle. LATE one night I heard a drive shut down while moving a bunch of data. Sure enough one of my older Maxtors (the first was also a Maxtor) had failed. This time I tried to reset it from memory and pushed some of the wrong buttons - like reset. The drive was out of the unit by this time and it began rewriting parity - and my data! as soon as I saw that I knew I had gone wrong. I pulled up the WEB site and discovered that my poor memory had failed me, the steps I'd taken were quite wrong and that I'd shot myself in the foot. In the end I purchased a larger drive to replace the failed one, put the new drive in the old slot with the old drive in a new slot, and copied my data off. Parity was rebuilt and all was well - I don't write to that drive right now and before I do I'll replace it with a larger WD or Seagate drive.

The bottom line is that I've never lost data and in the second case if I had it would've been MY fault for not having followed directions. Tom has responded to me pretty quickly in the two cases where I've sent him panicked e-mails :) I too have noticed he's not been here and can only hope that he is working on newer and better things. I stream MP3 but not video so I cannot speak to throughput issues. I *have* noticed that the choppy throughput I see when copying files in Exlporer doesn't seem to happen when using an Xcopy or while I'm burning DVD pulling data from the array. I conclude that Explorer has "issues" to say the least. I plan to build an MCE box soon, we'll see how it goes then.

Oh, and I'd not seen that other thread so I'll go and check it out now. <shrug>

P.S. Noticed that UNC naming stopped working on my network the other day but that new machines introduced to the network used it just fine. I suspect a Windows quirk but will reboot my array when I have time just in case. I am currenty using 7 drives for a total of 2TB - 300megs of that is Parity....

gnollo

02-13-06, 07:01 PM

Because the item is currently unavailable at outpost.com?

It is back now @ 289.99... (call for availability)
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4697778?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

spacecadet610

02-21-06, 10:08 AM

Hmm. can we assume now that Tom is MIA and that this product is abandoned and we will receive no further support? That's what seems like is happening, since he did promise updates which we have heard nothing about. Until we hear from him, that is my current assumption.

On an unrelated note, I just received my electricity bill which was a bit high. I like how the unRAID puts HDs to sleep until needed. Is there a way to put the whole server to sleep until it is needed?

Richard_P_Harvey

02-21-06, 10:14 AM

I think as more and more days pass with no response from Tom the situation gets bleaker and bleaker. I hope that users here like Joe who are Linux savy will be able to find ways to keep this thing alive for us all, even in it's current not so perfect state. HAd I known that the system had this many technicial issues I would have looked elsewhere, add to that the missing single link to any support or enhancements......! Ouch.....!

madpoet

02-21-06, 12:42 PM

Yep. Got to admit I've spent a lot now on the hardware and am regretting it :(.

szsori

02-21-06, 01:27 PM

Kind of a shame. I have been saving up for this, but there's no way I'm going to buy one if Tom's no longer responding here or releasing updates.

So, what other options are there? I have many IDE drives (therefore, a RAID5 solution won't work) that I've dumped my DVD's to as xvids, as well as a few that hold all the TV shows that I record. Before the Un-RAID info was posted here, I was backing up encoded movies to DVDR (the cost of each disk was small compared to the time it would take to re-encode all of those).

I don't need backups necessarily, since I have the original disks, but I'd like to reduce the likelyhood that I'll have to dump and encode everything again. Anything similar to the Un-RAID out there? Perhaps a cheap tape backup system?

CANNON-FODDER

02-21-06, 01:54 PM

I mentioned on the other thread about the SATA cards out with the Netcell processors, but I think there are similar PATA solutions which accept odd sized drives also. There was an article about them in the last Computer Power User (CPU) magazine, might be something to look at.

v/r,
C-F

Richard_P_Harvey

02-21-06, 03:18 PM

I really must admit that when Tom first approached AVS and posted this thread I looked at what he had and how he was pricing it and I just did not see a profitable business there. First off it's a very limited marketplace, us geeks that need such vast amounts of storage but are NOT professional's (for the most part) and not huge companies......! It's a small target for sure. Then he used basically off the shelf hardware that we all can buy but worse yet the geek target market knows what this crap costs so he had to trim out a lot of profit to get us to bite. His best shot at a profit margin would be if he could sell the entire taco, full of 500GB drives where maybe he would make maybe $650 profit on the entire box, but how many of us have or would do that.

There is NO stream of income after the initial sale either so it's basically a one shot deal. It's just not a business model that made any sense from a pure business viewpoint yet for us select few it's a product we all found like nothing else out there. To bad it did not deliver on the promise and even worse that it's not looking like Lime is going to be around to keep it alive for us.

I would very much like to have a backup flash drive as I'm already on #2 and it's flakey at best. Someone would need to figure out the serial number magic OR remove that check from the code. If we could figure out the magic and could find someone that knows how to make a flash drive bootable we could at least get a backup flash in our desk for when it goes belly up, and from my experiences and others, it will. Without this backup and Tom at the very point your flash dies so does the entire Un-Raid......! Ouch

JM2005

02-21-06, 04:47 PM

Well i email Tom again today and still no reply! Still no reply from previous Email's either. I am worried something my have happened to Tom? I too would like to have a backup of USB drive as well. Lets hope he shows up or we get some type of info to whats happening.

HD-Ready

02-21-06, 04:48 PM

4 open drive slots is correct! (and I have a Master's degree in accounting!). A pet peeve of mine is seeing people reach for their calculators to solve complex problems ... like calculating a 10% discount ... :|

I recently had to wait while the person at the "service" desk repeatedly asked around for a spare calculator to take a 10% discount off a total that was exactly $200. I then had to draw attention to the taxable amount being calculated on the discounted amount, not on the $200 already punched into the register, which they at first tried to assure me would be "the same." Good grief.

mpenton

02-21-06, 04:48 PM

I'm in the process of transitioning my unraid back to raid-5 (copying the data from one server to another). It will take me a couple of weeks to get everything transferred, rebuild the server using a different os and get the data put back. In the end I figure it is worth it not to be tied to a piece of unsupported and locked software. At the least I can recreate the os load if I manage to blow the cf card I'll be booting from.
If you believe the site search function, someone was logged in as limetech as recently as last night but still no response to all these messages.

dpeart

02-21-06, 05:48 PM

I'm looking more into the Solaris 10 ZFS that was posted here also. It looks to have a lot of the flexibility that Un-Raid provided and supported by a well known company.

Currently it is in beta release, but getting good feedback from the professionals. I'm going to burn a Solaris 10 iso to disk and boot my un-raid box to see if the hardware used in Un-Raid is supported by Solaris. If it is, then it will be a straightforward conversion.

For now, I just reboot my Un-Raid periodically (never let it run for more than 1 week) and pray it holds up till I get the other solution in place.

BLKMGK

02-21-06, 11:32 PM

erikatcuse

02-21-06, 11:39 PM

Has anyone tried giving Tom a call?

J. L.

02-22-06, 12:27 AM

Hrm, I don't feel like thi sis completely money wasted - the hardware WILL support other solutions after all. Cracking his scheme for preventing piracy is also likely NOT the way to get him to respond to support requests I'm afraid. I know folks who could probably figure it out to be honest but I've not pursued it other than to try, as others here did, to look at the USB ID string for comparison. Just not sure I want to crack the hard work of someone who had a good idea and was, at least for awhile, trying to do right by everyone. <sigh>

I've been discussing this solution with friends at work who are interested in it - there are lots. The support issue is a concern for sure! However "RAID" isn't the solution many of us want either as an alternative. To access anything it must ALL be spinning since it's striped, a goof or a failure can wipe it ALL out, and the list goes on :-( This solution works for me and others, not sure RAID would do the same. I've heard too many sob stories from folks who's RAID burped and puked the entire dataset to go running in that direction right now....

P.S. I've accessed my unRAID data from NT via a USB enclosure. The drivers work but... no recursive copy function so moving my MP3 would be "painful" to say the least. I'd use Knoppix for sure! Actually, a shame this solution wasn't done as a LiveCD! Hard to break but yeah easy to copy too...I feel much the same as you. I do not want to undermine Tom and crack his encryption... I do want Tom to resume his participation in these discussions and support of his product.

I have not tried to call him, but apparently others have. I did send him an e-mail this afternoon. We'll see if I get any response. I cannot think of any reason Tom would have dropped out of sight other than a serious illness that would keep him from the keyboard. I do hope he is alive and well.

Again, from what everyone has posted he seems to have delivered on ordered product but stopped responding to e-mail and phone calls. Aa I said... I hope he will soon surface with good news. About the only thing I can think of is that the task of upgrading his product to be compatible with the GPL and the newest Linux kernel for SATA users was bigger than he envisioned and he is surrounded with stacks of pizza boxes and empty pepsi cans left over from all night coding sessions. :D

Just like you, I do not think I wasted my money as the hardware is reusable no matter what. I will take reasonable steps to back up my USB drive and will probably even go as far as attempting to boot off a copy I'll make. I know it will not match the serial number in the config file and fail to start as an unRaid array, but it is a first step I'll need to perform if I have to replace my flash drive in the event of a failure regardless.

I agree, there is lots of interest in his product, but the unRaid will exist on only a few servers if Tom does not resume sales and support soon. I personally think Tom needs to work through the issues and resume communications with the rest of us who want to support him. As informed customers we can be very understanding. As abandoned customers we will do what we need to ensure access to our data. Fortunately, the reiserfs file-systems he used on the unRaid server are very well supported under Linux.

Joe L.

notandor

02-22-06, 02:20 AM

Hi folks,

For people who are looking at other alternatives, in case, you have missed my earlier postings:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6971124&&#post6971124
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6971202&&#post6971202

Earlier, I had grown impatient with all the delay of SATA unRAID, and if I retrospect now and see the current situation, I feel like I made a prudent choice... I'm quite happy with the solution from ReadyNAS X6 after owning 2 such units...

For the people interested in unRAID, I agree Tom has a good product, but still issues like backup of flash etc. should definitely be addressed if the product has to continue in future to remove such unforseen dependencies on/from limetech. It would have given all the current users at least some peaceful sleep in the current situation :-) I know at least I wouldn't have been able to sleep if my 2-3 TB of data was known to be in a state, where if it is lost it could not be recovered.

And also from the mpenton's message, it is more scary that even after so many postings on this and the other thread regarding product's concern, nobody from limetech's id replied... even though there was some activity on limetech id couple of days back...
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/member.php?u=7516502

I still hope that all is well with Tom and he addresses the flash backup issues for at least the current customers who have already paid, so they are not forced to look up to move to another solution...