Limetech un-Raid Media Storage Server support thread - Page 8

The Birdman. A most excellant suggestion which has just been moved close to the top of the Future Feature list!

Concern noted. My point was simply that there is no interdependence between the two devices. In the case you cite here, had it been the Slave which "went bad" probably the master would have also been marked bad (by an obviously flawed driver stack).

Yes, this is an issue with multiple device on a single channel or bus. I've seen SCSI systems where a bad device caused the whole bus to hang. But in this case, the driver was smart enough to not fail all the devices.

In the UnRaid driver we NEVER disable more than one device. For example, if a drive fails in such a way as to hang the channel, then what will happen is the low-level IDE driver will fail all the queued I/O to it. But when UnRaid sees the first write error, it will fail that drive (that is, disable it). Thereafter, any other error results in just failing the original host request.

In this case what would happen is your windows application using the share would see an i/o error. The UnRAID management console will show a disable disk and possibly a non-zero error count on other disks. I would guess that 99% of the time the correct disk would be marked as failed. You would then remove this disk and all should be ok again.

This is how it should work by design - but we haven't encountered a disk which failed like this, and we haven't tried to simulate it [add another item to the todo list ]

I haven't been able to figure out Intel's model numbering scheme, but I believe that's correct. You definitely want to get the one with the "LK" at the end of the model number - that indicates it has the PRO/1000 GigEthernet chip.

BTW - I really really really like Intel motherboards for these reasons:
1. Their quality and price is as good as anyone else
2. Their documentation is outstanding. This is reason enough to exclusively use them.
3. Their tech support is actually helpful. Early in this project we noticed a flaw in the bios where, after setting it for USB boot, if you added or removed a hard drive the bios would "revert" to hard drive boot. I sent them an email detailing this "bug" and got a reply that they would "look into it". Well, in a later bios release guess what? They actually fixed it! Don't know if was because of my email, perhaps they knew about this already, but that is true support.

Very good analysis.


Any discussion of UnRAID over there?


Do you mean for those who purchase a complete server? If so, you could take it apart and replace some/all of the disk trays with SATA versions along with replacing the PCI disk controller cards.

If you mean for the software-only product, then SATA support will be a free upgrade.


There's no fundamental reason why you couldn't build a system with a mix of PATA and SATA drives. You would have to decide how many of each type you want and their slots. It's a bit complicated creating the correct "configuration" file that tells the UnRAID software which devices correspond to which slots - but definitely do-able.

I don't anticipate offering any preconfigured products which mix PATA and SATA, but you could certainly roll your own.

One thing we need to work on in the s/w is better feedback about what's happening during an operation. Some operations take "a long time" and it can appear that the system is locked up when in fact it's still crunching away. For example, to "mount" a reiserfs file system it takes close to 45 seconds once the disk capacity is over around 200GB. Now when there's multiple drives to mount we try to do them in parallel, but it still takes almost 45 sec times the number of drives to complete (seems to be highly CPU-bound). Anyway, my point is that sometimes, especially when adding drives, it's possible to get into a state where it appears things have ground to a halt. I'm not saying this happend in your case, but other people have, shall I say, pointed this out to us as a problem to be addressed.


I also have a 9 year old daughter who expects to watch her movies when she's been told she can, and is very upset when that can't happen...........


The system was clearing your new drives before adding them to the array. The current code executes this "clearing" operation before starting the array because it was simplest and safest to do it this way - but we'll fix this in another release. Another way to add new drives is to first "initialize" the array configuration data (via Tools menu), in effect making it think all the drives are "new". Then when started, the shares become available much faster and a backgroun operation is started to regenerate parity. A problem doing it this way is there's no recovery if a drive fails during this operaiton.


I'd be interested in knowing some more details about your first test:
a) was ripping done on same PC as viewing?
b) was ripping writing to same disk as the one being read for viewing?
c) what's your network configuration and speed?
d) anything else happening on your network?


That's a great price, but man, I hate dealing with rebates....

We haven't actually tried this, but it should work Note that our preconfigured server is only all-PATA or all-SATA. You would have to build your own system and use our s/w.


You definitely need proper cooling; however, the system will generally run cooler than you might expect because most of the time most of the drives can be spun down.


You can use the 2 on-board PATA controllers for 4 PATA drives and either a single 8-port SATA controller or two 4-port SATA controllers. We're currently testing a couple 4-port controllers.

Me too

All the Flash orders are being shipped tomorrow (Friday). You will get a tracking number and email. I apologize for the delay. When we only offered complete servers it was sufficient and desirable to have Friday be "shipping day" - and that is when the FedEx pick up occurs for us. This week, all the other orders will also get shipped tomorrow but next week we'll start shipping within a day of receiving the order.