Limetech un-Raid Media Storage Server support thread [Text View] - Page 7

J. L.

05-14-07, 06:00 PM

On the admin webpage you will use to mantain and configure unraid, there is an error count per drive, which is supposed to give you a heads up on the state of your drive or data integrity in general, also it will provide you with temperatures of your drives.
No automatic notification of a problem, as far as I know, yet.on the unRAID support forum (and probably way back in this thread) is a script I wrote that is invoked hourly to monitor the status of the unRaid array. It sends a message to YAC clients running on other PCs on your LAN to warn you if a disk fails.

I've initially set mine up to give an OK message every hour, but it got to be a bother so I now I set it up to only get a message if a failure occurs.

(no disk in my array has ever failed... so far... it is only a matter of time... but I'm ready. :D )

The thread describing the unRaid monitoring script is here:
http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=140.0

Joe L.

Teamhood

05-14-07, 06:41 PM

I have had my server up and running for quite a while (a year has to be coming up) and I only had initial problems when I was first setting the server up, but it had nothing to do with the OS... I was using round ide cables... and they just caused days of problems!!

I really enjoy my unRAID server and I have had a few disks go dead and I added new ones and the server was brought right back online.

I am not going to upgrade until there are a few features that I need
1. Security... need something here
2. UPS- I have mine on a UPS, but it will not automatically power down until Tom implements this
3. Hard drive error report - I would really like to know if there were errors... sure you can run parity and check... just one thing I would like to know!

Teamhood

05-14-07, 06:42 PM

4. on my list would be Slimserver... I would enjoy streaming to my Squeezebox :)

mikemav

06-09-07, 07:20 AM

I put up a new post with these questions, but later realized I might get more info here and in the Lime forum, so I'll post here and there as well. Sorry if you are seeing this more than one time. Please let me know what you think.
I'm rebuilding my HTPC this weekend and also for the first time, trying out a NAS. Initially this will be in the form of Lime's unRAID, but if that doesn't work as expected I'm not opposed to a hardware RAID card. Anyway, I have a nice case for lots of hard drives for the NAS, but I have many older PATA drives (250's, 300s, one 500GB.) I ordered two SATA 500GB drives for the HTPC internal storage, thinking I'd maybe use them with my sole 500GB drive as a third to make a 1TB RAID-5. However, the drive I own is PATA, so it was suggested to use a PATA to SATA adapter and this should work w/ RAID.

So here's the main thing I'm wondering- am I better off using the two SATA 500GB drives I ordered to make the NAS larger and faster instead of in the HTPC? Maybe convince myself to buy two more to make a true SATA array, 1.5TB or so, and use it for everything until I need to expand? With the unRAID I can grow the array in the future. I had originally planned to make the faster on-board SATA storage directly in the HTPC for live recordings, HD and SD, from my tuners, and then the slower PATA or mixed drives unRAID NAS for DVD rips and other archived storage. However, maybe I can record across the network to the unRAID NAS, especially if it is larger and all SATA? My HTPC mobo, ASUS P5B DELUXE P965 775, can support RAID 5. So I thought to use three 500GB drives, one converted from IDE to look SATA to the controller. Hopefully that would work, but am I better off just storing everything on one large unRAID NAS? Are they fast enough (all gig-E network here) to record HDTV and stream other HD or a DVD rip at the same time? The thought of not having to transfer those shows I decide to keep long term to separate storage is appealing. However I'm not sure about the performance hit. I have read the unRAID monster thread, but I'm still not clear what the consensus is regarding real-world use limitations.

Also, how would any of this differ if the unRAID was PATA or mixed? I'd love to have just one huge array, using like four 500GB SATA drives on the NAS motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-945GZM-S2 945G 775) , and then maybe four of my left over PATA drives (two 300's and two 250's, say) attached to Promise ULTRA133TX2 PATA hard drive cards. Is the parity drive's speed separate from the others in an unRAID? In other words, if I have to mix drive types, am I better off sticking to almost all SATA and then using one PATA for parity- would that help speed over a true mix and match? I could use my 500GB PATA for parity on four 500GB SATAs- that might work....

Sorry for the rambling. If people feel this is better as a reply to the unRAID thread then it should be moved, but I thought this was beyond just the scope of unRAID as I'm considering using the ASUS SATA-RAID. By the way, I read that Vista does not support RAID 5 without a hack? I assume this is software RAID, and since I'm taking about using the ASUS mobo RAID controller that does not apply?

Sorry for so many questions. Any help appreciated.

I. M. Fletcher

06-09-07, 01:44 PM

One or two 500 GB drives in your HTPC are more than enough to hold your recordings. Don't put them into RAID 5. Totally unnecessary. Once you feel like archiving, move them to the unRAID server. Use an SATA for parity and the older PATA drives for the data. That would be best given the drives you already have. Simple. You're over-thinking it. I do that all the time too.

mikemav

06-09-07, 05:14 PM

Thanks; I'll try to chill on this- I agree over-thinking is one of my strong suits ;-) BTW, great screen name & avatar- both my wife's and my favorite older movie is Fletch! We just got our six year old son our first family dog. One guess as to the new mutt's name- yep, you got it, he's named Fletch!

I. M. Fletcher

06-09-07, 05:18 PM

One guess as to the new mutt's name- yep, you got it, he's named Fletch!
Awesome dog name!

Good luck with building the computers. If you need help with unRAID, post in here or on the limetech forums and someone will be glad to help.

greggplummer

06-11-07, 01:45 PM

I. M. Fletcher

06-11-07, 02:21 PM

They are good, but they have one critical flaw. They don't have Chevy Chase in them.

greggplummer

06-11-07, 04:00 PM

I read the books long before the movie came out and to be honest with you, I never thought Chevy Chase was a good match for the Fletch character. Maybe that was because I only saw Chevy on SNL and all the National Lampoon Vacation movies. His character in Caddy Shack was probably a bit closer, but still not what was in my mind.

kenshin-san

08-20-07, 02:15 AM

on the unRAID support forum (and probably way back in this thread) is a script I wrote that is invoked hourly to monitor the status of the unRaid array. It sends a message to YAC clients running on other PCs on your LAN to warn you if a disk fails.

I've initially set mine up to give an OK message every hour, but it got to be a bother so I now I set it up to only get a message if a failure occurs.

(no disk in my array has ever failed... so far... it is only a matter of time... but I'm ready. :D )

The thread describing the unRaid monitoring script is here:
http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=140.0

Joe L.

I posted a modified version of Joe L.'s script to the unRAID forum that adds Email functionality and the ability to include a more detailed summary of the system status.

It's only requirement is that you have access to an SMTP server whether it is on the LAN or the internet (or even a package added to your unRAID box).

The post on the unRAID forum is here:
http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=911.0

-kenshin

jpilcher

09-13-07, 10:45 AM

J. L.

09-13-07, 12:30 PM

I am looking at unrand and I am seeing some potential. question: (sorry if this has been asked before) is it possible to make a 1:1 back up of the parity disk and put that away for a rainy day , so that if the parity disc went , and 1 other they could both be replaced?Sorry to say... no.

Parity is a mathematical calculation performed once for each bit position on your data disks. For a 500 Gig drive, 500,000,000,000 x 8 calculations are made, one for each bit for each byte on the drive. (allocated or not, part of the partitioning, or formatting, or not, the same calculation is done to the raw data.) If any bit, in any data, on any drive changes, the parity bit changes on the parity drive.

To explain it in its simplest form, imagine a tiny disk drive, able to hold only one bit of information. That can be a single "1" or a "0"

Now imaging a set of 15 drives, each with that same capacity of 1 bit.
Add to this a parity drive of equal size... able to store one bit of data.

Parity works by adding up the bits in the one position that are set to a "1"
If three of the 15 drives have their bit position set to a "1" then there is a "odd" nunmber of 1's in that bit position across all the drives.
If 4 of the 15 drives have their bit set to a "1" then there are an "even" number of 1's in that bit position across all the drives.

In the case of the unRaid array, it uses what is called "even parity" so it sets the parity drive bit to a value so the entire set of bits set to a "1" would be an even number in that bit position. In the first case, with 3 data bits set to a "1" it would make the parity bit a "1" to end up with an even number in that bit position.

In the second case, with 4 data bits set to a "1" it would make the parity bit set to a "0" to end up with a even total of bits set in that bit position.

If ANY data bit changes, you can see that the parity bit must also change to keep an even number of bits set to a "1" in that bit position.

If any drive fails, you can deduce its value by looking at all the remaining bits in that bit position across all the remaining working drives. If there are an "odd" number of bits set to "1" remaining, the missing one must have been a "1" to result in an even number.
If there are an "even" number of bits set to a "1" remaining, the missing one must have been a "0"

This is how parity protects your data, individual bits can be deduced if the parity bit is set and the bits in that same position on all the other drives can still be read. If two drives fail, you cannot deduce their contents by looking at the remaining drives. (too many combinations of "1s" and "0s" result in the the same even or odd calculation result)

If you replace a failed drive before a second drive fails you can calculate its missing contents from the data on all the other drives and write it to the replacement drive. (you do the same type of calculation actually,for each bit position in turn, add the "1" bits, and if even, write a "0" to the new drive. If an odd number of "1" bits, write a "1") You can even do this before the new drive is installed and supply the contents of a file on the failed disk to a player on your LAN, re-creating it on the fly by reading all the remaining disks. (I was able to simulate a failed drive on my array and still serve 4 DVD ISO images to 4 players on my LAN from the failed disk... dynamically creating the files by reading all the other drives.

On real disk drives, each drive has a series of 8-bit bytes. This same calculation is performed for each bit in turn, for each byte in turn. Yup... on large drives billions of calculations are needed, one for each bit position in each byte on the drives.

Now you can see how a parity drive is ONLY useful in context of all the other data drives in the array. A parity drive by itself or with only one other drive from the array is useless. Without the ability to know what all the bits were set to on all the other drives you cannot deduce the value of a bit on a failed/missing drive.

A parity drive on the shelf is out of date as soon as you change a single byte to ANY drive in your array.

Joe L.

spectrumbx

10-20-07, 05:00 PM

For those interested in mass storage for your HTPC I'd like to invite you to check out a new network attached media storage server product called Un-RAID (http://lime-technology.com).

This server has been designed specifically for digital media storage, with these key features:

You can mix and match up to 12 hard drives of any size and easily add or upgrade hard drives over time. That's a maximum capacity today of 5.5TB of protected storage using 500GB hard drives.
Like other RAID systems, uses a parity disk to provide fault tolerance against a single drive failure; but, what makes our system unique is that data is not striped across the disks.
Hard drives are mounted in removable trays.
All the operating system software resides in a USB flash drive.

Please use this thread to post any questions and comments.

Can you provide support for booting using CDROM or Hard Disk with support to save preferences on USB drive or Hard Disk?

I have a need to evaluate your product under VMware. However, VMware does not support booting from a USB drive even though a USB drive is supported once booted.

Thanks.

HyPyke

10-20-07, 05:44 PM

Can you provide support for booting using CDROM or Hard Disk with support to save preferences on USB drive or Hard Disk?

I have a need to evaluate your product under VMware. However, VMware does not support booting from a USB drive even though a USB drive is supported once booted.

Thanks.

The unRaid team no longer monitors this thread. Goto the official forums at www.lime-technology.com .

The answer to your question is "no" BTW. The software licensing is hardware tied to a USB drive. More info can be found in the forums or the official wiki.

spectrumbx

10-21-07, 06:07 PM

The unRaid team no longer monitors this thread. Goto the official forums at www.lime-technology.com .

The answer to your question is "no" BTW. The software licensing is hardware tied to a USB drive. More info can be found in the forums or the official wiki.

Thanks for the reply.

multiblitz

10-21-07, 06:50 PM

51 pages, that a bitd more than I can eat tonight, so forgive me my questions:

- What about energy mgmt ? Is Unraid hibernating / sending the servier in stand-by mode when not used like XP ? Wake up by a normal info reuqest from a client possible ?

- What is the streaming / network perforamce ? My XP / Vista server has issues to send seamless streams when HD-DVD or Blue-Ray is needed, PDVD stutters when playing back these files, while local files work nicely...so, what is the performance of unraid (not the disk perfoamnce, but the performance of the network card-drivers)?

HyPyke

10-22-07, 10:29 AM

nightfly13

01-04-08, 01:50 PM

Goto the official forums at www.lime-technology.com .

I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything, but is it a problem if there's some activity on this site, as well? I looked into this solution 6-8 months ago and am thinking of getting into it in another 7-8 months and if there was chatter here among AVSers I'd like to read about it, rather than just shooing them away to the other site. As a part of this community, I'd like to hear about the experience of AVSers (as opposed to random Lime forum users) and continue to dialog whether this is still the best solution for cheap, largely redundant (ie. backed up) storage for those of us with lots of different sorts of drives.

Has any other product come out that's cheaper? I think enough AVSers would be interested that keeping this thread alive is a good idea, I'd love to read a current parts list and hear good/bad stories from AVSers.

/rant complete

HyPyke

01-04-08, 02:34 PM

I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything, but is it a problem if there's some activity on this site, as well? I looked into this solution 6-8 months ago and am thinking of getting into it in another 7-8 months and if there was chatter here among AVSers I'd like to read about it, rather than just shooing them away to the other site. As a part of this community, I'd like to hear about the experience of AVSers (as opposed to random Lime forum users) and continue to dialog whether this is still the best solution for cheap, largely redundant (ie. backed up) storage for those of us with lots of different sorts of drives.

Has any other product come out that's cheaper? I think enough AVSers would be interested that keeping this thread alive is a good idea, I'd love to read a current parts list and hear good/bad stories from AVSers.

/rant complete

It's just that all the questions asked could have been answered with some research at the official site and if not then answered in the forums there. This thread was started before the forums were up and now that they are there is not much point in a "support thread" because it fragments the discussion. If people want to talk about alternatives or whatever sure but I just could not see a reason for this thread to keep getting revived.

I am not sure there are enough "avsers" using the product and if they are chances are they are posting on the official forums. All the info you need is there or can be questioned there.

The answers from AVSers are not going to be vastly different because they are the primary target since this is a "media server" solution as far as Lime is concerned. Perhaps starting a new thread with a specific topic of discussion would be better. In my opinion this particular "support" thread needs to die. Support from Lime and from users is handled at the lime forums now. People who try posting here are not going to get a speedy response and their question has likely already been asked and answered.

Not trying to be a jerk just trying to help keep things together.

CANNON-FODDER

01-05-08, 11:54 AM

Glad to disagree HyPyke.

However, helpful you believe killing this thread is, what help is that to a member looking for a storage solution on AVS? Is there an "Official Limetech / un-RAID Owners' Thread"? I did not find one. Are there not plenty of dedicated forums for other products which do have "Official" threads on AVS?

nightfly13 has a point, sometimes forums and threads become dominated by a personality or meme [group-think] so it may be useful to have a separate method of obtaining the opinions of AVS members. Especially since examining across domains (HTPC, gaming, audio, video, etc.) you can get a better sense of your opinion of that particular personality's opinions ...

It's not always just about being the "chosen [thread]" or the [fount of all knowledge]. If it dies, it dies. But it serves to introduce folks to a potential solution, and is no longer the "Where's Tom" fest that could have ended badly.

v/r,
C-F

dragon_788

01-05-08, 01:36 PM

Just wanted to let sir Limetech know that on this page, http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=46 the Syslinux link is broken (it points to an .exe) but if you visit the Downloads link for UnRAID shortly below it you'll discover the syslinux.zip. Hopefully they can get it fixed for others, and I'm looking forward to testing unRAID out with my DFI Lanparty NFII board, I'm hoping its similar enough to the Asus A7N8X-E to work properly.

Jagercola

01-05-08, 02:13 PM

nightfly13

01-05-08, 02:20 PM

nightfly13

01-05-08, 02:31 PM

Billped

01-05-08, 02:35 PM

Personally I'm totally in favor of a new 'home' for unRAID. I'd love one or two of the experts to summarize the state of affairs (a sort of AVS pros/cons sales pitch) rather than 1500 posts (many of which are totally irrelevant) but until someone mans up to the task, let's talk here. HyPyke, that unsubscribe button might be a good plan for you - I just don't see how this thread works against 'keeping things together'.

My questions:

1) Has any cheaper (non-licensed) alternative (a linux distro) come up that does all this (PATA + SATA + only losing 1 parity drive for redundancy) that one should look at besides unRAID? Should I research freeNAS?

2) Can someone who's just built one recently stick up a parts list (maybe that's a good sub-thread?) - technology changes so fast (especially prices) I'd love to see what it costs nowadays and the more newegg links the better :P

3) Any real-world bottlenecks, aside from frustration with slow write speeds? I assume no one needs more than 2x HD feeds simultaneously - all systems providing that?

*edit* 4) Any way to incorporate external drives (USB, e-SATA) into an unRAID solution, say if the tower fills up before you max out on drives?

Thanks guys! I'm inching closer and closer to doing this. It'll be interesting to see if I can get the necessary hardware here in India or if I'll need to get most of my stuff from the US and then just buy the biggest case I can over here.

And Jagercola, I share your hesitance to pay for Linux of any sort - feels wrong, but it's pretty good value for someone like me with 6 mis-matched hard drives with random media sitting around in enclosures (or towers) waiting to crash without any redundancy.

I am far from the most knowledgable of the unraid crowd, but I have been successfully running the Pro version for about 6-7 months and am happy with the price, feature-set, performance, reliability, and support.

Other alternatives: definitely check out FreeNAS and NASlite. I haven't played with either but they look interesting. No, they don't do exactly what Unraid does, but it always pays to keep your eyes open.

Parts list: check the wiki - http://wiki.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page - also check out my parts post - http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=701.0 - remember that the mobo is the most important part as USB-booting and ethernet support are the two most important aspects of compatibility.

Real-world bottlenecks: I can rip a DVD directly to the unraid at the same speed I rip to my local hard drive, so I think writes are fine, but I can understand why many are frustrated. This is not a solution for those looking to rapidly move around files. Streaming is no problem, file-server activities would be.

External expansion. I believe E-Sata works, but USB support is not there ... yet.

Sales pitch: mixed drives (technology (sata vs. pata) and size/brand), upgrade drives at any time, only lose one drive for redundancy (vs. many for raid1), cheap hardware requirements (no raid card), only one drive spins up at a time when reading (vs. all for raid5), I believe only two spin up when writing (parity and drive being written to), active support community, performance supports multiple concurrent HD video streams, frequent performance and functionality improvements (averages something like every two months), ....

nightfly13

01-05-08, 02:59 PM

Really helpful - thanks Bill. 3 minutes of wikipedia-ing reveals that neither FreeNAS or NASlite are remotely similar to UnRAID's feature set.

I'll probably have to do the dirty work myself and try to find the best price points/feature set, but generally what's the max number of drives on can run simply from the motherboard (ie. without any SATA card? or are SATA cards affordable enough to negate this question?)? e-SATA drives stacked sounds like a compelling feature to me!

nightfly13

01-05-08, 03:23 PM

Billped

01-05-08, 04:10 PM

I've got some more questions for ya Bill:

The wiki mobo list doesn't say anything about PATA (IDE) - the mobo that caught my eye from the wiki says '1 x ATA100 2 Dev. Max' in the PATA listing. That means one cable/bus? Basically wondering if I could run my 3-4 PATA drives on a board like this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131043)?
Ever try 2gb vs 1gb memory? Any advise?

$65 Intel Celeron 440 Conroe 2.0ghz (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116038) (single core) reportedly consumes only 35w and works with the above board - should be plenty? Think for $10 more a 1.6ghz dual core (Pentium E 2140 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116037)) is better/worse? $20 increase ($85ish) nets a dual-core at 2.0ghz, albiet at double the wattage.

Lower power consumption is actually important for me since I run 6 hours a day on battery backups (non-urban India!).

PATA: You can run 16 PATA drives if you want.

2GB vs. 1GB: I believe this will make zero difference as more than 512MB (I think) won't even be used - something about high-mem support. I went with 1GB (as do most folks) just because it was cheap.

CPU: How low can you go? Various tests have demonstrated that we all go overboard with CPUs. You'll note that some of the solutions like Infrant and Thecus use truly tiny CPUs. The recommendation is a P4 2GHz or better. I bought a cheapie multicore for future-proofing. Some folks underclock to cut down power/heat/noise.

Low-power. One guy on the board built a super-low-power box in the last couple of weeks. A quote, "The entire system is only pulling 31 watts from the wall at idle with drives spun down and case fans disconnected". Check out the thread: http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1167.0

You can add SATA ports to get all the way to 16. Just make sure you use compatible parts. Again, the wiki is the best resource.

BTW, I also dismissed FreeNAS and NASlite, but feel obligate to make sure you know the alternatives lest I be labeled a fanboy.

nightfly13

01-05-08, 04:18 PM

Thanks again for the quick feedback - I'm staying up way too late!

The wiki parts page says something like 'processor - anything 2.0ghz or higher' which is a little different than what you stated about a P4 2.0ghz or faster. ie. I'm wondering if a 1.6ghz single core Celeron 420 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116040) (a pretty modern, shockingly cheap chip) is in fact equivalent to a P4 2.0ghz (or faster). It's 38 freaking dollars :P

How many drives are you running? Using a PCI card?

dragon_788

01-05-08, 06:23 PM

Is there a linux command that can be issued from a telnet session which will gracefully shutdown and poweroff the the server? I can't seem to hit on the right command. Reason is that I have 4 Windows 2x servers without keyboards and monitors that I administer using remote desktop and would like to administer the unRaid the same way.
Thanks
Dennis

Hopefully somebody answered this for you, but if you follow the suggested BIOS defaults its set to ALWAYS be on, so of course OBVIOUSLY it won't power down. ;) So the trick is to stop the array and then shut off using the power supply/surge protector's power switch. Very nice if you need always on storage, and since I'm not sure how many use WOL yet, probably a good thing so you aren't left with an unresponsive server.

J. L.

01-05-08, 06:35 PM

Hopefully somebody answered this for you, but if you follow the suggested BIOS defaults its set to ALWAYS be on, so of course OBVIOUSLY it won't power down. ;) So the trick is to stop the array and then shut off using the power supply/surge protector's power switch. Very nice if you need always on storage, and since I'm not sure how many use WOL yet, probably a good thing so you aren't left with an unresponsive server.There is a shell script in the /root directory named "stop" another named "samba"

If you login via telnet type:
sync
sync
samba stop
stop
sleep 5
poweroff

This should get you pretty close to what you need.
If you install "unmenu," a shell script I wrote to help administer the unraid server from the telnet prompt, you can do the same thing from its menu but you will not have to remember the commands.

You can find "unmenu" in the user-contributions sub-forum.

Joe L.

RockDawg

01-05-08, 07:34 PM

nightlfy13 - You should be fine with the 1.6 Celeron 420 running unRAID. I have two unRAID servers that I orginally built using an AMD Athlon 1.4 and an Athlon 1.7 and 512MB RAM on both and they ran just fine. I ultimately upgraded them both to 1GB RAM and Celeron D336 2.8 and I didn't notice any difference in performance after the upgrade.

As for mobo and drives, it all depends on the mobo. The mobo you linked to only has one IDE channel so it can only run 2 IDE drives unless you add a IDE card. I run both IDE and SATA cards in my servers and you can get either for $20-25 (PCI versions. Not sure about PCI-X)

Limetech has acknowledged that unRAID doesn't take advantage of any memory above 1GB so I wouldn't waste the money on any more than that.

It's easy to get hung up on performance when buying equipment, but it really doesn't matter much for a NAS system like this.

dragon_788

01-05-08, 07:47 PM

Probably not the best place to comment on this, but I think the product pricing is a little steep for the Pro version. If the PRO was like $70 and the PLUS around $40, I'd probably jump ship. I looked around Lime's site to see how long an Unraid license is valid for, but couldn't find out if it is good for all future versions. I also think that if your USB drive fails, your license goes with it. So long term, this becomes an even more expensive solution.

I think I'm going to install Ubuntu Server and run a couple of RAID-5 arrays instead of using Unraid. I recently figured out how to grow the arrays as I add more drives. So Ubuntu costs $0 now, and I know I will be covered from an upgrade standpoint. Though, don't get my message wrong, I think Unraid is a good product, just a little more costly than what it brings to the table.

Jagercola, I think really for the money this is an outstanding solution, where else can you build a device that's as large or small as you want, expandable to astronomical capacities, with the possibility to tolerate a drive failure flawlessly and even MULTIPLE drive failures without COMPLETE DATA LOSS? I've read mention of the Infrant ReadyNAS solutions, Drobo has a DataRobot, NASLite and FreeNAS are competing software solutions, but they still can't offer these same features. The other WICKED feature in my mind is that I could theoretically pull a drive out of my unRAID server, load it up with content in another machine (providing I had a ReiserFS driver) and put it back in and simply regenerate the parity info and be cooking with Crisco again. That kind of flexibility astounds me and even though I wasn't in the market for a new storage solution just yet, I know EXACTLY what I'll be getting when I am.

Also, from everything I've read that one license fee is good for ALL future versions. A few pages back a couple of the early adopters using v1.5 mentioned they got free upgrades (with two Pro licenses no less) to v4 when it came out. THAT'S value for your money.

BTW Jagercola, when you lose two drives and all your data, you might wish you went unRAID, when you want to change out the drives in your arrays for larger capacity ones, you might wish you went unRAID. Glad to hear you are at least using Ubuntu and software (I'd think) RAID5, so you won't have to worry about your controlling dying and losing your data, but I think if you want the ultimate in expandability, you'd want to go unRAID.

P.S. I'm in no way related to Tom or Lime Tech, and I remember reading about this solution MONTHS ago and not being impressed, but as I've dug through the entire 52 pages of this thread (kudos to the mods for not deleting or locking it) I've found it to be an AWESOME idea, and something I'd definitely consider before rolling any alternative solutions myself.

Tybio

01-05-08, 08:21 PM

Jagercola

01-05-08, 09:28 PM

Jagercola, I think really for the money this is an outstanding solution...

Thanks Dragon for your input... I'll see if someone else wants to go in on a pro license with me to bring the price down to around $79.5 a pop (Any takers?). I'm itching to set up a MDADM Raid 6 though... If Windows Home Server had a parity drive extender instead of just a duplicate, that would be the superior solution. As of right now, it can even corrupt your data if you save with the wrong app.

Copperfield

01-07-08, 07:11 AM

Geordon

01-07-08, 08:18 AM

There is one thing I don't understand at all. The way the unRaid software works with disks is said to be possible to loose one disk without data loosing, BUT how does it exactly work? if I for example had two disks 1tb and 80gb and lost this 1tb one then in my opinion I wouldn't have the data saved, am I right? :)
So how does the 'raid5-like' data system work?

An 80GB drive in your raid??!! In any case, one drive is your parity drive, and all other drives must be smaller (or else the difference is unused). In your example, you would set the 1TB drive as a parity drive (to allow for future addition of any drives up to this size), and your data drive would be the 80GB drive.

Now, let's say one fails. If is the the parity, after you replace it, UnRaid will rebuild the parity drive. If it is a data drive, after you replace it, UnRaid will rebuild using the parity and other drives (none in your example) to recreate the lost data. Ta da!

Copperfield

01-07-08, 11:54 AM

An 80GB drive in your raid??!! In any case, one drive is your parity drive, and all other drives must be smaller (or else the difference is unused). In your example, you would set the 1TB drive as a parity drive (to allow for future addition of any drives up to this size), and your data drive would be the 80GB drive.

Now, let's say one fails. If is the the parity, after you replace it, UnRaid will rebuild the parity drive. If it is a data drive, after you replace it, UnRaid will rebuild using the parity and other drives (none in your example) to recreate the lost data. Ta da!
Now you made me not understand it at all...
Let`s start again. The system is said to have a possibility to add size-various drives without loosing space on any of them, but is also said to be raid5-like. I mean it 'eats' the space of one drive (like normal raid5 for parity codes) and provides one-drive-fail-security, but also allows to have size-various disks what is logicaly impossible, cause this way all drives must have the same size!
Otherwise a bigger disk would have to have the space excess cut in order to be identical with others, or if it was smaller then the rest of disks would have to have this done.
Do you understand my problem now? Can someone explain me this? :)

J. L.

01-07-08, 01:20 PM

unRaid uses a modified version of raid-4. it is modified in that it does not stripe data across multiple data drives.

It does use a single parity drive. It must be as big, or bigger than any data drive.

It can handle as many as 15 data drives in addition to the parity drive. The data drives can be any mix of SATA, PATA, and size, as long as they are not any bigger in size than the parity drive.

For the purposes of calculating parity, the "missing" space of drives smaller than the parity drive is considered to be all zeros. In other words, it pretends to read the non-existent block of data from a small drive when parity for a block on a much larger drive is calculated.

As already described, it can survive the loss of any single drive without losing your data. (exactly like raid5)

If you understand how parity works you will know it does not care how many data drives a single parity drive protects. The limitation occurs when reconstructing data from a failed drive since all the remaining drives in the array must be read to determine the value of the missing or failed disk. A practical limit of 16 devices imposed by the unRaid software is not unreasonable. In most cases, the PCI buss will limit throughput at that point and be the bottleneck.

So, if you lose the parity drive, you have not lost any data. Replace the parity drive and re-calculate parity and you are protected once more. If you were to lose a data drive at the same time the parity drive failed, then you would lose the data on that data drive... exactly as on most systems where no parity drive exists.

However, losing those two drives would NOT cause the loss of data on any of the other 14 drives. Each data drive has its own reiserfs file-system. This is very different than a normal raid5 or raid4 array. Normally losing two drives loses ALL your data on ALL drives. The data drives have data "striped" across them and they do not have file systems that can be read independently. (in the case of 15 data drives, each would have 1/15th of the blocks of data from your file)

The throughput of an unRaid array is not designed for a high performance data center or database. Raid5 with striping of data is faster, since it can issue parallel read requests to multiple disks.

unRaid stores files on a single disk, in normal file systems, so it is limited to the access speed of a single disk. It does easily handle streaming media in a home environment. It can handle multiple HD streams when in a degraded state and I've personally served 4 different ISO images to 4 different medial players/PCs on my lan while reading from a "missing" disk in a test where I simulated a drive failure.

That is more than I'll ever need for my home media server and I have an all IDE array. If I ever need more speed I'll upgrade to an SATA based array of disks.

You will get more information from the lime-technology web-site, wiki, and support forum.
http://www.lime-technology.com/
http://wiki.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

Obviously, it is important to replace a failed drive as soon as possible to maintain the protection a raid array provides. Just remember, there are only two types of hard disk drives.

No, not PATA and IDE. No, not 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch, but

Those that have already crashed
and
Those that have not yet crashed, but eventually will... it is only a matter of time.

Copperfield

01-07-08, 02:06 PM

Still don`t understand how it works totally, completly, at all...
This is a great way to make use of older, smaller hard drives you might have laying around.

For example, you might start out by installing one or two new high capacity hard drives along with some number of smaller hard drives you already own. Later, you might decide to replace one of the smaller drives, and unRAID Server will restore the data of the smaller drive onto the new drive, and then expand the file system to incorporate the full size of the new drive.
By the way...
Thx, for what you wrote. I know raid5 idea very well, and the fact that unRaid isn`t as fast as it, and everything other I need, but that`s a problem I cannot understand...
If I had following disks: 1x80gb, 2x160gb, 3x250gb, 1x320gb, 5x500gb.
Where would the parity codes be stripped, and which disks would be fail-secured?

imlucid

01-07-08, 02:13 PM

If I had following disks: 1x80gb, 2x160gb, 3x250gb, 1x320gb, 5x500gb.
Where would the parity codes be stripped, and which disks would be fail-secured?

You would have to use one 500gb drive for parity (or buy another). All parity information is stored on the parity drive.

All drives have their original content and show up as separate volumes, which is why in the worst case scenario of losing two drives at once, you still have all the other drives intact.

Losing any single drive is not an issue because the data from that drive can be reconstituted from the parity information on the parity drive and the information on all the others.

Kevin

nightfly13

01-07-08, 02:13 PM

nightfly13

01-07-08, 02:19 PM

Hey Kevin, I've been meaning to ask and you seem to be the guy - unRAID plays nice with Macs, right? I can't imagine it not but it's good to double (triple?) check with actual users. I'm not as fortunate as you, I won't get a monster pre-built system (since they don't sell 'em any more) but I imagine the inner-workings are the same.

You stream easily to your AppleTV?

Billped

01-07-08, 02:26 PM

PGPFan

01-07-08, 02:37 PM

I'll just chime in as I understand it - feel free to correct me guys.

With that setup of disks, 1 of your 500gb discs would have to be *the* parity drive. All the other discs can be filled up with data as needed, so in your case 3.47TB of data (from your 11 data drives). Amazingly you'd only 'sacrifice' the space of 500gb to have single-drive failure protection of the whole 3.4TB and if ANY 1 drive fails, replace it with an equal or larger drive and it repairs itself. Pretty sweet system :) The parity data isn't striped among all the 11 data drives, it's ALL on the single parity drive, but it uses the data on the others to balance its self out.

That is EXACTLY how unRaid works, and yes it is pretty sweet!

-PGPfan

Copperfield

01-07-08, 03:07 PM

I'll just chime in as I understand it - feel free to correct me guys.

With that setup of disks, 1 of your 500gb discs would have to be *the* parity drive. All the other discs can be filled up with data as needed, so in your case 3.47TB of data (from your 11 data drives). Amazingly you'd only 'sacrifice' the space of 500gb to have single-drive failure protection of the whole 3.4TB and if ANY 1 drive fails, replace it with an equal or larger drive and it repairs itself. Pretty sweet system :) The parity data isn't striped among all the 11 data drives, it's ALL on the single parity drive, but it uses the data on the others to balance its self out.

But if the data is NOT stripped then how can be the parity code counted?
if we have four drives and our file looks like this: '110' in binary system then it is stripped:

Drive 1 Drive 2 Drive 3 Drive 4 (parity)
1 1 0 1 xor 1 xor 0

BUT if the data isn`t stripped then how it looks like? It can`t look like this:
Drive 1 Drive 2 Drive 3 Drive 4 (parity)
110 (?)

J. L.

01-07-08, 06:15 PM

But if the data is NOT stripped then how can be the parity code counted?
if we have four drives and our file looks like this: '110' in binary system then it is stripped:

Drive 1 Drive 2 Drive 3 Drive 4 (parity)
1 1 0 1 xor 1 xor 0

BUT if the data isn`t stripped then how it looks like? It can`t look like this:
Drive 1 Drive 2 Drive 3 Drive 4 (parity)
110 (?)

It would depend upon what is on the other two data drives.

In usual raid5 system where data is stripped across drives the first block of data goes on drive 1, the next on drive 2, your picture is basically correct.

Think of whole files on a drive, not parts of them.

For this example I'll use the first three "bits" of a file and 4 drives, exactly as you.

Drive 2 is your smaller 80 gig drive. The others are larger.

Drive1 Drive2 Drive3 Drive4(parity)
1 0 1 0 <- first bit on disk
0 0 1 1 <-2nd bit on disk
1 1 0 0 <-3rd bit on disk
... etc... for 80 Gig worth of bits....
1 0* 0 1 <- bit position one bigger than 80 gig disk.
... etc for as many bits on your biggest drive ...
0 0* 0* 0 <- last bit position on biggest data drive

The bits with the 0* does not exist on the smaller drives, but unRaid pretends it read it and it is zero. We still have an even number of "1s" in a given bit position on the set of drives.

In each case, across a given bit position on all the drives there are a EVEN number of "1" bits set. This is because unRaid uses EVEN parity. Yes, xor calcs are used internally as you described.

Now, disk1,2 & 3 all have their own file-systems, their own formatting, and their own files. In my example, disk1 and disk2 also have files. (starting with bits of values = 101 and 001 respectively) In reality, the first bits on a disk would be part of the area allocated for a master boot record followed by the partition table. The first bits of the first file you create or save is probably a few hundred bytes up into the disk but the principal is the same... All of the bit positions... those in the MBR, the partition table, the formatting, and the data bits are ALL have parity calculated. That way, it is possible to re-create an entire defective disk when one goes bad. You don't format it first, you simply calculate all the bits needed for every data block. Parity does not care what kind of file system exists on a disk, or even if there is a file system at all.

So, to repeat, parity is calculated across the same bit position across all the data drives. The parity bit for a given position is set to the value needed to have an even number of 1s for that bit position. Do the same calculation for all the bits in turn and you have protected your array with parity data.

Now, lets assume you have a drive failure... I'll put an X in the column for Drive 3, simulating it having failed. I'll bet you can tell me what used to be there in place of the "X" since you know there MUST be an EVEN number of "1s" in a given bit position.

Drive 2 is your smaller 80 gig drive. The Drives 1 and 3 are larger. Parity (drive4) is as large or larger than any data drive.

Drive1 Drive2 Drive3 Drive4(parity)
1 0 X 0 <- first bit on disk
0 0 X 1 <-2nd bit on disk
1 1 X 0 <-3rd bit on disk
... etc... for 80 Gig worth of bits....
1 0* X 1 <- bit position one bigger than 80 gig disk.

The first mystery bit MUST be a 1, to make an even number of 1s in that bit position. The second mystery bit must also be a "1", the third must be a "0" there already is an even number of "1s". The last bit illustrated must be a "0" also, as we already have an even number of "1s" in that bit position across all the drives.

Don't confuse striping of data across drives with parity, or raid. You can strip data across drives for increased performance without RAID or PARITY. You can have parity without striping of data (as does unRaid), and the parity itself can be either on 1 drive (as in RAID4 and unRaid) or stripped across multiple drives.

Biggest differences are these. On a normal RAID5 you must spin up all 4 of your data disks to read a file, since pieces of it are on all the drives. In unRaid, you only need to spin up one drive, the one with your flie you are reading. This is better in a home environment (quieter, less heat, less energy consumption)

On a normal RAID4 or 5 all the disks must be the same size. In many instances, the same speed as well. This limits growth and expansion. You cannot take advantage of a disk special sale, limit 1 to a household. unRaid can be upgraded or expanded one disk at a time. I can wait till the 1 Terabyte drives drop to below 200. I can grow my array as drives get cheaper and I find drives on sale.

Joe L.

gshipley

01-07-08, 06:21 PM

I just ordered the parts for an unRaid or Raid 5 (RHEL sofware raid) server. I ordered 7 1tb drives. If I understand unraid correctly, I would have 6tb of usable space with a 1tb parity drive. I could lose any of my drives and be able to recover it with only the parity drive.

PGPFan

01-07-08, 06:41 PM

You are correct, gshipley! 6TB data, 1TB parity.

-PGPfan

str1der

01-07-08, 08:38 PM

Have an unraid system myself and to me it is perfect for a media server. I specifically chose it over Raid 5 for the ability to lose two drives at once and not lose data off of all drives. Most media servers are going to be full of data that you either have on CD or DVD so losing the data just means re ripping what was on that drive. Another thing to remember is you are righting to one drive at a time so when you fill it up you go to the next but if you create a directory, say "movies" on each drive you can access "movies" as a single volume and it will read the data from all drives that's in the movies directory.

Copperfield

01-08-08, 01:59 AM

Thanks J.L. for reaaaaly long explanation. I think if I read it some times then I will understand completly :) Right now I`ll just believe in the way it works without knowing detalis and build my data server. What do you think of this:
-Asus p5e-vm do
-2x512mb kingston 667
-Celeron 420 @ downclocked 1.6ghz, 1.1V cooled passively
-Corsair 450W psu
-Modecom case (already owned by an accident)
-two jmicron sata cards

Plan to start with 4 samsungs hd501lj and expand to 18:)

CANNON-FODDER

01-08-08, 10:10 AM

I have another question, call it

5) Anyone ever consider using laptop hard drives? SATA (same interface) 160gb are $80. Imagine how many you could stick into a 5-in-3 cage or whatever. Low power consumption, lower heat, I guess for most ppl it's a waste of one of the 16 drives, but with 500gb units just announced (I'm sure still obscenely expensive) it might be something to think about long term. Bad idea?Just thinking about this, since I have some old laptop drives collecting dust, and thought about your power requirements.

Have you considered a Mini-ITX motherboard with a PCI controller and some 40-44 pin IDE adapters? I guess SATA would be cleaner if you are buying new.

Although there may be some work to configure it for that platform.

v/r,
C-F

nightfly13

01-08-08, 01:11 PM

Just thinking about this, since I have some old laptop drives collecting dust, and thought about your power requirements.

Have you considered a Mini-ITX motherboard with a PCI controller and some 40-44 pin IDE adapters? I guess SATA would be cleaner if you are buying new.

Although there may be some work to configure it for that platform.

v/r,
C-F

I'm afraid to say I don't know what what a Mini-ITX motherboard is or much about IDE adapters. I guess I'll have to educate myself a bit on MOBOs, since, from what I've gathered, you can do this on 'old' hardware, yet most of the parts list and whatnot I've seen are for current-generation procs, so yeah... I was trying to talk a friend into going halfers with me on a pro license and he was saying how $400-500 start up is too much and I countered with the obvious benefits and that you could just buy a '3-4 year old system' but then I don't know if that's true. I need to know which motherboards are working and which aren't, and I need to understand more broadly which categories they fall into. The list is there, but it's all obscure specs to me. Any shortcuts to figuring this out?

PGPFan

01-08-08, 01:21 PM

gshipley

01-08-08, 01:43 PM

A low-end system from a few years ago works just fine. Your best bet is to surt the Limetech forums and see exactly what hardware people are using. My system hardware was top of the line about 5 years ago and it runs unRaid flawlessly.

-PGPfan

I am building my server tonight and will start a new thread with details and links with my exact hardware configuration.

nightfly13

01-08-08, 01:50 PM

Woo I'll watch for the link :)

Most likely I'll end up buying new low-end components, too. The idea of re-tasking old hardware is cute and the fact that old procs can be useful is attractive, but ultimately I want a fully compatible (hassle-free please) and upgradable MOBO w/ capable power supply - I don't want crap, basically, but I want my linux box to be econmical. My other two machines are 'Pro' line Intel Macs (although my beloved Mac Pro just got antiquated earlier today, it seems).

J. L.

01-08-08, 04:10 PM

I'm afraid to say I don't know what what a Mini-ITX motherboard is or much about IDE adapters. I guess I'll have to educate myself a bit on MOBOs, since, from what I've gathered, you can do this on 'old' hardware, yet most of the parts list and whatnot I've seen are for current-generation procs, so yeah... I was trying to talk a friend into going halfers with me on a pro license and he was saying how $400-500 start up is too much and I countered with the obvious benefits and that you could just buy a '3-4 year old system' but then I don't know if that's true. I need to know which motherboards are working and which aren't, and I need to understand more broadly which categories they fall into. The list is there, but it's all obscure specs to me. Any shortcuts to figuring this out?Basically, you want a motherboard that can be booted from its USB port from a flash drive. Since you can download and configure your own USB flash drive with the unRaid version that can support up to three disks (parity + 2 data) you can test ANY of your old motherboards for compatibility. You will need to configure the boot device in the BIOS to point to the USB Device. You don't even need disks to see if the USB port can be selected as a boot device.

Make sure to follow the steps on the lime-tech web-site when configuring your flash drive. Biggest error I see is forgetting to set the volume label of the flash drive to UNRAID

If the MB is IDE based, odds are very high when you boot up it will see the disk controllers just fine. If SATA based, again odds are good it will see the drives if a reasonably standard chipset was used on the MB.

The other compatibility issue is if the network controller on the motherboard is supported. You might need to purchase a PCI gagabyte lan card if the chipset on the old motherboard is not supported. This is not too expensive fortunately.

unRaid is built on top of a Slackware release of Linux. Since Slackware supports almost any old hardware, odds are you will find things working IF you can boot off the USB port.

Joe L.

BeyondHope

01-08-08, 07:43 PM

Right now I`ll just believe in the way it works without knowing detalis and build my data server. What do you think of this:
-Asus p5e-vm do
-2x512mb kingston 667
-Celeron 420 @ downclocked 1.6ghz, 1.1V cooled passively
-Corsair 450W psu
-Modecom case (already owned by an accident)
-two jmicron sata cards

Plan to start with 4 samsungs hd501lj and expand to 18:)

That's a good baseline system...but the 450W psu will probably top out ~8-10 drives (typically limited by startup power draw on the psu's 12V rail).

However, the 450W psu may last you longer than you think because of one of the biggest benefits of unRAID...mixed drive sizes. That means that in 6 months you'll be adding 750GB drives to your current array (without replacing the 500GB drives). In a year...you'll be adding 1TB drives. When a small drive dies...it gets replaced by a large drive. Essentially, unRAID's mixed HDD capability completely shatters the old thinking of RAID capacity planning. There's never a need to purchase extra disks today...capacity expansion will be both possible and cheaper in the future! :-)

BTW...unRAID is currently limited to 16 drives (15 data + 1 parity).

gshipley

01-08-08, 09:12 PM

Woo I'll watch for the link :)

Here is the link to my 7tb unRaid build. (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=973512)

fitbrit

01-09-08, 10:15 AM

EDIT: The Lime technology web pages were down, but now up again. Yay!

jimwhite

01-09-08, 11:31 AM

you also want a motherboard which has the NIC on the CPU private bus, NOT on the PCI bus...

:cool:

typh92

01-09-08, 12:08 PM

The Lime technology web pages have had their accounts suspended. :(

Lime site back up and running

MikeRich

01-09-08, 12:50 PM

you also want a motherboard which has the NIC on the CPU private bus, NOT on the PCI bus...

:cool:

What's the reason for this?

Is there a quick way to tell which mobo's have this?

Thanks,

fitbrit

01-09-08, 01:37 PM

What's the reason for this?

Is there a quick way to tell which mobo's have this?

Thanks,

I think the reason is that the PCI bus is too slow to give optimal performance from a gigabit connection.

I'd be interested too to know which mobos have this, although it's probably too late now that I've already bought mine.

J. L.

01-09-08, 01:37 PM

What's the reason for this?
If the PCI bus has to share its available bandwidth for both disk data AND network data then disk access could be half as fast as when a PCI bus can use all its available bandwidth for disk data. In other words, the array speed will be faster if the PCI bus is not used for network traffic.

Is there a quick way to tell which mobo's have this?

Thanks,Need to look at the chipset being used. (read the manufacturer's marketing notices and announcements) This separate bus for network traffic is one of the reasons the original Intel D865GLC motherboard was chosen when unRaid was first developed.

Joe L.

Copperfield

01-09-08, 02:42 PM

That's a good baseline system...but the 450W psu will probably top out ~8-10 drives (typically limited by startup power draw on the psu's 12V rail).
w00t?! From what I can read one hdd consumpts about 0.75A on 12V rail and 0.55A on 5V rail, so In 16hdd configuration the values would be just 12A on 12V, and 8.8V on 5V. Is there any trick in power requirement when disk is spinning up?

nightfly13

01-10-08, 01:41 PM

trueimage

01-10-08, 03:23 PM

What is a good case to store at least 6 drives? I'm thinking something with hot-swap bays or whatever right on the front.

paulvincit

01-10-08, 03:46 PM

Guys you gotta check out this link on the lime-tech site (http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1311.0). Why be limited by a case for your unRAID.. gives 'server room' a new definition.

Thanks for the cross post nightfly. unRAID is an excellent product and its great to help this community.

paul

luckyflyer

01-14-08, 07:39 PM

I'm a newbie here that is building a MD-1500 PC-A16B clone. Can anyone speak to the effectiveness/viability of the fan controller that Lime sells for $39.00 for this case? If they are a useful addition I would prefer to install it during the initial build rather than retrofitting it. Also the brand would be helpful if it is available. I posted this on the Limeware forum but haven't got a reply yet so I thought I would post here.
TIA
Luckyflyer

ChicagoTC

01-14-08, 08:19 PM

What is a good case to store at least 6 drives? I'm thinking something with hot-swap bays or whatever right on the front.

I just put together a Newegg wishlist over the weekend and ordered it today.

Case - Pretty cheap, 8 front 5.25 bays. Eventually I'll add sata blackplanes for hotswapping. Athena power makes 5x3. They can fit 5 3.5' drives into 3 5.25" bays.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16811208022

************************************************************ *****************
Athena backplane I mentioned. 2 of these will fit easily into the above case. This will give you 10 hotswappable drives. I didn't get these since I didn't want to spend the extra $220. I'm using the NAS for my movies, music, and photos, not Ebay's SQL backend. Maybe in the future I'll get these but I can live with the 30mins downtime it takes to pull the cover off the case.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817995001

************************************************************ *****************

5.25-3.5 Bay converters
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16811999141

Motherboard - Abit Abt9. I choose this board since it has 9 onboard sata connections.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813127004

Processor - 3gHz P4 should be more then enough for a NAS box
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16819116004

Power supply - Rosewill 600w with blue led to match the case :)
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817182032

Memory - 1GB G.skill DDR2 800
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820231098

Hard Drives - 500GB WD Sata drives. I have 3 existing 500gb drives I'm adding as well
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822136178

The total was somewhere around $770.

BeyondHope

01-14-08, 11:43 PM

w00t?! From what I can read one hdd consumpts about 0.75A on 12V rail and 0.55A on 5V rail, so In 16hdd configuration the values would be just 12A on 12V, and 8.8V on 5V. Is there any trick in power requirement when disk is spinning up?

Those look like idle consumption numbers.

You might want to check out the HDD power benchmarks at StorageReview (http://www.storagereview.com/Testbed4Compare.sr). The most relavent benchmark for unRaid is the 12V maximum power dissipation.

Except for Hitachi drives, most of the modern drives pull 25-29W on startup from the 12V line alone -- that's up to 2.4A per drive! With 16 drives, that's over 38A. Add-in CPU, fans, motherboard, PSU aging and you need a lot of juice on the 12V line. That's why the Lime Tech MD-1500 is spec'ed with a 620W PSU that has a 49A 12V rail.

Once the system is started up, it operates with much less power. So, staggering drive start-up can reduce the initial power draw and allow a smaller PSU.

audiomaniac

01-15-08, 03:49 AM

Except for Hitachi drives, most of the modern drives pull 25-29W on startup from the 12V line alone -- that's up to 2.4A per drive! With 16 drives, that's over 38A. Add-in CPU, fans, motherboard, PSU aging and you need a lot of juice on the 12V line. That's why the Lime Tech MD-1500 is spec'ed with a 620W PSU that has a 49A 12V rail.

Once the system is started up, it operates with much less power. So, staggering drive start-up can reduce the initial power draw and allow a smaller PSU.

How would you practically go about staggering this?

The new Hitachi Cinemastar drives do look promising though.

lungnut

01-21-08, 12:11 AM

[PROBLEM SOLVED VIA TRIAL AND ERROR]

I cannot for the life of me get my newly-built system (using the Asus P5B-VM DO for a mobo) to read from the flash key (I bought the pre-configured flash drives from limetech). All of my unsuccessful boot attempts end in a DOS-like text message stating:

----

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key_

----

Unfortunately, the limetech forums seem to have gone off-line. I bought my keys and my hardware before the holidays, but I've just now gotten around to putting everything together. How long have their forums been down?

Anyway, I think I've tried every single BIOS combination I can think of. Is there someone out there using this particular board, and if so, could you please share your BIOS settings with me?

In the Asus BIOS, under Advanced-->USB Configuration, what do you have set for all of the USB options listed there? For the USB Storage Device Configuration, what do you have the Emulation Type set as?

What do you have set for your Boot Device Priority?

I bought this board based on its popularity with unRaid builders, so I know that the problem is me, not the board (not surprising, hahaha).

Thanks!

lungnut

01-21-08, 02:09 AM

Billped

01-21-08, 02:48 AM

Well, I finally got my system to boot to the flash drive. Lots of trial and error. I couldn't even tell you what I actually did to finally make it work.

However, I have a new problem :(

I am being asked for a "Tower login" and "password". I wasn't provided with either. Is there a default? No one else has ever posted about this problem???

Thanks....

Two things:

1. The steps you did were likely to set the USB flash key as "forced FDD" and then make it the first device in the boot priority. Also, the USB key itself has to be properly formatted, any U3 software removed (not always easy), and labeled "UNRAID".

2. Login = "root" and if you use that you will not be challenged with a password.

3. The Unraid board went down Friday night, I think. Tom uses a flaky webhost but this is the first time I can remember when it was down for more than an hour or two.

Goggy

01-21-08, 10:32 AM

Hi

I know I should post this on the lime forum, but it's been down for a few days so I'm trying my luck here.

I've recently purchased a two-pack of pro USB sticks. I was able to build my system (on a asus p5b-vm do), add 2 drives, plug in a USB stick and boot. I was able to assign drives, one to partition, one to data. Parity check went fine and I was able to move data to the data drive.

Then I wanted to add one more data drive so I stopped the array and shut it down. I added a disk and now tower won't boot.

I tried a few things...

I tried the other key, same behavior.

If either of the two initial drives are connected, the machine won't boot. If none are connected, it boots. If only the "new" drive is connected (on any port), it boots.

I tried putting the data disk on another computer and tested it with rfstool and I can get a listing of what's on disk:

T:\file\reiser>RFSHELLTEST.exe
/dev/hde0 is a ReiserFS partition
Got newstyle partition information, assuming Windows XP
*** Listing of "/":
.
..
tv
tmp
Julie
julie
musique
movies
*** Contents of /etc/fstab:
ERROR, directory '/etc/fstab' not found
ERROR, unable to open file "/etc/fstab"ERROR, directory '/usr/include/stdio.h' n
ot found
ERROR, unable to copy /usr/include/stdio.h to stdio.h

T:\file\reiser>

I see "Julie" and "julie", one I created manualy, the other with the user share menu. don't know if there are implications...

I haven't tried to copy the content of that drive yet as I don't have enough free space with that configuration but it's my next step. I'm hoping a format on those drives will bring back their bootability but I don't want this to happen again.

Any idea what this could be ?

thanks

Gog

fitbrit

01-21-08, 10:47 AM

J. L.

01-21-08, 11:01 AM

That's a bit scary. I hope you fins an answer. I hope I'm not in the same boat. I've built my system with 3 drives, and this weekend I paid for a dual key Pro system. Instead of rebooting, I shut it down; I plan on adding a few drives and then starting it up, so I want to be sure that I don't get your problem, or if I do, that some kind soul has found a solution for you. Good luck!On many motherboards, if you add a drive, the bios resets to use it as the boot device. (thinking it is helping you)

You will probably only need to go back into the bios and select the flash drive as the boot device once again.

The drives you originally loaded are probably just fine... put them back into the unRaid server... no need to re-format.

As you add drives, you might need to make sure they are assigned properly on the devices page. (If they get detected in a different order by the hardware, they might be at a different device under linux. No problem, just assign them to the same slot/role in the array)

Joe L.

Goggy

01-21-08, 11:04 AM

On many motherboards, if you add a drive, the bios resets to use it as the boot device. (thinking it is helping you)

*bang head on desk*

Now that you mention it, I feel pretty dumb not at least checking the bios. I don't think I had to do anything for the first two drives, but it's worth a look.

Thanks for the idea.

Gog

fitbrit

01-21-08, 11:04 AM

Thanks, J.L.! I'll be sure to remember that if I get any trouble tonight.

J. L.

01-21-08, 11:10 AM

The reason it boots with only the "new" drive connected is that the flash drive is the only thing with a partition that could be bootable, so the motherboard defaults to it.

So... just set the bios setting and you should be fine. My motherboard is exactly the same way. If I swap to my other USB flash drive, it still resets the boot order to the first hard disk because the serial number does not match what it thinks the boot device should be. I have to go into my disk boot order screen and re-select the flash drive, which is usually at the end of the list.

Joe L.

Goggy

01-21-08, 11:13 AM

I'm not saying it won't work, I sure hope it does, but when I remove everything but the new drive, I get the "no boot drive found" message, but with a "bad" drive in, I get nothing. black screen and blinking cursor.

gog

J. L.

01-21-08, 11:22 AM

I. M. Fletcher

01-21-08, 11:45 AM

J. L.

01-21-08, 01:43 PM

Since the forum is down, I thought I would ask a question here.

I would like to completely delete a drive and reconfigure the array. I want to make sure I do it properly. Disk 2 has started to act weird. I've got a red ball next to it. I can access it, but sometimes it will freeze up. So, I was able to move all of my files off of Disk 2 on to other disks. I'd like to just delete it and remake the array. I don't want to replace it with another drive.

Should I:

1. Stop Array/Shutdown
2. Remove disk
3. Reboot
4. Assign drives
5. Start array

Is it that simple? Am I missing anything?
Yes, you are missing one step.

Doing what you described will simulate a defective/crashed drive. It will still be part of the array, and you will still be able to read and write to it even though it has been removed. (although you are actually reading from all the disks and writing to keep the parity correct as if it was there)

Once you remove the disk and power up it will show as missing on the array.

You will need to stop the array, check the checkbox under the "Restore" button and then press it. It will then re-initialize the entire array based on the currently assigned disks and re-calculate parity. At that point, your old removed disk will be forgotten about.

Joe L.

I. M. Fletcher

01-21-08, 03:05 PM

Yes, you are missing one step.

Doing what you described will simulate a defective/crashed drive. It will still be part of the array, and you will still be able to read and write to it even though it has been removed. (although you are actually reading from all the disks and writing to keep the parity correct as if it was there)

Once you remove the disk and power up it will show as missing on the array.

You will need to stop the array, check the checkbox under the "Restore" button and then press it. It will then re-initialize the entire array based on the currently assigned disks and re-calculate parity. At that point, your old removed disk will be forgotten about.

Joe L.

I thought that might be the case. Thanks for the help. Running Parity Synch now. Should work just fine.

I. M. Fletcher

01-21-08, 04:22 PM

Very Strange Behavior:

Parity-Sync is running and it's 14% done. However, Network Places is still displaying the old Unraid shares. Navigating to Tower and pulling up the disks is a little different. The correct disks are listed, but it is still reading the old data that was on the disk that I removed.

So weird. I can't imagine that it will change once the Parity-Sync is done. The disks are mounted, so they should read properly.

Thread at lime-tech is here: http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1348.0

Goggy

01-22-08, 11:11 AM

mani

01-22-08, 01:07 PM

Hi

I have been using unraid server for couple of months. I wanted some input on how to create user shares. What I want to achieve is this:

- I have songs, pictures , files of different sorts mixed on different drives. So lets say I want to see home pictures- there may be some on drive 2 , some on drive 4 , 5 etc. How can the PC connected to network view the home pics as one folder instead of me browsing through all drives?

thanks
mani

Goggy

01-22-08, 01:10 PM

Hi
- I have songs, pictures , files of different sorts mixed on different drives. So lets say I want to see home pictures- there may be some on drive 2 , some on drive 4 , 5 etc. How can the PC connected to network view the home pics as one folder instead of me browsing through all drives?

thanks
mani

Hi Mani

The doc here is pretty clear:

http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=47#toc-user-shares1

basically, you turn on user share and then you can access \\tower\disk1\toto and \\tower\disc2\toto through \\tower\toto

Gog

mani

01-22-08, 01:26 PM

thanks

kapone

01-22-08, 01:30 PM

Hi Mani

The doc here is pretty clear:

http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=47#toc-user-shares1

basically, you turn on user share and then you can access \\tower\disk1\toto and \\tower\disc2\toto through \\tower\toto

Gog

This peeked my interest. When you do that (turn on user shares), how do the files appear to the clients?

\\tower\toto\disk1\movie1\...
\\tower\toto\disk2\movie2\...

or

\\tower\toto\movie 1\...
\\tower\toto\movie 2\...

PhillipH

01-22-08, 01:36 PM

The files appear as:

\\tower\toto\movie 1\...
\\tower\toto\movie 2\...

It works very well.

Phil

J. L.

01-22-08, 01:45 PM

This peeked my interest. When you do that (turn on user shares), how do the files appear to the clients?

\\tower\toto\disk1\movie1\...
\\tower\toto\disk2\movie2\...

or

\\tower\toto\movie 1\...
\\tower\toto\movie 2\...

They show up as the second example you gave.
\\tower\toto\movie 1\...
\\tower\toto\movie 2\...

There are several different ways to set up space allocation and which physical disk will be used when you write a new "movie 3" to \\tower\toto, and (in the paid versions) who can access them.

Each top level folder on the drives shows up as a separate "shared" drive on the windows network. I have a "Movies," "Music,", "Photos," and "data" folders that each span multiple disks.

You can still get to the individual disks for complete control on where content gets written if you desire, but if you write to the drives directly you (currently) need to stop and re-start the array for the new files to show up in the "User-Shares." At one point in the past a "Scan" button existed in the interface... it is likely it will come back in a future version as many have requested it to be put back on the management interface.

Joe L.

RoninTech

01-22-08, 04:34 PM

I just finished putting together an unraid (basic) server:

Celeron 420 CPU (low power) (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX18172(ME).aspx)

Asus P5E-VB DO Motherboard (picked for availability) (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX18899(ME).aspx)

Antec Case and 380W Earthwatts 80 Plus Power Supply (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX18177(ME).aspx)

2 Western Digita WD10EACS 1TB drives - One for parity, one for data (add more as needed) (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX19436(ME).aspx)

1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 RAM (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX14501(ME).aspx)

1GB Kingston Data Traveler USB stick for OS to boot from (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX8641(ME).aspx)

Set up some shares for movies, music, pics, data etc. and copied everything over. Didn't see temps go over 37 degC on HD's during copying and at idle, HD temps are ambient (21 degC). Watched mounted ISO's and HD mkv's over Gig-E link to HTPC with no problems. So far so good. :)

fitbrit

01-26-08, 01:37 PM

I. M. Fletcher

01-26-08, 01:53 PM

You will have to add the device on the devices page. This must be done with the array stopped. Have you done that?

J. L.

01-26-08, 01:54 PM

I just added a 4th 750 GB disk to my system (1 parity, 3 for shares). Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be recognised by unRAID. I recently upgraded to the Pro version, and this is my first installation above the 3 disk limit of the basic version. The BIOS recognises the 4th drive, but when I got to the main page of the management tool, there's no sign of the 4th disk (disk3). If it makes a difference, the disk is not empty or formatted; I assumed that once installed unRAID will require that I reformat and would therefore request confirmation of this.
However, since it never shows up on the maintenance page, I'm not sure what to do. I have several more disks I'd like to add in this manner.

Help? :(Stop the array, go to the drive assignment page, you should be able to assign the new drive there, assuming you put the pro-key file into place. Then, go back to the main page and start the array once more. You might need to check an "I'm sure" checkbox to allow it to format the new disk as it starts.

Joe L.

fitbrit

01-26-08, 02:14 PM

Thanks, Joe and I.M. Fletcher. I didn't realise that the option to assign disks would only come up when you stop the array. Serves me right for stopping my newly installed system for a few days so soon after learning how to use unRAID. I.E. I had known I must do this, but I forgot!
Thanks a lot guys. It's all good now. :)

Also in my defence, I was following the online unRAID manual. Perhaps it needs to be updated?

Add one or more new disks

This is the normal case of expanding the capacity of the system by adding one or more new hard drives:

1. Stop the array.
2. Power down the server.
3. Install your new hard drive(s).
4. Power up the unit.
5. Start the array.

When you Start the array, the system will first format the new disk(s). When this operation finishes, all the data disks, including the new one(s), will be exported and be available for use.

The format operation consists of two phases. First, the the entire contents of the new disk(s) is cleared (written with zeros), and then it’s marked active in the array. Next, a file system is created. unRAID Server uses the ReiserFS journalled file system.

The clearing phase is necessary to preserve the fault tolerance characteristic of the array. If at any time while the new disk(s) is being cleared, one of the other disks fails, you will still be able to recover the data of the failed disk. Unfortunately, the clearing phase can take several hours depending on the size of the new disks(s).

The capacity of any new disk(s) added must be the same size or smaller than your parity disk. If you wish to add a new disk which is larger than your parity disk, then you must instead first replace your parity disk. (You could use your new disk to replace parity, and then use your old parity disk as a new data disk.)

carramrod

01-26-08, 02:18 PM

Anybody try running unraid on a VIA Epia ME6000?? This could make a nice low-power NAS.

fitbrit

01-26-08, 03:56 PM

J. L.

01-26-08, 07:27 PM

Hmmm a new problem:
I have a Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC (Netgear GA311, I believe).
Last week when I built the server, it was operating at 1000 Mbps.
I then switched off the server and installed a new drive (and the config file on the USB to upgrade to unRAID Pro). Once I started the server again, the NIC seems to be running at only 100 Mbps.
Is there some reason that the Pro version is reducing the speed of my NIC? I've tried restarting the switch I'm using, but no luck there either.

I've checked video streaming and it's fine in 100 mbps mode, but transfering 100s of GB of data is another story, of course.

Finally, if I want to try the onboard gigabit NIC on my mobo (obviously with a different MAC address) is that possible? Or would I need a different unRAID key? I went straight with the netgear NIC as I knew it was supported.
Now when I try to use the onboard NIC, ifconfig tells me that the IP address is the same, but the management utility will not connect.

Thanks for any insight.unRaid does not care about MAC address. It can handle only one network card, so if you enable the onboard card, remove the other one.

If it is recognized by the OS, then sometimes you will need to re-boot your router or other PCs on the LAN to get them to know the how to get to your unRaid server. (the router knew to send packets to the OLD MAC address when the unRaid server was addressed as http:\\tower\ .... if it still is sending packets to the old MAC address when you changed things out from underneath it, you would get no response, exactly as you have experienced. A reboot of the router will fix that.)

There is an issue with some realtec chipsets with poor performance, do a search for details to see if yours is involved, we expect it to be fixed in next release, only Tom knows for sure...

Joe L.

fitbrit

01-26-08, 07:48 PM

Thanks a lot. I'll try that. If it works, I've just freed a PCI slot for future SATA card expansion.
I would have asked these question on the Lime forums, but they've been down for much of today. A big thumbs-up for your rapid advice on a Saturday, no less.

gtfoltz

01-27-08, 11:15 AM

Ok, I have a problem with my new unRAID server. I am getting SERIOUS stuttering when I stream a DVD to my HTPC. This is a regular SD DVD in a regular uncompressed VIDEO_TS folder, on 100MB ethernet. My unRAID server is brand new and should be plenty fast (Cel430, 2GB, Seagate 500GB) as is my HTPC (E2160, 2GB). I know that 100MB may not be enough to stream HD, but I should be able to stream SEVERAL SD media streams stutter-free on 100MB. What the heck is the problem? My wife is about to kill me--I promised her a hassle-free DVD watching experience if she let me buy this stuff, and so far it's been a total BUST... :eek:

tstolze

01-27-08, 06:29 PM

I had an issue with my new setup where I could write to the server at good speeds but the read speed was horrible. I cured this by disabling the onboard nic and using a add on card.

gtfoltz

01-27-08, 06:40 PM

I a hoping to avoid doing EXACTLY that. I want to use everything integrated to maximize power savings. If there's no other option, well, Im stuck I guess, but I was hoping there was something else I could try first.

I. M. Fletcher

01-27-08, 06:49 PM

I would suggest you post over at the lime-tech forums with a full list of your hardware and a syslog.

http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

If you need help on how to get a syslog go to the wiki under "how-to's"

http://wiki.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

gtfoltz

01-27-08, 07:50 PM

I did post over there, but I didn't know how to do a syslog. Thanks for your help--now I do. I have a syslog.txt now and I'll go post it. THANKS!

EDIT: It was what you all said--the onboard NIC. I had an old Intel 10/100 NIC lying around, so I popped it in and no more stuttering. How frustrating. Surprisingly (to me), was that it didn't seem to affect my idle power consumption--I'm still pretty much at 44W (I did disable the onboard LAN--not sure if that balanced it). So I guess I don't care so much... Thanks again to everyone for their help.

rpf717

02-10-08, 12:03 AM

Looks like they are coming out with a new model the MD-900 (http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=38). Sounds interesting, wonder what the price will be?

Thanks!

fitbrit

02-10-08, 01:49 AM

Looks like they are coming out with a new model the MD-900 (http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=38). Sounds interesting, wonder what the price will be?

Thanks!

Looks like you edited your second question out. I hope that menas you got your answer, which incidentally was: Yes, you CAN do that with unRAID! :)

fitbrit

02-10-08, 01:50 AM

Looks like they are coming out with a new model the MD-900 (http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/?page_id=38). Sounds interesting, wonder what the price will be?

Thanks!

The page has been like that (under construction) for months now. I would probably have bought one before Christmas if a price had been quoted. In the end, I'm glad I made my own server.

rpf717

02-10-08, 07:13 AM

The page has been like that (under construction) for months now. I would probably have bought one before Christmas if a price had been quoted. In the end, I'm glad I made my own server.

Really!? Wow, that's good to know! I was on the fence anyhow, so I'll probably end up building my own. What motherboard did you end up getting for yours?

Oh and I did find my answer, thanks for checking!

fitbrit

02-10-08, 03:12 PM

I got an eVGA E-7100 as it was pretty cheap and supported the low power, low cost Celeron 420 CPU ($37). It's worked well so far.
Downsides:
In unRAID 4.2x, the opnboard gigabit ethernet isn't supported.
Only 4 SATA ports
Only 2 PCI slots

Pros:
Onboard video
Onboard gigabit ethernet should be supported in unRAID 4.3
Cheap
Stable so far
Easy layout to work with
Can use to make an HTPC if I want to make another server later.

najames

02-12-08, 08:14 PM

I was beating my brains out on installing unRAID last night. It stopped at a boot prompt and said something like it couldn't find the OS. I saw the same thing elsewhere in this thread but nobody responded. I expect they were having the same problems I had.

Solution - after jacking around for a couple hours, my PNY 4GB Attache drive does NOT work. I reluctantly formatted my trusty Sandisk Cruzer 2GB, copied the files, and unRAID installed without a hitch. DOH.

I got 2 of these 4GB PNYs at a Black Friday sale somewhere. They don't like to write large chunks of data, like a Ubuntu CD, they don't like to write lots of data in smaller files either, like a lot of mp3s. You've been warned, they are smoldering piles o' doggy poo.

J. L.

02-12-08, 08:48 PM

najames

02-12-08, 11:03 PM

Nope, didn't use the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, didn't know it existed. I formatted with WinXP. I had a hard time finding it, here's the linky in case someone else needs it.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&swItem=MTX-UNITY-I24434&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Hmm, I thought it might be on my ultimate boot cd, but it doesn't look like it.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I guess I may need to drag out my old AMD 1600 WinXP box or a notebook and try it. I am a Linux sorta guy.

Excellent!! UnRaid works on my Asus A8N-E 3800X2 with Nvidia 6600 and my old MSI Neo2 Platinum with an AMD 3200 and AGP Nvidia 6200 128MB card. I'm installing XP so I can reformat the PNY flash drive now.

mikemav

03-25-08, 04:01 PM

samw97

03-25-08, 04:03 PM

Try http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php.

I believe they recently changed to a new host provider.

gtfoltz

03-25-08, 04:23 PM

Yeah, the site appeared to be down most of Sunday, but it's back up today.

Mikemav, I think the URL to the forums has changed--just go to www.lime-technology.com, and click on forums, and you will see the URL is now:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

I just got a response from Tom at LimeTech. He confirms they did have some problems this weekend. The URLs I provided are working now though.

J. L.

03-25-08, 04:24 PM

Is the support page at http://support.lime-technology.com/forum/ dead? It's not loading for me? Are these guys still around? I emailed Tom (I am a Pro license customer) yesterday and did not receive a reply yet, so I figured I'd post on the forums, but link isn't working. So if anyone here knows what to suggest please advise, thanks. Here is the email question I need answered:
Hi Tom-
My network wasn't seeing the unraid so I checked and it appeared fine on the web page. I stopped the array and clicked reboot. No write errors had been reported. When it rebooted, it said disk 2 was missing. I went to the devices page, and it was unassigned, with disk 2 as an available choice on the pull down. So I selected it, but on the main page it shows an error in red, that the replacement disk is too small?! It's the same disk- nothing was wrong with it that I know of, and when I reassigned it it shows a different size? Here's the info shown:
disk1 MAXTOR STM350063/5QG06KKG 41°C 488,385,496
MAXTOR STM3500630A/5QG06KKG 488,386,552 - -

This is the only Maxtor STM series drive in the array. Please let me know how to proceed to save it. Thanks

Tom recently changed servers and as a result re-organized his web-site.

The forum is at:
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

The main site is at:
http://lime-technology.com/

The wiki is at:

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

As far as your drives go, it appears, from what you have described that disk2 has failed in some way, and is now reporting a smaller number of disk blocks than when you originally installed it. The RED indicator is showing because the unRaid array has taken it off line.

Whatever you do, DO NOT PRESS THE "RESTORE" BUTTON. It does not restore anything, but instead stores a new configuration based on the currently assigned drives and then proceeds to forget the existing parity information and re-calculates it based on the currently assigned drives.

If you have room, copy the files from disk2 to other disks just to be on the safe side. Then, get a new replacement disk and you can go through the process of replacing disk2.

Odds are pretty high some failures occurred on disk2 and it thinks it is helping by just re-allocating sectors and reporting the smaller size.

What version of unRaid are you running? Start a thread on the unRaid forum for specific help. It's still there, just your bookmark needs updating.

You should only need to replace disk2 and then start the array to get everything back restored from the parity data you now have.

Joe L.

J. L.

03-25-08, 04:48 PM

I might have spoken too soon. The difference in size, 1056 bytes has been reported before. It is, as I described, the value being reported by the Linux driver to the unRaid management screen.

A thread describing the issue is here:
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1073.0

Apparently, the size reported is fixed in newer releases of Linux.

What version of unRaid are you running?

Joe L.

J. L.

03-25-08, 04:53 PM

In this thread, the size is reported to be corrected in the 2.6 release of Linux used in the new 4.x release of unRaid. (it is now up to 4.3-beta3. I am running 4.3-beta3, and have no problems to report at all)

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=581.0

It might be as simple as upgrading your release.

Joe L.

hehe299792458

06-05-08, 01:16 AM

could someone explains to me the benefits and drawbacks of unraid vs raid5? I'm will be using it to store 5Tib of data (six 1TB drives).

ReneV

06-05-08, 03:17 AM

could someone explains to me the benefits and drawbacks of unraid vs raid5? I'm will be using it to store 5Tib of data (six 1TB drives).

In unRAID, HDDs remain independent. This means that you can take a HDD out of an unRAID server at any given time and read off its contents, that HDDs need not be the same size, that multiple HDDs failures do not result in loss of all data, that HDDs can be spun down, that it is straightforward to add HDDs to an unRAID server, and more. Conversely, reads are bounded by the speed of the relevant HDD in unRAID but are kind'of parallellised on RAID5.

nightfly13

06-05-08, 06:16 AM

In your scenario (6x1TB drives) unRAID may not offer many advantages, and have the disadvantges of trickier hardware system requirements and paying for the license.

The big advantage is if you ever want to expand, you still only lose 1 drive to giving parity. So with both systems, you get 5TB data from the 6TB, but with unRAID, you can go up to 14-15TB and still only give up the 1TB for parity on all drives. You can also toss in some old 500gb drives or 2TB drives in the future and the system keeps growing with you. Write speeds are not great with unRAID, although with the addition of a 'cache' drive, that's improved. (The cache drive is not a part of the array, but data written to the cache drive is copied into the array at a scheduled time - eg. 3am nightly or whatever) so it improves write performance.

Let us know if you have more specific questions we haven't covered.

hehe299792458

06-05-08, 01:21 PM

rebkell

06-05-08, 01:38 PM

From my understanding, if the parity drive is 1TB, I can't add drives larger than that, right?

I think you can add them, but it will swap the parity over to the largest drive, not sure how automated the process is, but you can add larger drives, but the largest drive will always be the parity drive from my understanding.

nightfly13

06-05-08, 01:39 PM

From my understanding, if the parity drive is 1TB, I can't add drives larger than that, right?

That is correct. Say there were 1.5TB drives, you'd buy 1 (or 2) of those and make that the parity - and the 1TB former-parity becomes a new data drive. Highly preferable to buying 6x1.5Tb drives with a RAID5 solution :)

hehe299792458

06-05-08, 01:52 PM

That is correct. Say there were 1.5TB drives, you'd buy 1 (or 2) of those and make that the parity - and the 1TB former-parity becomes a new data drive. Highly preferable to buying 6x1.5Tb drives with a RAID5 solution :)

I think you can add them, but it will swap the parity over to the largest drive, not sure how automated the process is, but you can add larger drives, but the largest drive will always be the parity drive from my understanding.

Wow! You two are quick! Thanks for the prompt replies

Anyhow, with regards to the benefits of unRAID over RAID5 - they seem to be more about future expansion than anything else, correct? Speed isn't really a concern for me since I'm just using this as a media & file storage server. As long as it can get above 15mb/s, I'm quite happy.

nightfly13

06-05-08, 02:56 PM

I'd agree that the prime benefits of unRAID are certainly about future expansion flexibility. If you were just looking for today, or silly enough to think "5TB is all I'll EVER need" then I'd say go RAID5. Or if you're building it for a company to that spec or something then yeah.

The other advantage of unRAID is that in the super-unlikely event of 2 simultaneous disk failures, you only lose the data on failed disks, not the whole array, like you would with RAID5. Frankly, to me that's like saying 'unRAID only partially burns when struck by lightning' and not a super-strong selling point :)

kapone

06-05-08, 03:05 PM

I thought of moving to UnRaid for my server a while back...until I realized my needs would grow very quickly. When I was considering it, had 12 drives, 2 months later (and at present) have 30 drives (26TB total). Can't use UnRaid.:(

rebkell

06-05-08, 03:18 PM

J. L.

06-05-08, 03:21 PM

I think you can add them, but it will swap the parity over to the largest drive, not sure how automated the process is, but you can add larger drives, but the largest drive will always be the parity drive from my understanding.The process is fairly automated. To replace the parity drive with one that is larger is very easy. You simply replace the parity drive and the unRAID software will write new parity content to the newer drive. It is perfectly OK to have a parity drive that is larger than any of your data drives, so when you finally see a great deal on that 2TB drive, but are limited to 1 per household, go for it and put it in the parity slot in the array. (It can be in any physical slot or controller since the drives are logically assigned on a "Drvices" drive-assignment page.) The parity drive must be AS LARGE, or LARGER than any data drive. It is perfectly OK to have all your drives exactly the same size as the parity drive.

To replace a data drive, regardless of the reason, either to upgrade to a larger drive, or if the existing drive has failed, simply replace it with a drive as big, or bigger and start the array. It will notice the new drive and ask that you check a checkbox to confirm you want to use the new disk. Once checked, and the "Start" button is pressed, it will rebuild the contents to the new drive. If the new drive is also larger than the parity drive it will not allow the array to start and will recommend a "parity-swap." To do this, take your existing parity drive and assign it to the data drive's logical position in the array, and assign the new larger drive as the parity drive and then start the array once more. (basically, you swapped the two drives... logically on the Devices assignments page)

It will first copy the parity data from the old parity drive (now in the data drive location) to the new parity drive, and then it will use the new parity drive in combination with your other data drives to rebuild the data on the old parity drive now reallocated as a data drive. This process is exactly the same regardless if the data drive is being upgraded, or if it is being replaced because it has failed.

All you need to do is the physical installation of the new drive, and re-assign the drives to their logical roles as appropriate. The rest is automatic. For most of the data rebuild operation, the array is available and still on-line. I did exactly what I described several months ago when I was able to get a 750Gig drive for under $100 on sale. It replaced my existing 500gig parity drive. Soon after, a 250Gig data drive was replaced with a second 750Gig drive. I can keep replacing drives as I need, and as I find them on sale, as long as I have someplace to plug them in. (current limit is 15 data drives, 1 parity drive)

Joe L.

fitbrit

06-05-08, 03:26 PM

Snipped a lot of great stuff. Thanks Joe L, as I'm soon about to get a 1 TB drive to replace the 750 GB parity. Now I know what to do.
Also, don't forget to mention that new cache drive capability too. :)

(current limit is 15 data drives, 1 parity drive)

Joe L.

kapone

06-05-08, 03:46 PM

So, what is your solution, what are you using with the 30 drives?

Right now, Windows Server 2008 software RAID using Silicon Image cards, probably move to Linux soon.

hehe299792458

06-06-08, 02:05 AM

Since unRAID is basically a modified software RAID driver, there's no need for hardware RAID cards, right?

ReneV

06-06-08, 04:05 AM

The other advantage of unRAID is that in the super-unlikely event of 2 simultaneous disk failures, you only lose the data on failed disks, not the whole array, like you would with RAID5. Frankly, to me that's like saying 'unRAID only partially burns when struck by lightning' and not a super-strong selling point :)

To me, that sealed the deal in favour of unRAID. In fact, I'm not sure whether I prefer RAID5 or JBOD: is the slighter danger of total data loss better than guaranteed loss of only some data? I honestly can't say.

J. L.

06-06-08, 04:18 AM

Since unRAID is basically a modified software RAID driver, there's no need for hardware RAID cards, right?Right.

hehe299792458

06-06-08, 04:21 AM

To me, that sealed the deal in favour of unRAID. In fact, I'm not sure whether I prefer RAID5 or JBOD: is the slighter danger of total data loss better than guaranteed loss of only some data? I honestly can't say.

seriously, what's the chance of two drives failing simultaneously or one failing while the other is being rebuilt? It's probably like being struck by lighting twice a day.

Could unRAID use non-SATA drives - ie USB, Firewire, eSata? Probably not, but this is, in my opinion, one of the best feature of drive extender on WHS. Since it uses software RAID, what kind of processor should I get? I'm looking at the E8200.

ReneV

06-06-08, 05:04 AM

seriously, what's the chance of two drives failing simultaneously or one failing while the other is being rebuilt?

Point is: there is a chance, and the result would be much worse on RAID5 than on unRAID or JBOD.

Could unRAID use non-SATA drives - ie USB, Firewire, eSata?

eSATA certainly works. (Of course, eSATA only differs from SATA on physical issues, with their appearance being equal probably as low down as at the BIOS level.)

hehe299792458

06-06-08, 11:51 PM

Point is: there is a chance, and the result would be much worse on RAID5 than on unRAID or JBOD.

eSATA certainly works. (Of course, eSATA only differs from SATA on physical issues, with their appearance being equal probably as low down as at the BIOS level.)

To me, the overriding benefit of unRAID over RAID 5 is easy expandability. Nothing else really matters. So, what CPU should I get for unRAID. I understand software RAID takes a lot of processing power

I. M. Fletcher

06-06-08, 11:58 PM

Unraid has very low system requirements. Check out the Unraid forums for current configurations that people are running. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

J. L.

06-07-08, 06:20 AM

Unraid has very low system requirements. Check out the Unraid forums for current configurations that people are running. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.phpAnother good place to look is in the wiki: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php

The hardware compatibility page in the wiki says 2.0 Ghz or higher will do:
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware_Compatibility#Motherboard

Most critical to best performance is to get a motherboard that keeps network and disk IO off of the PCI bus. Best if disk I/O can be on PCI Express bus instead.

Joe L.

hehe299792458

06-07-08, 06:35 AM

Another good place to look is in the wiki: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php

The hardware compatibility page in the wiki says 2.0 Ghz or higher will do:
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware_Compatibility#Motherboard

Most critical to best performance is to get a motherboard that keeps network and disk IO off of the PCI bus. Best if disk I/O can be on PCI Express bus instead.

Joe L.

How about this?

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30295&vpn=P5Q&manufacture=ASUS

J. L.

06-07-08, 09:14 AM

How about this?

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30295&vpn=P5Q&manufacture=ASUS
Here is another post, specifically addressing what you should be looking for in a motherboard:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2024.msg14679#msg14679

Joe L.

rebkell

06-07-08, 11:18 AM

Billped

06-07-08, 11:44 AM

Try rebooting.

If the flash is dead, your system will probably work until you reboot or power cycle. Then it won't work.

J. L.

06-07-08, 11:59 AM

I have a question, I've been running Unraid for two or three months and it's been doing fine. I happened to notice that the glowing red light on my Sandisk Cruzer Micro Flash USB drive is off, it's always been on. I can still use the Unraid server, I've written and read from it and it seems to be working fine.

But, I can't figure out why the light is off the Flash Drive, will the Unraid server run if the Flash dies? Is everything loaded up in memory on boot and the flash isn't in use? Anyone know, I guess the light could have just failed on the USB flash drive and that everything is ok, dunno. Anybody know the answer?If you have written to and read from the flash drive, the odds are it is just the light that either has been turned off somehow, or has failed.

A reboot "might" turn it back on, if not, a "power-down/power up" might. In either case, the light really does not matter as long as the drive itself is good.

Joe L.

rebkell

06-07-08, 01:19 PM

J. L.

06-07-08, 01:29 PM

Well, the reboot didn't work. I tried reboot, lost contact with the server, finally went over and turned it off manually. Then turned it back on and the Flash Drive light lit up, I'm not sure what was going on, it's rebuilding parity now, which it wouldn't have to do with a clean shutdown or reboot I assume??

I don't feel too warm and fuzzy about this Flash Drive, I guess I need to get a hot spare. I'm still using the free version of Unraid, I only have one data and one parity drive currently. I assume I can just build another flash boot drive and put it in and that I can give it the needed info about which drive is which and be back in business. I made a printout of all my screens so I should have all the info I need for the drives as to which is which, etc...just copy the contents of the config folder to the new drive and all your settings will be there already. Do this AFTER you stop the array, otherwise, the "dirty" flag in system.dat will not indicate a clean shutdown, and you will be calculating parity again when you boot up on the new flash drive.

If you stop the array and then copy the config folder, you can easily migrate to a different flash drive. Also, make sure your bios options are set to not remove power to the usb ports... (might be what caused your original issue)

Joe L.

rebkell

06-07-08, 01:36 PM

just copy the contents of the config folder to the new drive and all your settings will be there already. Do this AFTER you stop the array, otherwise, the "dirty" flag in system.dat will not indicate a clean shutdown, and you will be calculating parity again when you boot up on the new flash drive.

If you stop the array and then copy the config folder, you can easily migrate to a different flash drive. Also, make sure your bios options are set to not remove power to the usb ports... (might be what caused your original issue)

Joe L.

I doubt the BIOS options are a problem, the machine was up for weeks at a time and the light always stayed on, and of course the Unraid is headless and a pain to access if something goes wrong. I'll try to grab another flash drive tomorrow and try to get a good backup. I may be back asking more questions then :D

Ewingr

06-11-08, 03:35 PM

If I am able to put the USB Flash in, boot, and see the drives through the management software for Unraid, do you think I can assume I am compatible?

I have a 4 year old Gateway, 3ghz box that I did just that on. I'm thinking of converting it to an UNRAID box.

Also, it is a BTX case. I've never heard of a BTX motherboard. Do you recon I can assume an ATX replacement case would work?

[EDIT]
Never mind on the case. I did find that the ATX and BTX is different. On the case i will need to find a BTX case.

fitbrit

06-11-08, 03:49 PM

J. L.

06-11-08, 03:52 PM

If I am able to put the USB Flash in, boot, and see the drives through the management software for Unraid, do you think I can assume I am compatible?Yes. Sounds like it will work.

Does it have a gigabit network interface, if not, that may be an upgrade at some point.

You might also need to put in a bigger power supply at some point, I'll bet that gateway never figured on you installing more than a dozen disk drives :eek:

Might look here for some answers to common questions:
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki

Have fun, check in on the lime-technology forum if you have questions.
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

Joe L.

Ewingr

06-11-08, 06:28 PM

Thanks guys. In fact, I anticipate using the MOBO, but get a new case (room for drives...and I'm finding BTX cases a little harder to find, but they are available), and a new power supply ultimately.

That being said, I think a BTX power supply is different from ATX too.

On the NIC, I'm not sure if it is GB or not. May not be. And on that topic, I'm not sure my house cabling will support GB. When I built the house 12 years ago I put in quality CAT 5 at that time. Oh, and so, I need a new wireless router. Mine is 100, I'm pretty sure.

There's awlays caveats :rolleyes: And working on this stuff is like working on my classic car, which is like pulling a thread :p

Thanks for the point to the WIKI. I've been looking at that some.

Regarding the Lime Tech forum, I signed up, but it said I had to be approved, and have not yet received anything notifying me I can sign in for posting. Usually those things are automatic, but apparently not in this case.

Billped

06-12-08, 01:39 AM

You can add a GigE switch to your network instead of buying a new wireless router. It will likely be cheaper and less of a hassle (plug and play rather than the configuration needed for a router). However, it is another box which means more electricity, wires, etc.

hehe299792458

06-16-08, 09:18 PM

After doing extensive research, I've decided to use unRaid over a hardware-based windows solution for my home server. However, I still have a few lingering questions

1) does anyone know how could I add bittorent capability to the unRAID software?

2) Also, could someone familiarize me with the concept of "Shares"? Can a share be spread across multiple drives? ie I have backed-up a dvd library of 1.3TB, larger than any single drive. Can I put all of that into a single share called "Movies"?

3) What are the chances of data corruption in the event of a power failure?

4) If it shows a HDD has failed, how do I know which one it is? Do I just systematically pull out drives until I get the right one?

5) What format is the drives formatted in? EXT3? ZFS? NTFS (wishful thinking)?

captain_video

06-17-08, 07:49 AM

After doing extensive research, I've decided to use unRaid over a hardware-based windows solution for my home server. However, I still have a few lingering questions

1) does anyone know how could I add bittorent capability to the unRAID software?
I'm not sure I understand what you want to do with this. Are you trying to set it up to allow bittorent seeding or sharing or do you want to be able to download directly to the server?

2) Also, could someone familiarize me with the concept of "Shares"? Can a share be spread across multiple drives? ie I have backed-up a dvd library of 1.3TB, larger than any single drive. Can I put all of that into a single share called "Movies"?
Most definitely. I have seven drives totalling almost 5TB and I have shares set up for DVDs and HD DVDs (includes both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray rips). The files are located across all drives but they only show up as two folders when I map to them. All movies that are part of a specific share show up in a single list. Just set up the share in the unRAID software web interface and create an identical folder on each drive that you want to contain the share. Everything placed inside one of the folders will show up as if all items were placed in a single folder.

3) What are the chances of data corruption in the event of a power failure?
Probably about the same as any other PC. Get yourself a UPS.

4) If it shows a HDD has failed, how do I know which one it is? Do I just systematically pull out drives until I get the right one?
Here's a tip for you - Put a label on each drive as you install it to indicate which drive number is assigned in the unRAID software when you access it via the web page. It makes life a lot easier when you're trying to figure out which drive is which. I'd also recommend putting a label on the SATA or IDE cable as well so you know which drive it connects to.

hehe299792458

06-17-08, 08:09 AM

Thanks for your reply

I'm not sure I understand what you want to do with this. Are you trying to set it up to allow bittorent seeding or sharing or do you want to be able to download directly to the server?
My current NAS, a DLINK DNS-323, has the ability to download torrent direct to the HDD. Right now, I just point to a .torrent file on my computer and the NAS downloads the files in the torrent to its harddrive.

J. L.

06-17-08, 08:22 AM

After doing extensive research, I've decided to use unRaid over a hardware-based windows solution for my home server. However, I still have a few lingering questions

1) does anyone know how could I add bittorent capability to the unRAID software?

Can't help you with that. I'm sure it can be added, as long as a command line version of a bit-torrent client is available, but it will not be simple. unRAID is basically a network storage server. It does not provide a "desktop" on its console. Management of the array is done using a web-based management interface. unRAID is built on a stripped down version of "Slackware Linux" so to add a bit-torrent client you need to find a compatible package and install it. To my knowledge, nobody has done that.

2) Also, could someone familiarize me with the concept of "Shares"? Can a share be spread across multiple drives? ie I have backed-up a dvd library of 1.3TB, larger than any single drive. Can I put all of that into a single share called "Movies"?

A "Share" is a shared drive, available on the network. There are two types, "disk shares" (each representing a specific physical data disk in the array) and "user shares" (each representing the merged contents of similarly named top level folders on your disks) I've got 10 physical data drives. The "disk" shares I've configured to be read/write, but hidden. They do not show up in Windows file-explorrer, but can be accessed if you know the path to them.
You can have as many "User Shares" as you like (within reason, as the emulated directory tree is in memory and windows will probably choke if presented with over 10 or so shared folders from a given server.

My "User shares" are for "Movies, Music, Pictures, and Data" The "Movies" share has about 4TB of ISO images of my DVD collection, spanning all 10 drives, but presented as if it is a single drive to my media players. I usually have it as "Read-Only" and do my DVD ripping to one of the disk shares. The "Data" drive is hidden, so the media players do not show it in their file browsers. It is used to do backups of the other PCs on my LAN.

3) What are the chances of data corruption in the event of a power failure?

Probably a bit better than your PC,because it uses journaling file-systems, but you probably want to have a UPS, to prevent a long verification of parity if the array is not cleanly shut down before a power down.

4) If it shows a HDD has failed, how do I know which one it is? Do I just systematically pull out drives until I get the right one?

The management page tracks the disks by model/serial number. A failed drive will have a "red" icon next to it on the management web-page. You simply need to match the model/serial number.

5) What format is the drives formatted in? EXT3? ZFS? NTFS (wishful thinking)?
unRAID uses Reiserfs file system.

Many more questions might be answered by reading through the unRAID wiki http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki It has two sections, the official documentation (http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Official_Documentation), and the user-contributed content. (http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Unofficial_Documentation) Both will be interesting reading for potential users.

Joe L.

captain_video

06-17-08, 08:39 AM

Thanks for your reply

My current NAS, a DLINK DNS-323, has the ability to download torrent direct to the HDD. Right now, I just point to a .torrent file on my computer and the NAS downloads the files in the torrent to its harddrive.

If you just want to download it then you shouldn't have a problem. Just set up the location as the default location and it should be able to download it using the BT client on your PC and then deposit it on the unRAID server over your home network. You would probably just need to set up a directory for it unless you'd prefer to dump it in the root directory of one of the drives.

captain_video

06-17-08, 08:42 AM

The management page tracks the disks by model/serial number. A failed drive will have a "red" icon next to it on the management web-page. You simply need to match the model/serial number.

The only problem here is that this data is usually printed on a label that's hidden by the mounting brackets when installed in a rack, hence my suggestion for putting a label in the drive that can be easily seen. I've already had to deal with this issue so I decided to start putting labels on the end of the drives where the cables connect so I could easily compare the drive number on the unRAID screen to the actual drive in the case. This can definitely be an issue if you decide to use an SATA backplane that requires each drive be installed in a removable enclosure. The only way to read the model and serial number would be to remove the drive from the rack and open the enclosure. It's far easier to simply place a small sticky label on the drive or enclosure for easy identification.

hehe299792458

06-17-08, 09:15 AM

thanks for all of your replies. I just have 4 more questions:

1) Do I need a display during installation? I currently ordered the Asus P5Q mobo and it doesn't have a VGA port.

2) Is the Asus P5Q mobo compatible? It's not mentioned either way in the unRaid wikis and forums.

3) Why does it say 4GB of RAM is only supported on the beta versions? What happens if I install 4GB on a current stable ver?

4) Will I receive updates after I buy the software? If not, does anyone know whether it is about to release a major upgrade anytime soon?

Thanks

captain_video

06-17-08, 10:43 AM

thanks for all of your replies. I just have 4 more questions:

1) Do I need a display during installation? I currently ordered the Asus P5Q mobo and it doesn't have a VGA port.
It's probably not absolutely necessary but it is the only way to make sure everything has booted properly. If it does boot OK then you will eventually be able to connect via your web browser. If it doesn't boot correctly then you will need the monitor to see what's happening. Once you've made sure it can boot up you can disconnect the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Just plug in any old graphics card that will fit one of your available slots if your mobo doesn't have onboard graphics.

2) Is the Asus P5Q mobo compatible? It's not mentioned either way in the unRaid wikis and forums.
Can't say for sure. Your best bet is to check the forums to see if anyone has tried it. If there's no mention of it having ever been tried then I'd steer clear of it and stick with a motherboard that has been tested and proven to work.

3) Why does it say 4GB of RAM is only supported on the beta versions? What happens if I install 4GB on a current stable ver?
Probably for the same reason Vista won't recognize 4GB unless you're using the 64-bit version. Chances are it will only recognize part of the 4GB and not all of it. Besides, you don't need 4GB of RAM so why spend the extra money if you don't have to?

I receive updates after I buy the software? If not, does anyone know whether it is about to release a major upgrade anytime soon?

Thanks
Upgrades are free for download. Just download the latest version. You only need to copy a couple of files over to the flash drive to install the update. I don't recall which ones they are off the top of my head but I'm sure it's mentioned in the forum somewhere. I'm still using the same version I installed about five months ago. My setup is working fine so I never saw the need to screw with it by installing an update that probably wouldn't do anything for me. IIRC, updates are usually designed to add more compatibility with current hardware. If your setup works then there's probably no need to add compatibility with hardware you don't have installed. Should you ever feel the need to upgrade any of the hardware then that would probably be the time to upgrade the unRAID software as well.

J. L.

06-17-08, 11:31 AM

Upgrades are free for download. Just download the latest version. You only need to copy a couple of files over to the flash drive to install the update. I don't recall which ones they are off the top of my head but I'm sure it's mentioned in the forum somewhere. I'm still using the same version I installed about five months ago. My setup is working fine so I never saw the need to screw with it by installing an update that probably wouldn't do anything for me. IIRC, updates are usually designed to add more compatibility with current hardware. If your setup works then there's probably no need to add compatibility with hardware you don't have installed. Should you ever feel the need to upgrade any of the hardware then that would probably be the time to upgrade the unRAID software as well.During the past 5 months there was a critical bug fixed in how the "parity swap" process worked. That process is used when you wait to replace a failed data drive, but the replacement drive is bigger than their existing parity drive. It was discovered because the person found a great buy on a disk much larger than the ones currently in the array and buying the smaller size drive would have been more expensive. The bug in the parity swap process prevented somebody from replacing a failed data drive with a drive bigger than their existing parity drive. The bug has probably been there since the major re-write of code dealing with SATA drives occurred. (I don't know when it was initially introduced)

Depending on the version of unRAID you are running, you might have this same problem. Since it will only affect you if you attempt to replace a disk that has failed, you would not notice it as an issue until it is too late. (you have a failed disk, and the one you already purchased as a replacement is bigger than your parity disk)

I would strongly suggest you upgrade to the 4.3.1 version just released this week. The odds you you finding a great sale on a new disk is very high. The odds of it being bigger than any of your existing data drive also high. If you have to wait to learn a critical bug was discovered and corrected, it will be too late to easily help.

Joe L.

J. L.

06-17-08, 11:51 AM

thanks for all of your replies. I just have 4 more questions:

1) Do I need a display during installation? I currently ordered the Asus P5Q mobo and it doesn't have a VGA port.

You will probably need a monitor to set the bios options to use the flash drive as the boot device. Any video card will do... an old PCI card will be perfect and it can be removed afterwords IF the motherboard will boot without it. (Some will not boot without a video card installed)

2) Is the Asus P5Q mobo compatible? It's not mentioned either way in the unRaid wikis and forums.
There are so many different motherboards out there. What is important are:
Can it boot from a USB flash drive?
If it has an embedded LAN port, is the chipset supported by the drivers included in the unRAID distribution. (You want your potential motherboard to use one of the same chipsets as those listed on the page describing hardware known to work)
Are the disk controller chipsets supported? This is mostly for SATA support. Odds are in your favor, but if your board used some unusual chipset, it might not work.
Less important, but desired is to have the bulk of the I/O not be on the PCI bus. It might be a bottleneck if it is. Try to have get a motherboard with BOTH LAN traffic and DISK I/O traffic from the on-board controllers are not on the PCI bus.

If the motherboard boots from the flash drive, can connect to to the network, and can see your hard disks then it is compatible, even if not on the lime-tech page describing known hardware that works.

3) Why does it say 4GB of RAM is only supported on the beta versions? What happens if I install 4GB on a current stable ver?

The support for 4G of ram is in the current final release 4.3.1. You must be reading an older thread when it was initially introduced in a beta release.
As already described, unRAID only needs 512 meg to run. Unless you have it handy, or expect to do other tasks on the same hardware in the future, the extra ram is not going to make much difference. I'd go with 1 or 2 Gig, as it is a good price-point these days.

4) Will I receive updates after I buy the software? If not, does anyone know whether it is about to release a major upgrade anytime soon?
Thanks
Updates are announced on the unRAID support site and may be downloaded from there. There is no charge for the update to a new release.

Do not confuse a release update (free for download) with an upgrade of the "license." There is a charge to upgrade from the "free" version supporting 3 hard disks to the "Plus" version (6 disks) or "Pro" versions (15 disks). Two features (user-share based security, and an extra "cache" drive) are not available on the "free" version.

The most recent release was this week. It is 4.3.1. (Is that soon enough?)

Joe L.

rebkell

06-17-08, 12:43 PM

(Some will not boot without an attached monitor)

I assume you meant video card, I think most machines will boot without a monitor attached.

J. L.

06-17-08, 12:55 PM

I assume you meant video card, I think most machines will boot without a monitor attached.
true.

captain_video

06-17-08, 04:15 PM

During the past 5 months there was a critical bug fixed in how the "parity swap" process worked. That process is used when you wait to replace a failed data drive, but the replacement drive is bigger than their existing parity drive. It was discovered because the person found a great buy on a disk much larger than the ones currently in the array and buying the smaller size drive would have been more expensive. The bug in the parity swap process prevented somebody from replacing a failed data drive with a drive bigger than their existing parity drive. The bug has probably been there since the major re-write of code dealing with SATA drives occurred. (I don't know when it was initially introduced)

Depending on the version of unRAID you are running, you might have this same problem. Since it will only affect you if you attempt to replace a disk that has failed, you would not notice it as an issue until it is too late. (you have a failed disk, and the one you already purchased as a replacement is bigger than your parity disk)

I would strongly suggest you upgrade to the 4.3.1 version just released this week. The odds you you finding a great sale on a new disk is very high. The odds of it being bigger than any of your existing data drive also high. If you have to wait to learn a critical bug was discovered and corrected, it will be too late to easily help.

Joe L.
Thanks for the info about the update, Joe. I'll definitely check it out.

hehe299792458

06-19-08, 07:50 AM

J. L.

06-19-08, 08:25 AM

I wanted to try unraid before I made my decision, but I can't seem to get it working on any of my machine. I followed the instructions in the website exactly - downloaded syslinux.exe to c:\; formatted my drive with FAT32 and named it UNRAID; use the command to run syslinux; safely removed the drive; etc. I just won't boot. I repeated the process several times and tried it on different computers. Any suggestions? I'm sure all these computers can boot into USB because I've tried before
More detailed instructions on how to load the USB flash drive are here in the wiki : http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=USB_Flash_Drive_Preparation

In most cases, the use of the "-ma" option to syslinux is the answer, as many flash drives do not come with the master boot record populated, or do not have it marked as "bootable"

For others, the use of the HP formatting tool will make the flash drive bootable. For the flash drive I used, I needed both the HP tool and the -ma option to syslinux.

Recently, a user described how a newer version of syslinux was needed to boot one motherboard. (the details in the wiki describe this too)

A lot has to do with the bios on the motherboard involved.

The unRAID wiki has two types of content:
The "Official Content" here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Official_Documentation

And "User Contributed Content" written by users of the software here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Unofficial_Documentation

In many cases, the "User-Contributed-Content" section will have the answers to a lot of your questions.

Joe L.

captain_video

06-19-08, 08:26 AM

I wanted to try unraid before I made my decision, but I can't seem to get it working on any of my machine. I followed the instructions in the website exactly - downloaded syslinux.exe to c:\; formatted my drive with FAT32 and named it UNRAID; use the command to run syslinux; safely removed the drive; etc. I just won't boot. I repeated the process several times and tried it on different computers. Any suggestions? I'm sure all these computers can boot into USB because I've tried before
The flash drive you use is very important as you can't use just any flash drive. I used one from the recommended list and still had problems getting it to boot until I reformatted the flash drive using the HP flash drive formatting utility. Here's a link for it:

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197

Also, when you run the syslinux.exe program you may want to add the "-ma" switch to the command line.

FYI - I just upgraded to 4.3.1 two days ago and everything is up and running fine as far as I can tell. All I had to do was replace the bzimage and bzroot files on the flash drive with the latest files included in the new release. I already had the flash drive mapped to my main PC so it was a simple task to swap them out remotely. Then, all I had to do was stop the array and reboot it. The instructions for performing the upgrade are included in the readme file located in the zip file for the software update. I had previously been running version 4.2.1 and didn't realize that there were several releases since I first installed it so now I'm current with the latest version.

replayrob

06-19-08, 11:23 AM

The flash drive you use is very important as you can't use just any flash drive. I used one from the recommended list and still had problems getting it to boot until I reformatted the flash drive using the HP flash drive formatting utility.
+1
I found that the smaller (512MB or 1GB) drives seem to work and the larger 2/4/8GB drives are hit and miss when it comes to booting up. Last time I was at Staples they had the 1GB Lexar Firefly drives at the checkout counter for $9.99- I picked up a couple of them- they work perfectly in three different mother boards I tried for UnRaid and freeNAS boot devices.
http://www.antonline.com/p_Lexar-Media-Inc--JDFF1GB-431--Lexar-1-GB-JumpDrive-FireFly-USB-Flash-Drive-(-JDFF1GB-431-)-_238023.htm

J. L.

06-19-08, 02:49 PM

+1
I found that the smaller (512MB or 1GB) drives seem to work and the larger 2/4/8GB drives are hit and miss when it comes to booting up. Last time I was at Staples they had the 1GB Lexar Firefly drives at the checkout counter for $9.99- I picked up a couple of them- they work perfectly in three different mother boards I tried for UnRaid and freeNAS boot devices.
http://www.antonline.com/p_Lexar-Media-Inc--JDFF1GB-431--Lexar-1-GB-JumpDrive-FireFly-USB-Flash-Drive-(-JDFF1GB-431-)-_238023.htmI think the underlying reason is that when the BIOS's of a lot of motherboards was written, the larger flash drives that are cheap today did not exist. Even the 512 Meg were huge back a few years ago, and expensive too.

On my Original Intel motherboard, I could boot the original 128 Meg flash drive I purchased from Lime-Tech, but once I had over 64 Meg of files on it, it failed until Tom at lime-tech issued a fix to the GRUB boot loader he was using at the time. (In other words, my original BIOS could access the first 64 Meg, but not anything bigger! Today, I don't even think you can buy a 64 Meg USB flash drive.)

The Sandisk 1 Gig flash drives I replaced it with when version 3.0 of unRAID came out would not boot unless they were formatted with the HP tool to look like a hard-disk's geometry, and I used syslinux -ma to add an MBR and mark the partition as active. (Until I used the -ma option, it would boot on my laptop, but not on the unRAID server's BIOS. Apparently, it did not care.)

All kinds of fun...

Joe L.

hehe299792458

06-19-08, 07:56 PM

thanks a lot guys! The -ma command worked like a charm. Now, I definitely know why unraid is so great. However, the lack of printer server and ********** downloading capability are really big problems for me. I'd rather not run another Ubuntu or Xp computer just to get those features.... I'll have to work something out soon.... any suggestions?

EDIT: I just noticed that DLINK release an updates firmware for my NAS (DNS-323) which allows me to download torrent files. YEAH! Now, if I could only get the printer server on the NAS to work too.

kapone

06-19-08, 08:05 PM

Get a VMware license (not that expensive) and virtualize your "server". Then you can run unraid and another Linux or even Windows O/S at the same time as Unraid.

Geordon

06-19-08, 09:20 PM

Get a VMware license (not that expensive) and virtualize your "server". Then you can run unraid and another Linux or even Windows O/S at the same time as Unraid.

I think they are actually free. Can't get less expensive than that.

J. L.

06-19-08, 10:07 PM

People are already running unRAID under both VirtualBox and VMWare. Check out some of the threads on the lime-technology support forum. Others are working to compile VmWare to run on the unRAID server, to run windows.

unRAID is basically a stripped down version of Linux based on Slackware, but with a custom version of the multi-device driver. Source code is supplied for the md driver (under GPL), but not for the management utility (it is not GPL).

You can compile a custom kernel or add in any packages you desire. It might take some work, but it is very possible. It certainly is more customizable than most off-the-shelf network storage boxes. Yes, you need to install the packages for the compiler and support libraries, but most pre-compiled Slackware packages will work.

Joe L.

hehe299792458

06-19-08, 10:08 PM

Get a VMware license (not that expensive) and virtualize your "server". Then you can run unraid and another Linux or even Windows O/S at the same time as Unraid.

I can't do that, can I? How would that work? Also, I just installed on one of my computers, but it can't see any of my drives. I have 5 Seagate drives plugged into the mobo (Asus P5Q)

hehe299792458

06-21-08, 01:43 AM

anyone?

hehe299792458

06-21-08, 05:25 PM

bump

J. L.

06-21-08, 08:19 PM

bumpAre you still talking about VMware? Or did you install unRAID on its own server?

Assuming the latter, you go to the "Devices" page http://tower/devices.htm and assign disks to the logical slots on the array.

Be aware: unless the disks are already formatted as reiserFS, they will be cleared and re-formatted, so do not assign your precious disks with their original data. You do not need to assign a parity disk, but you will be running un-protected against disk failures until you do assign one.

If you are using the free version of unRAID, you will be limited to assigning three drives.

For any other assistance, best to post in the lime-technology forum http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php and not here. Also a good idea to attach a copy of your syslog. Instructions on how are in the wiki: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki

Joe L.

hehe299792458

06-22-08, 08:28 PM

Are you still talking about VMware? Or did you install unRAID on its own server?

Assuming the latter, you go to the "Devices" page http://tower/devices.htm and assign disks to the logical slots on the array.

Be aware: unless the disks are already formatted as reiserFS, they will be cleared and re-formatted, so do not assign your precious disks with their original data. You do not need to assign a parity disk, but you will be running un-protected against disk failures until you do assign one.

If you are using the free version of unRAID, you will be limited to assigning three drives.

For any other assistance, best to post in the lime-technology forum http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php and not here. Also a good idea to attach a copy of your syslog. Instructions on how are in the wiki: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki

Joe L.

Yes, I did install the actual (free) version to unraid to test it before I buy. However, when I do go to the devices page, and click the drop-down menu, there are no drives. None are listed there.

J. L.

06-22-08, 08:59 PM

Yes, I did install the actual (free) version to unraid to test it before I buy. However, when I do go to the devices page, and click the drop-down menu, there are no drives. None are listed there.Did you do this on real hardware? Or under VmWare?

Joe L.

hehe299792458

06-22-08, 09:24 PM

Did you do this on real hardware? Or under VmWare?

Joe L.

real hardware

fitbrit

06-23-08, 11:47 AM

real hardware

I'm not sure whether you even have this option if unRAID doesn't see any drives currently, but make sure your array is stopped on the main page before you go to devices.

J. L.

06-23-08, 01:04 PM

real hardwareIf the drives are seen by the BIOS, then it might indicate the disk controller is not supported. If the drives are not seen by the BIOS, then nothing will see them.

Only way to know for certain is for you to post a syslog. Instructions in the wiki: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting

As already described, the array must be stopped to make drive assignments, but if you have no disks assigned, I have no idea if you could even start the array if you tried.

Joe L.

bigbud120

06-26-08, 01:48 AM

lanstrom

06-26-08, 05:30 AM

No problems here although I did read through quite a few threads to make sure I knew what to buy first.

The only components I needed to actually purchase to get unRAID running was :

USB Drive - Lexar Firefly
4 port SATA PCI Card (Promise TX4)
Gigabit NIC (DLink - cant remember model number at moment).

Rest of hardware (Mobo, Processor & RAM) was just spare stuff I had lying around.

No problems with it at all now although the first mobo I tried did not support booting off USB and the kicker disks wouldnt work either but it was REALLY old.

BCDouglas

06-26-08, 08:46 AM

electr0n

06-26-08, 02:29 PM

No problems for me - but I did read the forums to see what boards were supported.

I'm using the P5B-VM DO (now discontinued) and haven't had any problems at all - running 6 drives right now.

Stiltz

06-26-08, 06:14 PM

I'm looking for someone to split a 2 pack Pro for $149. (~$75 each)

PM me if interested

JoshDorhyke

06-26-08, 11:09 PM

Over on the UnRaid forums a lot of people are reporting poor performance or no performance at all due to hardware problems. UnRaid has such a small hardware compatibility list, so I wanted to find out whether people on AVS who have used UnRaid ran into difficulties due to hardware?

Didn't have any issues here. running a ECS A740GM-M motherboard, BE-2350 processor and 2gig memory. Installed 2 500gig drives to test (data and parity) and was getting 75% network utilization writing and 85% network utilization reading over my 100Mbps network moving some large test files.

Remember that on a public forum you will mostly hear questions and problems. People don't go looking for answers when things are working for them.

I'd just like to know if windows XP reports network utilization accurately in the task manager. I was moving a large file to test speed and the speed was almost flat line and more than I expected. I had the task manager set to the high refresh.

Peter

BLKMGK

06-27-08, 10:25 PM

Write performance is slower with unRAID, read performance is as good as a Windows server. I do not know where you are seeing so many issues with unRAID but there are tons of people using it with no issues. The compatibility list hasn't been kept up to date as hardware changes constantly but I had no issues with my two servers simply asking and figuring out what to use. I have the original Intel board and an Asus P5 VDM blah blah board. One IDE, one SATA - something like 7+TB or so, one been running for years and the other at least a year. <shrug> Peaking out a 100mb connection doesn't surprise me, move to Gigabit and you'll see the valleys etc. when writing. Not tried the new trick with the cache drive though.

J. L.

06-28-08, 07:46 AM

The motherboard compatibility list was more important in 2005 when unRAID was first introduced. At that time, many BIOS could not boot from a USB flash drive. Today, that is not much of an issue.

You basically have three hurdles in getting an unRAID server running.

Can it boot from a USB flash drive?
Is the IDE/SATA controller supported, so the Linux will see the disks?
Is the network chipset supported?

In the past three years, the transition from IDE to SATA drives has occurred. As new chipsets for this were developed for Slackware Linux, they were added to unRAID. I have not read of anybody having difficulty with their disk drives unless they set their bios options wrong. (During the IDE - SATA transition some BIOS had options to put an SATA drive in PIO emulated IDE mode. (read slow)) IDE disks are never a problem unless you use round cables (they do not meet IDE specs for high speed use)

A slightly bigger issue to some, is if the embedded network chipset on the motherboard is supported. There are thousands of 10 and 100 Mb LAN comntroller chipsets. unRAID does not include drivers for many of them to keep the size of the distribution reasonibly small. It does include network drivers for just about all the 1000Mb/s chipsets and a handfull of the more common 100Mb chipsets. Some people who use an older motherboard add an up-to-date network card, both to get faster speed, and/or compatibility.

As of today, there is one network chipset driver that has been identified that will be included in the next release (due out any day). If you happen to be in that situation, using a motherboard that uses the SIS900 network controller, you can always add an inexpensive network card that has a chipset that is supported at 1000Mb speed, or wait a few more days.

If you want to do a little bit of investigation on proposed hardware, use Google to see what kernel driver it uses and then look in the following listing. It shows the kernel driver modules in the current 4.3.1 release of unRAID.

root@Tower:/lib/modules/2.6.24.4-unRAID# ls -R
.:
build@ modules.alias modules.dep modules.inputmap modules.ofmap modules.seriomap modules.usbmap
kernel/ modules.ccwmap modules.ieee1394map modules.isapnpmap modules.pcimap modules.symbols source@

./kernel:
drivers/ fs/ lib/

./kernel/drivers:
ata/ ide/ md/ net/ scsi/

./kernel/drivers/ata:
ahci.ko libata.ko pata_sis.ko sata_nv.ko sata_sil.ko sata_sis.ko sata_uli.ko
ata_piix.ko pata_jmicron.ko sata_mv.ko sata_promise.ko sata_sil24.ko sata_svw.ko sata_via.ko

./kernel/drivers/ide:
ide-core.ko ide-disk.ko ide-generic.ko pci/

./kernel/drivers/ide/pci:
aec62xx.ko amd74xx.ko cmd64x.ko cs5535.ko hpt366.ko jmicron.ko pdc202xx_old.ko siimage.ko via82cxxx.ko
alim15x3.ko atiixp.ko cs5530.ko hpt34x.ko it821x.ko pdc202xx_new.ko piix.ko sis5513.ko

./kernel/drivers/net:
8139cp.ko bnx2.ko e100.ko mii.ko r8169.ko skge.ko tg3.ko via-velocity.ko 8139too.ko b44.ko dl2k.ko forcedeth.ko ns83820.ko sis190.ko sky2.ko via-rhine.ko

./kernel/drivers/net/atl1: atl1.ko

./kernel/drivers/net/e1000: e1000.ko

./kernel/drivers/net/e1000e: e1000e.ko

./kernel/drivers/scsi: scsi_wait_scan.ko

./kernel/fs/fuse: fuse.ko

Joe L.

greggplummer

06-30-08, 11:26 AM

Over on the UnRaid forums a lot of people are reporting poor performance or no performance at all due to hardware problems. UnRaid has such a small hardware compatibility list, so I wanted to find out whether people on AVS who have used UnRaid ran into difficulties due to hardware?

I'm one of those people that reported hardware problems over on the unRAID forums. It turned out that my Crucial Ballistix 2G kit, that was recommended here on AVSforum in the big GUIDE thread (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=940972), requires a higher operating voltage than normal. After resolving this problem, I have been very satisfied with the stability and performance of unRAID.

The mobo I am using is the Abit AB9 Pro.

Anyhow, this solution has worked out well for me so far. Whenever I run into problems, I will post a question on the unRAID forums and the experienced and knowledgeable users always help me find my way through...

captain_video

06-30-08, 01:22 PM

The only hardware issue I've ever had was getting my flash drive to boot up. Once I got it formatted with the HP flash drive utility and used the -ma switch with the syslinux.exe program it worked like a charm.

Ewingr

06-30-08, 04:54 PM

...there are no drives. None are listed there.

When I first booted mine it didn't see teh drives. I went back into the Bios and set the drives to be ACPI and that fixed my problem.

mrtwstr

07-19-08, 05:56 PM

rebkell

07-19-08, 06:50 PM

Ok... got an odd one. My unRaid has been powered down for months now. It is a REALLY old build (one of the originals) but what the heck, it never gave me issues. Anyway, I finally added it back and booted it up. Everything seems to load correctly, but I can't find it on the network. Since I shut it down I changed routers (and IP schemes) and I have a suspicion that I must have hard-coded my IP settings at some point to the old gateway, DNS, etc; Sooo... how the heck do I change them? I don't know enough Linux to do it :) Or am I off base?

Thanks!

I don't know the official way, but I suppose you can log in to the linux box as root, no password required, and type in ifconfig on the command line and it will report back your ip address ...that will at least tell you the address of the box, if it's on a different network than your current setup, you could probably change one of your windows machines temporarily to be on the same subnet as the unraid box and then access it directly with the address

http://192.168.1.103/settings.htm (<- whatever address the unraid is) and go into the settings page of the unraid box and change the ip and gateway addresses to match your current network setup. As soon as you click apply you'll probably lose touch via your changed windows box, because the tower will be on the other network. Then change your windows box back to what it was originally and you should be back to normal. I'm sure there is an easier way to do it, but I suspect that would work.

mrtwstr

07-19-08, 09:14 PM

Yeah, I actually found the ifconfig command line description on a Linux site and got it all set. After 5 months or so powered off all the drives came back... but one. *sigh* Ah well.

gorman42

11-01-08, 11:05 AM

I don't understand if there is some option to run this under a full distro.

It's annoying that, from reading your forums, installing a simple application such as SqueezeCenter quickly becomes a chore, due to this not being a complete distro.

Edit: was scared of the 57 pages... just read about the virtual machine option, will investigate further. That seems ideal.

kenshin-san

11-01-08, 12:49 PM

Have you checked the official Limetech forums? There is a wealth of information over there regarding the VM solution you described as well as extending the distro:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php

gorman42

11-02-08, 11:25 AM

Yup. Did check their forums and the wiki.

It still doesn't seem very user friendly. I would only need to add Squeezecenter to the standard build. I see that BubbaQ on the forums is running a full Slackware distro but the instructions are far from easy.
He's also planning to release a customized version of Unraid, with Squeezecenter built in... but I'm kind of wary of that solution, as I'm afraid it would make updates to the software kind of hard.

All in all, I have to say that it's a shame no comparable solution is available under Windows.

kenshin-san

11-02-08, 03:11 PM

gorman42

11-02-08, 04:41 PM

Actually...

http://www.openegg.org/FlexRAID.curiWow! That looks really promising. Thanks for the link!

jimwhite

11-02-08, 06:27 PM

offline raid.... yuk!!

don't get suckered into that abortion...

gorman42

11-03-08, 04:24 AM

offline raid.... yuk!!

don't get suckered into that abortion...Considering the files one usually means to protect on a forum like this... if I understand correctly the limitations, they really would be no limitations. But enlighten me if I'm missing something.

The real problem is that, as of now, there's not a version that one can use, as the author is missing and the previous releases were time limited (and they're expired).

blahblahblah65

12-17-08, 01:58 AM

mikemav

12-17-08, 09:07 AM

Just a feeler- If anyone is interested in a working fully configured unraid with room for expansion, let me know. I built it last year in a Enermax Chakra full size case (great to work with, and huge silent fan on the side.) It uses the Sony flash, MB GIGABYTE GA-945GZM-S2 945G 775 mobo, 2.8GHz processor, unraid pro server software, and has 7 drives currently ranging from 250GB to 500GB each (four 500s).

I'm going to pull one or two of the 500GB drives for other use and erase it so it's a clean fresh array. Not sure the final size yet but it will be about 1.6TB when I remove of of the 500GB drives. It can support up to 15 disks though, of any size, and resize the array on the fly, (but you probably know that if you're on the unraid thread!)

Anyway, I'm changing to an external 1.5TB drive just for portability and will regrettably give up the redundancy to cope with drive failures since this is all recoverable data for me anyway.

So if you're interested in talking about getting mine, PM me and we'll figure something out, or let me know if you have questions.

replayrob

12-17-08, 11:21 AM

I got the server built and booted into unRAID via the flash. Logged in as root.
I'm not seeing any network activity. When I type ifconfig nothing comes up at all. When I try ifconfig eth0 (or 1) I get "error fetching interface information: Device not found."
I'm also not seeing a link light on the router or the server itself. (Right now I'm just testing with a 10/100 router)
Sounds like un-Raid's not seeing your NIC.
Are others using the same MB with un-Raid and the embedded NIC?
If you have a spare (un-Raid compatible) NIC in your parts draw... disable the built in NIC in BIOS and try the plug in NIC.

blahblahblah65

12-17-08, 01:18 PM

Can you tell me where I can find the list of approved NICs? All I see is the approved Flash devices...
thanks!

duff99

12-17-08, 02:21 PM

Hi all, I just started setting up an un-raid server for the first time.
I'm using an Asus P5Q-SE as the mobo and 2 1TB WD HDDs.
Also using the recommended Sony flash device.

I got the server built and booted into unRAID via the flash. Logged in as root.
I'm not seeing any network activity. When I type ifconfig nothing comes up at all. When I try ifconfig eth0 (or 1) I get "error fetching interface information: Device not found."
I'm also not seeing a link light on the router or the server itself. (Right now I'm just testing with a 10/100 router)

Can someone point me in the right direction in order to get this thing on the network?
Thanks

I just built a new server using some sort of a Asus P5Q motherboard. It had 8 sata ports and was open box at newegg. I figured high quality board, good price, I was set. I had good luck with all sorts of old hardware I had lying around I didn't think I'd have any problems.

I was wrong. First off the built in NIC didn't work with unraid. I used a netgear gigabit card I had from other servers I had built that didn't have built in gigabit nic's. Well that solved my networking problems. Then it can't see my one ide drive. It seems that unraid didn't like that hardware either. The nic and the ide port both worked under windows so the hardware's good, just doesn't work with unraid.

Long story short get an add in card. Good list of supported cards on the unraid wiki. I'm a little upset that things didn't work out quite as I'd planned but in the long run not that big a deal.

BLKMGK

12-17-08, 09:48 PM

Duff, tried posting to the actual unRAId support board about this? Tom does add in new drivers as the need arises and there are guys there who could probably tell you how to patch the kernel to get support for that hardware. Most of them do NOT hang out here though since that whole board is dedicated to the software rather than just a single thread...

replayrob

12-18-08, 12:45 PM

Can you tell me where I can find the list of approved NICs? All I see is the approved Flash devices...
thanks!
I don't see any proper list on the site, but according to posts- the Intel PCI-E 100/1000Mbit Network cards work (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106121).

jesseasi

12-26-08, 02:53 AM

Looking to go unraid.

I currently have an Infrant/Linksys ReadyNas NV+ and it just failed. After about 3 hours of tech support I had to resort to borrowing another NV+ and moving all my drives over to recover my data.

Well now I am looking for another solution. I want to backup and share about 1000+ DVD's within my home network.

I am very interested in the prebuilt solutions or building something similar. I like the idea of growing to 15 drives of data.

1. How fast are the data transfer rates? Fast enough to stream HD video? Or have multiple computers streaming?

2. How loud are the systems.

3. When drives are not in use do they power down to conserve energy?

4. Parity Drives. Can you have more than 1? I would be afraid to have 15 drives all dependent on one drive for parity.

5. Are there rack mount cases / solutions available?
Some quick questions.

BLKMGK

12-26-08, 04:07 AM

1) Fast enough for multiple HD streams. Faster on reads than writes. Don't have benchmarks but I have no issues streaming 1080 on a 100meg network.

2) Mine isn't very - depends on how many drives and how many fans. I built mine so I had much control over this. My power supply fans, for instance, only run as needed. Hint: use 80+ rated P/S.

3) Yes, unlike typical striped RAIDs these drives do NOT all have to be spun up in order to read data. Writes require the Parity drive and data drive to be spun but not all the others.

4) What would be the advantage or multiple parity drives exactly? If I lose my parity drive I lose no data, I simply lose protection. Likewise if I lose two data drives I lose data - but NOT *all* of my data as I would on a standard RAID that didn't have hot spares blah blah. IMO there's NO advantage to multiple parity drives, I believe you misunderstand how the parity is being used. <shrug> BTW since each drive uses a standard filesystem data recovery is nowhere near the nightmare it can be with some dedicated RAID hardware. There's a reason why many data recovery services specifically advertise the ability to recover RAID data. <cough>

You might want to head over to the Lime Technology forums to get some additional information on the systems. Some of us have been running this system for years with few to no issues. One of mine is dedicated to sharing video, about 750 of them, and works perfectly for this purpose. With the cost of 1.5tb drives as low as it is that's what I'd go with in a new system - the fewer spindles the better IMO.

captain_video

12-26-08, 08:46 AM

1. How fast are the data transfer rates? Fast enough to stream HD video? Or have multiple computers streaming?
Definitely.

2. How loud are the systems.
That depends on how you design them. You could build them using quiet PC components or you could build them using standard components. I have an Antec Nine Hundred case with three Supermicro SATA backplanes for a total of 15 internal hot swappable drive bays. The fans that came with the backplanes are huge but very loud. I replaced them with Nexus case fans and it ran much quieter but nowhere near as cool as the stock fans. Since I keep the server in a small room separate from the viewing area I opted to reinstall the original fans.

3. When drives are not in use do they power down to conserve energy?
Yes. They spin down when not being accessed.

4. Parity Drives. Can you have more than 1? I would be afraid to have 15 drives all dependent on one drive for parity.
No. If the parity drive dies it's easy to replace and rebuild parity.

5. Are there rack mount cases / solutions available?
Some quick questions.
Since you're building it you can use whatever form factor you like. I don't know of any prebuilt solutions but if you use hardware from the recommended list then you should have no problems.

jesseasi

12-29-08, 03:05 PM

captain_video

12-29-08, 04:28 PM

Anyone build an unraid system using the NORCO 4020 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219021)

I really want to build a rack mount solution and am finding it pretty hard to find the perfect case.

My other concern is noise - just how loud are these things? I have Dell SAS solutions we use at my job and they sound like jet airplanes when you turn them on. I hope to avoid that.
I'm not familiar with the case but, based on the info at Newegg, it looks like a pretty sweet setup. You'll only need 16 of the available 20 drive bays but it's still cheaper than the three Supermicro 5-in-3 SATA backplanes I just bought for my Antec Nine Hundred case.

Noise should only be a concern if you plan on locating the server within earshot of your viewing area. I keep mine in a storeroom with the door closed so it never bothers me. The fan noise all depends on what fans you install in it. There are lots of aftermarket solutions for quiet case fans. Check out silentpcreview.com for all kinds of recommended hardware to build a quiet PC.

garycase2001

12-29-08, 04:49 PM

The fans that come with the 4020 to cool the drive chamber aren't too bad ... not real quiet, but nothing close to the fans on many more "industrial" server cases. You NEED good airflow in a case with that many hard drives ... so there's a limit to just how quiet you can make it and still keep the drives cool.

... so I'd be careful about replacing the fans with low rpm "quiet" fans.

jesseasi

12-30-08, 06:27 PM

Ok - I have decided to pull the trigger.

Case - Norco 4020. Seems like the best bang for you buck and noise and cooling seem to be easily resolved with a few modifications. Supports 20 drives - I guess I will have 4 extra slots ready for when un-raid adds more drives.

Drives - I have 7 1.5 TB seagates and 5 500GB Seagates. I am worried about compatibility with the 1.5TB drives and one of the reasons I am posting this - I wanted to make sure I had the right motherboard controller combo to support these larger drives.

Motherboard - Seems like Supermicro's C2EE-O is recommended by Lime-Technology - but it has some really bad reviews at new egg.

Is there a list anywhere of preferred or optimimal hardware configurations?

CPU and Memory - i will probably go with 2GB and some entry level duo-core cpu.

Controllers - Supermicro? Is there any one controller that is better than another?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I am just trying to narrow in on the right parts to get.

Thanks again for all the input.

12-31-08, 11:30 AM

That's the mb they use in their pre-built systems, take it as you will. Maybe it's not a great all-around motherboard but it certainly seems to work well with UnRaid.

There are two bad reviews of it on Newegg, one from a guy who from the sound of it is talking about a different motherboard, or had the wrong one delivered - he mentions it not supporting DDR2 memory when it obviously does. The other bad review came from a guy who lost onboard video after a few months and attributes it to a general problem with the G43 chipset, which I haven't heard.

Not defending Supermicro for the heck of it or anything but sometimes you have to take Newegg reviews with a grain of salt. If I were to build another UnRaid system I'd do it with this board just because I know everything will work with it.

J. L.

12-31-08, 06:27 PM

There are two bad reviews of it on Newegg, one from a guy who from the sound of it is talking about a different motherboard, or had the wrong one delivered - he mentions it not supporting DDR2 memory when it obviously does. The other bad review came from a guy who lost onboard video after a few months and attributes it to a general problem with the G43 chipset, which I haven't heard.
I've just purchased one of the CS2SEE motherboards to build a second unRAID server. Looking in its manual I can see it DOES NOT support DDR2 memory. It does support DDR3 memory.

The box it came in is for the entire Core2 series of motherboards. It does mention DDR2 memory, but only for the C2SBA+, C2SBA, and C2SBE models. For the other models it specifies DDR3 memory. The supermicro.com web-site shows DDR3 memory needed See: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Core2Duo/index.cfm#775

The included manual for my C2SEE motherboard even has a FAQ section with the following:
Q: What type of memory does my motherboard require?
A: The C2SEA/C2SEE supports unbuffered DDR3 1333/1066/1800 MHz memory modules.

I'm not even sure if DDR2 memory can physically plug into a DDR3 socket. Obviously, if the person complaining on newegg ordered and attempted to use the wrong memory for his motherboard version, it is not Supermicro's fault. (I'll bet I can't use any of my old Pentium 1 CPU's either in it, but I would not want to complain publicly on newegg if they did not fit in the socket :D)

As far as the other reviewer losing video after swapping cases, odds are good he zapped the board or damaged it in some way during the case swap...

Joe L.

rebkell

01-05-09, 11:48 PM

I'm having a problem with Windows Media Player and also Media Center playback from the unraid server, every so often the playback just freezes and finally the player will fault out, this only happens as far as I can tell when I'm watching a video over the network. I don't ever recall it happening when viewing from a local disk.

I'm running version 4.2.3, the drives report no errors, etc... I suspect a network problem, but just wondering if this is a known problem. I'm running Vista SP1, both PCs, the unraid server and the Vista machine are both using the onboard network adapters on identical Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboards.

dhy8386

01-06-09, 12:39 AM

Yep. Its the SAMBA protocol. Many users have complained over at the unRAID forums that streaming HD over the network with unRAID causes stuttering. In the recently release 4.5 beta 1, NFS has been included which provides for much faster transfer rates. Was just about to build my first unRAID box when i saw the issues re SAMBA. Hopefully 4.5 solves the problem.

EDIT: Per this post in the unRAID forums, this registry fix solves the problem: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1790.0

It has to do with your NIC card and dropped packets in Samba.

Here is the reg fix (note you need to have Vista sp1 installed or the appropriate hotfixes installed as mentioned below)

The settings for a give nic can be found under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\P arameters\Interfaces\<NIC Guid>
where NIC guid is the guid for the NIC as reported by either ethereal or sometimes under the Description field when using ipconfig /all.

There are two keys you will need, they were not created when I added mine, but they may be there already for you. Both are DWORD values. They are
TcpAckFrequency
and
TcpDelAckTicks

TcpAckFrequency controls the maximum number of un-acked packets before the algorithm kicks in. It should default to 2. Generally speaking, my driver does not seem to be servicing the NIC fast enough for this to matter most of the time, but setting it to 1 effectively will shut of the algorithm (every time there is 1 unacked packet, an ack should be sent, although as noted above because of the service frequency by the driver, there are usually many packets to ack by the time the stack gets around to it).

TcpDelAckTicks controls the amt of time to wait while the number of unacked packets is below TcpAckFrequency before senting an ack (units are in 100mSec chunk, so 1 == 100mSec, 2 = 200mSec, etc). Default is 2, setting it to 0 should disable nagle.

Once changes have been made, either bounce the tcp/ip service and your NIC or reboot.

Please note that the stock versions of most editions of windows ignore these settings unless you have the appropriate hotfixes. For vista, SP1 should do the trick. For XP and other OSs, see the a wrap-up of the topic and patches here

http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-nagle-algorithm.html

rebkell

01-06-09, 01:33 AM

Thanks for the info, I'll look into it, I don't have either of those keys currently. I'm not sure it's the same problem, though it could very well be. When my playback stops, it never resumes, until I shutdown the application and restart the playback and sometimes it takes a while for it to start back up, I do notice the network leds are flashing like they're transmitting packets after a restart of my player, didn't notice any activity when it stops though.

jimwhite

01-06-09, 07:50 AM

Yep. Its the SAMBA protocol. Many users have complained over at the unRAID forums that streaming HD over the network with unRAID causes stuttering
Horsepoopy... it's NOT Samba... some (not many) have problems usually traced to hardware/config network problems, but most, like myself, have ZERO issues...

:cool:

dandirk

01-06-09, 07:57 AM

I just built a new server using some sort of a Asus P5Q motherboard.

A user on thier forum was having nic problems and some controller problems (the 2 Drive Expert SATA port built in raid chipset and IDE). He solved these problems by using version 4.5 Beta. Well sort of solved it, the Drive Expert ports were flaky based on documentation if using jbod setup only 1 of the ports can be used.

His post is in their motherboard section with a title like "P5Q-E fun"

Joseph Clark

01-06-09, 10:52 AM

Horsepoopy... it's NOT Samba... some (not many) have problems usually traced to hardware/config network problems, but most, like myself, have ZERO issues...

:cool:

Hey, Jim. Can you say what you're average read/write rates are for unRAID (not to the cache drive)? BTW, thanks for your advice on my last unRAID build.

jimwhite

01-06-09, 11:51 PM

Read speed is about 75 MB/sec, write speed about 13.5 MB/sec. Running 4.3.3, 11 x 1tb drives in the array....

:p

havix

01-13-09, 11:25 AM

Anyone have some Samba vs NFS benchmarks on the new release?

Ewingr

01-13-09, 07:15 PM

Read speed is about 75 MB/sec, write speed about 13.5 MB/sec. Running 4.3.3, 11 x 1tb drives in the array....

:p

That read speed is reading a file within that box, right? In other words, if from computer 1, you copy a file from the Unraid box to a directory on computer 1, you are not getting that speed, as a transfer rate, right?

How are you measuring that speed?

Dennis.Mitchell

01-13-09, 08:32 PM

All sold. Thanks

duff99

01-14-09, 01:38 AM

A user on thier forum was having nic problems and some controller problems (the 2 Drive Expert SATA port built in raid chipset and IDE). He solved these problems by using version 4.5 Beta. Well sort of solved it, the Drive Expert ports were flaky based on documentation if using jbod setup only 1 of the ports can be used.

His post is in their motherboard section with a title like "P5Q-E fun"

Thanks for the heads up. I'll try playing with some of the newer versions. I'm thinking about just using this board for my HTPC. I bought because it was open box and has some great specs. The problem is half of it doesn't work with unraid. It would be wasted as a HTPC but would probably work better at that then an unraid server. Thanks again.

jimwhite

01-14-09, 04:59 PM

In other words, if from computer 1, you copy a file from the Unraid box to a directory on computer 1, you are not getting that speed, as a transfer rate, right?
wrong... those numbers are from my Vista pc to the server and back...

:cool:

Joseph Clark

01-14-09, 08:01 PM

wrong... those numbers are from my Vista pc to the server and back...

:cool:

My write speeds are about the same, but my read speeds are less for my Vista/unRAID network. I still think my network could use some tweaking. I might want to pick your brain a little more on that subject, Jim. :)

jimwhite

01-15-09, 03:03 PM

Careful.... slim pickin's these days :p

timinohio

01-16-09, 04:40 AM

I apologize if this has already been addressed in this thread or in great detail in the unRaid support forums. However, I did not find anything about this issue until after it was solved and I knew exactly what to search for (and this was only at the unRaid forums and not in this thread). I decided to post my solution in that it will allow someone else having this problem to find it in a search of this thread and easily solve their problem (and thus be able to use unRaid).

Having built a server to run unRaid I ran into quite a bit of trouble when trying to get it to boot off of my usb drive. I formatted the drive and ran syslinux (or so I thought, though it did put a ldlinux.sys file on the drive it did not make the drive bootable), then unzipped the files to the jump drive. However, when I tried to boot to it I got boot drive partition not found and non bootable pen drive errors (I tried two different USB drives). I searched the support forums but was unable to find a solution so I used the command line rather than "run" and discovered I didn't have the proper administrator rights at the command line (which in Vista does not ask you for elevated privileges, it just denies you access).

So, here is step by step instructions for using syslinux in Vista:

In “Start Search” type “cmd”, this should bring up one item, "cmd". Right click on it and choose “Run as Administrator”.

It should default to “C:\Windows\System32” (I’m running windows vista 32-bit, if you are running 64 bit it will be different). Copy the syslinux.exe file to this directory (windows\system32).

At the command prompt type: “syslinux.exe –ma x:”

(where x: is the drive windows has assigned to your UNRAID usb drive, for me it was drive i:, you can always check under my computer)

It if it works it will just return back to the “C:\Windows\System32” prompt. Type “exit”.

Notes: By using command (aka cmd), you will be able to see if it works. If you use run the window will disappear quickly if it does not and you will be none the wiser.

If you did not set the administrator permissions properly you will get an error that says: “Accessing Physical Drive: Access is denied. Did not successfully update the MBR; continuing…” But if you just did the steps as outlined, it should work fine.