Planning to rebuild my 20TB WHS Flexraid server: Information requested. - Page 16

Thanks guys for the information. Bought a 3TB green drive today which will go into a Flexraid Pool with two other drives (2TB+3TB). I should get about 5TB of usable space. Anything I should know before making the FlexRAID pool? The data on those drives will be intact, right? (I know it should, just making sure. I don't want to lose any of my precious data )

No, the upper limit of the spec is 54Mbps (data transfer) or 48Mbps (video+audio) for blu-ray movies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Bit_rate

You are correct. 36Mbps is the initial data rate.

I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt that a 100mbps switch will work anywhere that electronics work. I can not say that for any wireless based technology. There are places that it just won't work very well.

Thank you for jumping to conclusions that I have no idea what I'm talking about... CSMA/CA, half-duplex, wireless sucks.

My house is a wireless nightmare.

Some of my walls/ceilings are plaster applied on top of drywall with steel lathing in the corners (working on replacing that over the years).
Steel door frames (now I know the origin of "stand in a doorway during an earthquake").
Hardwood flooring that was top nailed in a 1x6 inch grid pattern.
Foil backed insulation.
Wire run everywhere in the walls (partly my doing).

Every room in my house is almost a faraday cage. About the only thing more wireless signal resistant is the inner ring of the pentagon. Until the last couple of years (after some remodeling) I couldn't even get cell phone signal in parts of my house, and I live in the city.

This part is not clear to me. Could you kindly reword these sentences? Which Recycle Bin should I delete? If I delete the Recycle bin, wouldn't that mean files from the pool will be deleted permanently when I delete them? Thanks btw for your help thus far.

Thanks! That's a great tip. The FlexRAID wiki talks about adding a reg key, not deleting the Recycle Bin from each drive if I am looking at the right thing. Great information. Thanks again. Any other cool tips?

I never bought the wrong ones. When I said unfortunately I meant that I have an older case. I bought my Norco before they had the models with SAS connections. You haven't lived until you try to run 20 individual SATA cables through the fan wall, keep it neat, and get them plugged into the right place. The SAS cables are so much more convenient.

On some of the server forums I hang out at I seen the difference between the cables come up a lot. Usually it's people checking if they've got the right parts. Sometimes it's troubleshooting after the fact. I just don't see it come up here very often so I thought I'd make sure I'd point it out. Check out the build a server thread here. Before it got out of control this came up a lot.

While everything (pretty much) is in the Wiki, it's not particularly well organized. If (and only if) you're planning on running a snapshot raid you should turn on Flexraid's internal (not Windows) proprietary recylce bin. The explanation for this is here: http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/10/18/understanding-the-limitations-of-snapshot-raid/, but it's somewhat confusing. Basically, things that can corrupt your parity (ability to restore) are:

1. Deletions. Unless Flexraids recycle bin is turned on (it's off by default).
2. Any changes to an existing data file prior to running an update. Only way to avoid this is don't allow programs such as metadata scrapers to update existing data.

In regards to #2, if you change (or update) 1GB of existing files and you encounter a drive failure before running an update, there will be 1GB of corruption in your parity data. You can see if this undesirable activity is occurring by running a quick validate and seeing if files are changed. If so, you will have at least some corruption in your parity data should you need to restore a drive.

Got my FlexRAID pool up and running, thanks to Mfusick and the others here. I am now facing this weird anomaly though. Could someone explain why I am getting speeds like this in benchmarks?

Depends on what kind of data you have. Since I use it for Pictures, Music and Video, I use snapshot. I make sure things are stable and that the only changes to the pool are additional material and occasional deletions. I make sure that my scrapers aren't constantly changing my metadata. Media Center Master can be bad about this. Real-time still has some limitations to it such as a single PPU at least at the moment and requiring all drives to be spun up. Over on the forum, I see people getting into a lot of trouble trying to restore their data. In ascertaining why, turns out they're doing stuff like including live buffer from a tuner card into the pool. Snapshot isn't made to support data that is constantly changed.

Here's a link to some discussions: http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,1251.msg9745.html#msg9745 and here: http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,1342.msg11319.html#msg11319, the second post. There are many others.

Part of the problem is the wiki DOES NOT have a clear, concise, step-by-step setup guide discussing setting up Flexraid. Most of the info is there, but spread over a hundred different articles. I can't find any reference to turning off the Windows recycle bin for pool drives in the wiki, I only know about it from forum discussions. Even Assassin's guides, which are quite good, makes no mention of the Flexraid recycle bin.

All-in-all, Flexraid is perfect for HTPC use, but it's not real-time raid and the documentation could be a lot better.

I think its not that big of a deal regarding making changes to data in a pool with snapshot. from the link posted, one of the final things it mentions is:

• You should always sync the RAID immediately after massive data edits

I guess main thing will be change scrapers to manual, and then run a sync on the raid after an editing session.

i still have not setup my flexraid yet...still setting up drives and doing an initial organization, but that will be a work in progress so even after setting up my pool and snapshot raid, i will be doing a lot or renaming and moving around and updating metadata.

and i agree, while a lot of info is there on the flexraid wiki, you have to look around for the correct articles. not the most user friendly for a starter.

What a coincidence --- I have actually been finishing a few changes to the guides including the Recycle Bin settings and issues. I also have been trying out a few new settings some of which I posted in the last few weeks.

I finished the Recycle Bin changes earlier today.

Agree with you about FlexRaid being perfect for HTPC.

Does Plex act weird with FlexRAID for anyone else? I am getting multiple copies of the same movie. It's also mixing up one movie poster with another. Any solutions?

Look at the second row

Are you sure it has something to do with FlexRaid? I bet it has more to do with how those movies are named. Look at the info from inside Plex and see what's listed.

I just did a quick look at my movies and saw a few duplicates but most were on obscure movies or TV shows that I wasn't able to find even with a manual search from within Plex.

Yea I am sure it's FlexRAID, because I didn't have this problem before making a pool. Everything looks fine in Windows Media Center though.

I didn't have this problem before installing FlexRAID though, which would mean my media is named perfectly. What's the solution now?

[H]ardforum, and the Unraid forums.