FlexRAID 2.0 Opinions? Thinking of going with it over UnRAID/SnapRAID - Page 3

Hehe, sure. Why not?
Since you started the thread, I will grant you a free license too if Killroy comes through.

You can also download FlexRAID now and start with a free trial and help Killroy in unmasking the bug. That will make the process faster.

I'm glad to see the sale got extended to May 5. But its now $60. I believe it was $40 at one point, then $50. So I'm assuming if its extended again it will be $70?

This strikes me as usual business practice (prices go up the more you wait) but in effect its punishing those who fully intend to buy FlexRaid but haven't had time to setup their servers or are waiting for things to become stable.

One of the key aspect in respect to software development is that you can never predict how the software you wrote will behave on every system.

Many of the bugs I have been fixing lately have been bugs affecting only a handful of users because of the particular aspects of their systems.
Maturity in software comes from fixing all these one offs as they come; and over time, the product simply becomes more robust as it gets all that baked in.

So, me not being able to replicate the issue does not mean it does not exist.
If it exists, my hope is to find it and nuke it.

With thousands of users pounding on FlexRAID from all sides and on all sort of systems, bugs are certainly being shaken out, which is a very good thing when you think long-term.

Parity creation has started. 46+TB should take about 30-35hours.

^That may become my new avatar.

Hahah

5 hrs later ? ?
Lets see it

Put up or shut u...

No , not the Oregon girls either .... but cool all the same

Gonna take 30ish hours for him to finish.

Really?!?! Did you not read that 46+TB takes about 30-35hours to create the parity?

I guess this goes to show that anything can have fanboys.

I would also be interested in the SMART report.

If you are referring to mine, I have disabled SMART on my installation.

Then how do you know you don't have excessive bad sectors on your parity drive?

Well, HDTune does just fine with that besides if you have Samsung Green Drives then any SMART program will be the death of them. I am not taking any chances.

What?

That was true for drives made in 2010 without the firmware update.

For any drive made in 2011 this isn't an issue. That has been in my hardware guide for over a year now.

And your point? I have several drives that fall in that situation. I did not upgrade the firmwares cause I lost several drives during the Seagate firmware debacle. I have over 68 drives. I have a bit of everything. There are other ways to check for errors.

I have updated the firmware with a full drive. No issues at all and you really should do it.

I heard the same thing about the Seagate drives. They fell like dominoes. Not taking any chances.

Well okay then.

Yes , really !! so sorry . I miss took myself for being perfect . Thanks

So some where in the neighborhood of 10:00 p.m. 5/2/12 and 2:00 a.m. 5/3/12 . That about right . Just want to be sure I'm watching , waiting .. oh boy !!

K , guess you did not read the "I am not perfect post " Right ?

That's funny, that is exactly the time period I calculated...but if you think I am staying up that late to work on this you are more nuts than I am.

No blame here man !! Let er run . Get some sleepeezzs

Isn't SMART mostly useless? I remember reading the Google survey and the conclusion was you can't rely on SMART to predict when a disk will fail. Or am I mistaken?

I have a few F4 drives I haven't updated the firmware on as well. I have no extra space to copy the data off, and the procedure for the update (its destructive, must boot from dos, must be only disk attached to system) is cumbersome.

It is a stretch to call it useless.
SMART is not the most accurate method, but it does have some valuable predictive aspects.
What's more of an art than science is how we interpret the metrics.
Some metrics just speak for themselves (like massive read errors). The issue has been that a drive can still fail even when all the metrics look good.

With FlexRAID, SMART is also used for drive failure notification.
If a drive fails, you want notification ASAP before another drive fails or you make too many changes to your RAID.

Remembering that drives do tend to fail in bunches, responsiveness is critical.

Also, being able to run self-tests on the drives straight from the UI along with visual charting of every single monitored attributes, simply puts more tools at your fingertips to effectively manage your drives.

+1

If you do it right there is no issues.

That's what they told me with the Seagate drives and out of 9 drives I updated the exact same way I lost 7.

The F4 drives work just fine with the old firmware, unlike the Seagates that were prone to data corruption with the bad firmware...so I am NOT taking any chances.