"Spielberg" UnRAID Server

Formerly known as "Zeus"!

As more media systems are added into my network, either via HTPC, MediaPC, music-server, or run of the mill computers for the kid's or surfing the web, I'm now starting to understand more and more the need for a robust storage backup scheme.

I thought about a simple RAID setup for the music-server, but then I started to think, what about a means for backing up my DVD collection? I was going to install a large drive into the HTPC, but what happens if that drive goes down? I would have to rip all my DVD's again. That would not be fun. Or if the music-server hard drive dies. Currently I would have to re-rip all my albums. All my singles would be lost. It would be most devistating.

So in thinking of a system for data backup, I thought about the different RAID types. I've settled on an UnRAID NAS server by Lime Technology. Main reason, I needed something that is robust, but also won't break me in the bank. The UnRAID system fits this to a tee. You can use run of the mill parts, and the OS can be trialed free for 30 days (for the basic RAID of 3 hard drives of various size). What this allows is the use of 2 data drives and one parity drive. If a data drive goes down, I can replace with a new drive (of equal or greater size) and the data will be re-written to it...hence no data is lost. So my new project will be to build an UnRAID server that will store the following:

DVD movies/HD content, recorded TV for either the MediaPC or the HTPC, pictures, games, install software, any other files that will be deemed important for backup, including the music-server, HTPC, MediaPVR backups.

This will also mean that instead of having computers networking into other computers, and sharing directories on the network, scattering information across multiple systems, that in order to read, one would have to make sure that particular system is awake, all computers will network into the UnRAID server and can view/play all content right from the server...in one central, redundant location.

I think also that I will be able to setup specific rights for individuals so they only have access to certain files on the UnRAID server. This functionality is offered in the Plus and Pro versions. UnRAID is now selling licenses for 3 tiers: Basic (6 drive max), Plus (12 drive max) and Pro (unlimited drives...but actually limited to 30). After time and increasing my drive count, I'm currently running a Pro licence with the following...

Current Main Hardware

Case: Antec Nine Hundred Two V3

I revamped the UnRAID box from the ground up a few years back. The first thing that changed was the case. The old generic that I had found an individual throwing out was no longer cutting it. I chose the Antec mainly on price. It was the most affordable that had 9 individual 5.25" bay cutouts in the front. Down the road I'm still planning on using a few 4x3 Hot Swap card cages. This will allow for a max of 12 drives with this case. This case also has lot's of fans, including a 200mm ventilation fan out the top, a 120mm vent fan out the back, 2x 120mm intake fans on the front cooling two 3.5" Hard drive card cages, an optional 120mm fan inside to blow air across the CPU, and an optional side mount 120mm fan. Right off the bat this case is capable of holding all my drives without modification. Kind of a shame that this case will be hidden out of site in the cellar, when it looks so good. I picked it up on clearance from the local computer shop for less that $80 including taxes. This Antec case was also one of the defacto cases when Lime Tech was still building their own servers to sell.

Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F

The Supermicro X10SL7-F is a replacement to the ASUS PM5-VM DO board that suffered a catastrophic fault. The X10SL7-F is a single socket LGA1150 server board. It fits Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/v4 CPU, or 4th gen Core i3. It can handle up to 32Gig DDR3 ECC memory. It boasts a whopping 14 SATA ports, dual Gig LAN ports, and a dedicated LAN port for IPMI with KVM abilities. It is a little dated, but is still a highly sought board considering all the SATA ports available without resorting to an additional plugin card.

This board came in a combo package that inclued the CPU, CPU heatsink, and 16Gigs of memory.

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220

The Xeon E3-1220 is a 3.1GHz CPU. It has 4 cores, can run in turbo mode upto 3.4 GHz when required, and consumes upto 95W. I'll find out more details on the CPU once the parts have been delivered. It came already combo with the motherboard, heatsink and memory.

CPU Cooler: Standard 2U Passive Aluminum Heatsink

The CPU cooler is a run of the mill 2U chassis rack CPU cooler. Basically it is a big hunk of alluminum to dissipate the heat buildup.

Memory: Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G DDR3 ECC RAM

The memory is 2 kits of 8Gig memory (each kit consists of 2x 4Gig RAM boards) by Kingston. The RAM is DDR3-1333 ECC server type. So 16 Gigs RAM, more than twice the amount I had previously in Zeus, should run the updated server very well.

Power Supply: Corsair CX600

I replaced the Antec EA-650 with this supply after researching and finding out that I should have been using a single +12V rail supply in the UnRAID server. The Antec had two +12V rails, and according to the UnRAID website, this is a no no. The Corsair is a 600W supply that had an instant rebate of $20 at the local computer shop. Paying by cash, it came out to about $54.99 +tax. The single 12V rail can supply up to 40A of current. This should be good for up to 11 7200RPM drives (with headroom).

Case Fan: Nexus and D12SL-12 Silent Fan

This fan is mounted in the side wall and blows in cool air right on top of the passive CPU cooler. It compliments the Antecs fans, where there are 2x120mm input fans in front of the hard drive cages. There is 1x120mm exhaust fan at the rear of the case, and as indicated below, a 140mm exhaust fan in the top of the case (replacing the original 200mm specialized fan).

Case Fan: Be Quiet! Silent Wings3 140mm Fan

This fan was purchased to replace the Antec 200mm top fan where the bearing ended up seizing up. This would then foldback the powersupply (and may have contributed to the demise of the old Asus motherboard). The Silent Wings fan put out just as much CFM and should be a good addition to remove heat from the case, since the new CPU cooler is passive.

System Drives

USB Drive: Lexar JumpDrive 16Gig

This larger USB stick now replaced my original 250Mb Firefly, which served me well for over 10 years. It too is a recommended USB Flash drive from Lime. Was about $16 at Walmart. The flash drive is used as the boot drive for loading the UnRAID OS and configuration.

Flash Drive: Innodisk USB EDC 2SE -1Gig

Included with the SuperMicro motherboard was this flash drive. It's only 1 Gig in size, so not exactly sure what to do with it. I'll do some research and see if anyone in the UnRAID forums have utilized something like this for quick caching, or even for aiding in a virtual system.

Hard Drives: 5x Western Digital WD20EFRX/EFZX, 2x Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001, 1x Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM006, 1x Western Digital WD30EFZX, 1x Hitachi HTS545016

The system now has a total of 11 drives. These have been broken down as follows:

1) Western Digital WD30EFZX "Red Plus" drive is now used for the Parity disk.

2) Western Digital WD20EFRX (later to become known as EFZX) "Red" drives are slowly replacing the aging Seagate drives. The WD20's now populate the drives 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

2) Seagate ST2000DM006 2Tb is used for Data drive 1.

3) Seagate ST2000DM001 2Tb drives populating Data drives 7 and 8.

4) Hitachi HTS545016 & HT5432 160Gb laptop drives are used for cache and docker appdata cache.

5) A small InnoDisk EDC 2SE 1Gig flash disk came included with the motherboard replacement.

To accommodate the amount of drives and for future expansion, I updated to unRAID "Pro".

Below is the drive configuration. Total Data Space: 16 Terabytes:

And the two cache drives:

Obsoleted Equipment

Motherboard: ASUS P5B-VM DO Socket 775 w/video, GigLAN, 6+1 SATA ports - RIP 1/12/2023

I picked this board up off ebay. It wasn't too expensive, and it is one of the defacto boards recommended by Lime Tech. In fact this was one of the boards that they used in their own builds when they were putting together systems to sell. It has on-board GigLAN. This board is a microATX form factor, it has 6+1 on board SATA ports that can support up to 3Gb/s transfer rates, 1 IDE connetor that can support 2 IDE drives at Ultra-ATA 100/66/33 mode, 1 PCI-Ex16 connector, 1 PCI-Ex 4(1) connector, and 2xPCI slots. So there should be enough slots to add future SATA controller for additional drives. With the Bytecc card and the Promise card, and including all the on-board SATA ports, I should be able to setup an UnRAID Pro server using a 12+1 setup (12 data, 1 parity drive, and a cache drive), though I will limit it to 12 drives total (11 data/1 parity). Including shipping, it cost $98 cdn.

As of January 12th, 2023, this motherboard had a critical fault occur, and is now considered dead.

Any other equipment directly connected to the motherboard (ie CPU, memory etc) has been either dumped or cycled into other systems, ie the Grohl server or the new Kodigames system, and I found out that my everyday office computer is an older HP system with a LGA775 Core 2 Quad Q8400. It used DDR 2 PC6400 memory, so was able to slap 2x1Gig RAM into that increasing it from 4 Gigs to 6 Gigs.

Current Software/Dockers:

UnRAID OS 6 (recently upgraded to 6.12.10)

LimeTech's UnRAID OS is the heart of the system. I started trialing/using unraid back at version 4.7. This version allowed free use to upto 3 drives. Once realizing that I would require more drives that the free version allowed, I migrated to version 5.0.2 and paid for the pro license. After having memory issues, and to utilize the docker format, I upgraded to 6.3.5, and now currently on 6.12.10

PLEX Media Server Docker

I decided to utilize the power of Plex to take advantage of a common database between multiple clients. This is one of the best, most universal, cross-platform systems available for free. I now have two Kodi machines, a Roku stick, SmartTV, FIre TV and Android box, that all can utilize, and share this common database. The interface is also easy to manage and configure. I've also been able to add additional "Channels" so the family can get some traditional TV via the Plex interface. This is a growing system, and there will for sure be more to come.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant or HASS is an Open Source home automation project that integrates many smart home products across a broad spectrum of company, allowing end users to control the functionality of these products in a common seamless dashboard.

Other dockers:

DuckDNS - docker for dynamic DNS rooting to UnRAID

Swag - formerly known as LetsEncrypt, this docker to automate SSL certificate generation and renewal process

ControlR - application for UnRAID remote monitoring using Android phones

Tautulli - docker for remote monitoring of Plex activity

MKVToolkit - MKV editor

qBitTorrentVPN - Torrent download docker, this one has included OpenVPN

Sonarr - Docker for scheduling TV show downloads

SpeedTest - for testing internet speeds

Krusader - internal web server file manager

Glances - system monitoring tool

LOG

Aug 26, 2008

The motherboard came in yesterday. I installed it into the case last night, along with the memory. No issues so far. I'm going to drill some mount holes for the 120mm fan. I also will require some rubber feet. The next purchase will need to be the CPU. Then I will be able to do an initial power-up and verify a boot from the Lexar Firefly.

Aug 28, 2008

Lexar USB stick arrived. UNRAID installed on the stick just fine. Now I just have to complete the rest of the build and get the server going.

Sept 3, 2008

Drilled mounting holes for the Nexus 120mm fan, and installed it. Should help bring in fresh cool air. It resides right below the 3.5" drive bays, so air should be sucked in and upwards and blown out the supply. I will most likely install more fans into the system, once I get an idea of how the eventual hard-drives warm up.

Sept 15, 2008

Just won an Intel Celeron 440 CPU off ebay. The next purchase will be a hard drive and a CPU cooler. Then I can at least power the system to the BIOS and maybe verify that the system will boot from the USB Flashdrive. Then I just have to pickup the hard drives.

Sept 28, 2008

The Celeron 440 just arrived in the mail, so I will be looking forward to installing this onto the motherboard. Just have to pick up a CPU cooler for it still.

Sept 29, 2008

Some pictures of the install currently.

ECS motherboard, RAM installed

Close-up of Kingston RAM in dual channel mode

Celeron CPU installed

Nexus 120mm fan installed

Overall case view

The back IO shield

Back of the case

Case front with faceplate removed

Oct 13, 2008

I bought the Artic Cooling Pro cooler for the Celeron 440, and installed it. Below are some pics:

I installed a generic power supply to try and power the system. It powered up, I went through some of the BIOS and everything seemed in order. I then attempted to boot off the Firefly, but was getting an error that it couldn't find the boot drive. I re-formated/installed the UnRAID boot on the drive a few times but got the same error message. I then found in a forum thread on the UnRAID site to add a switch command to the syslinux. On the main site it indicates to type this:

c:\syslinux.exe f: (changing f: to whatever the USB drive is)

I found out that this may not set the USB drive with a master boot record. The actual command should have been:

c:\syslinux.exe -ma f:

Adding "-ma" seemed to make all the difference. Now my server is sitting and greeting me with "Tower Login". I powered down, and changed the IP, Mask and gateway to my network, and changed the network name to "WORKGROUP" from "MSHOME". Powered the system back up and was able to connect to it via web browser on a remote machine. Now I just need to get some hard drives and a final power supply.

Oct 18, 2008

Picked up the Antec EA-650 650W supply. Installed it in the UnRAID box, along with old drives (6.4Gg, and 3.2G) with hopes of trying out the system tonight and see how it works. I will be able to check throughput, see how think operate under load, and give me a chance to work on the system, since I've never worked really on a Linux type system in the past...only briefly played with them. Will update later with details of my first hand view of this exciting venture.

The Antec EA-650 prior to installation

Supply installed

ATX Connector installed

ATX Additional 4-pin Molex connector

Oct 20, 2008

Well, I had my first hand experience at building an UnRAID array. Used a temporary 6.4Gig, and 3.2 Gig drive. The larger one setup as the parity. System built itself no problems...though I will not use for pratical use as I can't even fit on DVD on the data drive. Though I may transfer my install software directory over to it just to try it out some more. Good start for myself, and got me comfortable around the web server.

Oct 27, 2008

Started to run the wiring to the UnRAID's final resting place. I'm going to install it in the dry cellar. It's not a bad location as it stays relatively cool year round. It is no more damp than the rest of the house. Finished running the CAT5e cabling, with only the end needing termination.

Oct 28, 2008

I finished running and terminating the CAT5e cabling. I was able to verify the connection by talking to the UnRAID server via webserver. Now I just have to run the AC to that location.

Oct 30, 2008

Ran some speed tests on the LAN. I pinged the UnRAID server for about an hour and did not get one dropped packet. Good! I then ran some files across, and using a Net Scanner, it reported a peak of 33MB/s output to the UNRAID and 14MB input from the UNRAID. I did notice when I was outputting, after a sudden speed burst, the system would pause. I'm taking this as the drives in the UnRAID is the bottle neck, and once a drive buffer is full, it has to write to the server. I'm not sure, but I think it is also writing the parity at the same time. This issue should be eleviated once I get the proper drives in the system. Just as an example, a 100Meg file should have copied over in 20seconds, but with this pausing, it took about 40 seconds to copy. Next step will be to copy over a .VOB file (1 gig file) and time it, then play it back across the network on the HTPC or MediaPVR and verify that it plays correctly. There were reports that DVD playback stuttered with this motherboard/network driver, but that was using previous versions of UnRAID, and the more recent 4.3.3 had better driver support.

Nov 1, 2008

Wired up the the AC receptacle into the area where the UnRAID server is and everything powered up fine there. I also performed some more network tests:

Continuous Ping Test

I sent continuous ping packets to the server to see if I had any dropped frames.

And the results of the test

I then sent a bunch of small files across the network to the UnRAID server the back from the server. The files were MP3 of AC/DC new album "Black Ice" (which is a pretty good album I must admit). All 15 tracks, final album size was about 127Mb. I used AnalogX NetStat Live to monitor the transfer speed.:

To UnRAID

From UnRAID

The next test was to send/receive a moderate sized file. I used a Ren & Stimpy video which was just under 100Mb in size.

To UnRAID

From UnRAID

Finally the last test was to transfer 1 large file to and from the UnRAID server. For this I used a 750Meg video file.

To UnRAID

From UnRAID

Not to bad for a 10/100 LAN. The one thing, and I think I stated it above, and which seemed to be very evident in the large file transfer TO the UnRAID box, is the persistent pausing. I think it can be boiled down to a couple of issues. One being that the data drive I'm experimenting with is only 3.2Gigs in size on the IDE bus. The parity drive also is only 6.4Gigs. So these two drives are old, and very slow. The other thing is that I think the parity is being written to and verified on the fly. The first issue should be solved once I get newer drives to place into the system. The second issue is just the way UnRAID opperates. This shouldn't be a problem when getting files from the server, such as watching video, as was noticed in the the last "From Server" picture. It seemed to be sustained and consistant.

Dec 5, 2008

I haven't been playing around with this system too much as of late. Been busy with my other projects. Found out that the three drives will be a Christmas gift so I'm salavitating over that. I picked up a couple more SATA cables in prep for connecting the drives when I get them. Nothing would drive me up the wall more than to get the drives and not be able to connect them. So look for an update around Dec. 25th.

Dec 26, 2008

Ended up getting two Seagate 750G drives and an APC UPS for Christmas. Installed the two drives and the UnRAID system is rebuilding now. After the parity check, I will have to format the data drive. Drive temps are Parity: 23 degree C, Data: 28 degree C. So they are still running pretty cool, though granted, the room that the system is sitting in is pretty cold right now.

Dec 28, 2008

So here is the screen capture of my UnRAID main screen. The second drive, though shows it very cool, has gotten up to a whopping 28 degrees C. The parity drive remains relatively cool and steady at 23 to 24 degree C. I still have an old IDE 6.4G drive which doesn't indicate temperature. I have transferred the majority of movies, music, install files, emulators/ROMS, and some pictures over to the server and it is in full swing now.

Jan 12, 2009

Over the weekend I had a chance to really start trying out the UnRAID server and network in a possible real world situation. My kids were watching a movie that was playing on the MediaPVR, so I decided to take the opportunity to really run things and setup the HTPC to also play a movie. So I had two movies running from the UnRAID server, across my LAN to two different computers, and everything ran solid. Absolutely no glitches in the video or breakup of audio. I was very happy with the results of this test. Now I'm going to have to try three streams, then four, then...

Jan 15, 2009

Well, over the last little while, I've been monitoring the hard drive temperatures. I've seen the data drive as low as 13 degree Celcius when the system spins up. With the weather as cold as it has been, my storage area where the UnRAID server resides is pretty cool. To play it safe, figuring that the hard drives have a lower temperature limit, I decided to leave the drives spinning. The data drive is now sitting around 26 degree C. The parity drive was always sitting around 22 degree C. This makes me feel a little bit better. I am very happy with this system.

Feb 8, 2009

I recently got a 3' USB extension cable, as I've wanted to move the USB flash drive to the internals of the box. Last night I went ahead and installed that, as well as clean-up/tie-wrapped some of the other harness. Hopefully that will increase air-flow over the components, and keep everything a little bit more cooler. System booted up after without issues.

Feb 16, 2009

Since I was spending some time in setting up and testing two video streams on the BES box, I figured this was a pretty good test on the UnRaid server and general network throughput. I decided to push the envelope even further by not only streaming the two movies to the BES system, I decided to stream a third movie to the MediaPVR. Well everything ran really smooth, and I didn't notice any hiccups. Maybe I should try for four streams ;) .

Apr 4, 2009

Finally picked up a drive to finish off the "Basic" array. It is a Seagate ST3500418AS 500Gig drive. Arrays rebuilding nicely as I'm typing this. This should buy plenty of space until I start towards HD content.

Dec 26, 2009

As mentioned in the hardware discription above, I got for a Christmas gift two 1.5Tb drives. The one is now the new parity drive, and the second is becoming the new disk1 drive. The old parity will replace the 500G drive. I am also going to expand from the Basic version to the Plus version which will allow for up to 6 drives. This way I can add back in the original 750G Disk1 data drive (it will become data disk3), and can add in a couple of IDE drives, or I could pickup a SATA controller and add the 500G drive back in as well...or not.

The parity is added and currently the data on disk1 is rebuilding.

Jan 13, 2011

Finally upgraded my UnRaid from the Basic version to the Plus version. This will now allow me to use up to 6 drives (5 data/1 parity). I have a 750G drive in the system, unplugged, but ready to go. When I get a chance, I will have to power down the server so I can officially plug it in. Very excited and happy, since I was starting to run out of space on the Basic version.

Jan 14, 2011

System is up and running with the additional 750G drive. So now all four ports on the motherboard are in use, and I have two drive spaces in the UnRAID Plus package to fill. So I may try out that crap PCI SATA card and use the 500G drive I had sitting around. If this works, then that drive will solely be for backups, and install software. Basically stuff that doesn't require speedy throughput and keep all the other data drives for media storage.

Feb 5, 2011

Decided to try that crappy Bytecc card in the unRAID server, if it worked, I would have an additional 2 SATA ports to play with, though at a reduced throughput when compared to faster PCIxE bused cards. Currently attached to it is a 500G drive. It actually started up fine and currently the drive is refreshing and building within the array. Hard to believe that I may actually have a use for this Bytecc board after all...I was ready to throw this junk card into the garbage...but now, I'm kinda glad I kept it.

May 25, 2011

Purchased a new 1.5T drive as I've started running low on space. This drive replaced Data drive 3 (750G). The drive was only $68, and was the last one available. Hopefully I'll be able to use the 750G in the available port on the Bytecc card.

May 27, 2011

Now that I had installed the larger drive in place of the previous 750G drive in location 3, I decided to attempt to add the 750G drive to the second port of the Bytecc card. When I started the array again, according to the web server, it couldn't find drive 4, nor recognize drive 5 (both the 500G and 750G on the Bytecc card). I realized that the cards firmware was flashed to work as a SATARaid card, which being RAID 0/1, if using multiple drives, they had to be identical. I ended up downloading some base firmware for the card, and the flash utility, and attempted to flash the on-board ROM so the card would work as a SATALink, or each port was independent of each other. Well it worked. The 500G drive was again recognized as that, and the system built up the 750G drive as the new drive 5. So I have maxed the system for the total drives under the "Plus" plan. Since January I've increased the server size from 3.5 Tera-byte to 5 Tera-byte. Almost a 50% increase of hard drive space.

Hopefully that will tie me over for the next little while.

Now the only thing that concerns me is the hard drive temperatures. Especially with Data 3. Since it is sandwich between the Parity and Data 4 drives, during the rebuilding stage, topped out at 43 degrees Celsius. Parity and Data 4 were at 36 degrees C and 37 degree C respectively. The system currently has a 120mm case fan at the bottom that pulls in outside cooler air to aid in cooling the case. I installed a second 120mm fan that blows air across Data drives 1 and 2 at the top of the box. The power supply has a 120mm fan that is to suck out the hot air. But the three drives in question all reside in the 3.5" drive bay around the middle of the box. There is about an 1/8" space between the drives, so I can understand why Drive 3 is getting quite a bit warmer peaking about 43 degrees during the rebuild stage. See the image below for how the system is currently cooled.

May 28, 2011

I contemplated about upgrading the OS from 4.3.3 which I had started with, to the most recent stable release - 4.7. Joe L from Lime Tech, more or less indicated that 4.3.3 had a major bug in that when installing a new drive, all drives could be formatted. Well that prompted me to update, so tonight I am now running UnRAID v4.7 final. So far, everything has gone off without issues. I even took the time to wrap some of the wiring a little better, and to open up the front to allow for more airflow. We'll see if that helps some of the higher drive temperatures I was experiencing. I also took some updated pictures of the current setup, which are shown below.

Data 2 drive

Data 1 drive

Data 4 drive

Data 3 drive

Parity drive

USB Flash drive tucked along the bottom

Data 5 drive mounted to the back of the box

Closer image of Data 4, Data 3 and Parity drives, along with 120mm Nexus cooling fan

Front of box, 120mm fan at top cooling Data 1 and 2 drives. Drive 4, 3, and Parity shown below the fan.

September 18, 2011

I forgot to mention this, but in August, I has disk 5 breakdown. Don't know what really happened, because, I tried to use disk 4 and disk 5 as recovery disk for a data retrieval test. Long story short, I had been given a drive that was almost dead, and I used a linux tool to attempt to recover the data. The experiment wasn't successful (hence no data was recovered), and during this time, disk 5 broke down. It appears to now have some bad/un-recoverable sectors on the drive. When I try and copy data to it, it just stops and reports errors. So I'm in the midst of swapping drives around. Not to long ago, the local computer store had a sale on Seagate 1T drives. I ended up getting one of those, which I will first use to replace drive 2, since it currently is only 750G in size. Then I will use that spared up 750G drive as the new drive 5.

Also I noticed that the parity, drive 3 and drive 4 temperatures indicated the drives were getting a little to hot. Especially drive 3, which is sandwiched between the other two, would hit temperatures above 40C (45C was about the worst). The parity drive would also occasionally hit around 40C as well, with drive 4 in the high 30's. I ended up putting another Yate Loon 120mm fan in front of them (just below the orange Yate Loon in the picture above). It is hot-glued to the plastic front face. I also enlarged the lower vent holes in the front face for the lower Nexus fan. Doing this seemed to have helped, as now the three drives are reporting temperatures in the low to mid 30's...in par with the other drives in the system.

October 26, 2011

So the other night, the UnRAID server suffered a catastrophic failure to the Antec power supply. About three years to the date, the supply just died. No rhyme or reason for its demise. It actually disrupted the UPS, and sent that into battery backup. So I ended up picking up a new Antec EA650 supply to replace it. Prior to full recovery, I went into the BIOS to verify all drives were still recognized, and the motherboard came up okay. UnRAID startup also can do a memory check, which I ran to verify that the RAM wasn't fried. Luckily it appeared that the power supply didn't take anything else out along with it.

Now the question...why did this happen? The only thing I figure was during the summer, someone brought me a "dead" drive to see if I could extract any data from it. The only system I could prove this on at the time was the UnRAID server (it had the drive availability, and capabilities). That "test" ended up destroying one of my data drives...it now has constant errors and can't be written to. Now I think that test also may have stressed the supply, and it finally just had enough.

Since it is a three year old supply, and I think out of warranty, I opened the old supply up with the hopes to troubleshoot and repair it. If I can, then I will have a backup supply in the event that this should happen again. Normally I wouldn't do this but since this is supposed to be a good supply from a pretty reputable company...

So opening it up revealed no burn marks or apparent blown components. There was no burning electrical odour you get when a component is smoked. One thing that others have reported on are bulging capacitors, which I didn't notice happening in this supply. I did a voltage measurement across the bridge rectifier and it reported 0 volts (should be 120VAC). Right next to the rectifier is a small PCB mount relay...got me thinking/wondering. Maybe that relay went bad, since there is a mechanical element to its operation. I recall an incident years back where my NAD Integrated amp wouldn't turn on...it happened that a delay relay went bad, and once that was replaced, the amp has been functioning ever since.

I will have to spend more time to figure this problem out, and will hopefully report back some good news soon.

October 29, 2011

I ended up getting an early B-day/Christmas gift, in being a new 1T data drive. I'm going to use this drive to replace the 750G data 2 drive. This will allow for an additional 250G on that drive, which will be nice to have. The 750G drive will then be re-allocated to data drive 5, this will max out my drive usage for the license that I have, and bring me back to where I was prior to that horrendous data recovery experiment I attempted in the summer.

Other things of note on this system is that I installed the unMenu web-server. UnMenu allows for a whole lot more of options to play with, such as power-down events, and temperature protection scripts etc.

*Update*

1T drive up/rebuilt and running, new drive 5 (750G) almost done. The system is back to normal! Yeah!

June 10, 2012

After researching the UnRAID forums for information on hard drive card cages, I discovered that I had the wrong type of supply in my server. The Antec supply that I was using had dual +12V rails. According to the UnRAID website, the supply should use a single 12V rail for the system. Reason being was that if using more than one rail, one couldn't determine how the overall power distribution would distribute enough current to whichever rail had all the drives connected to. This may have been the reason for blowing the last Antec supply I replaced. When I was trying to extract information from the dead drive, I may have inadvertently pulled too much current for that particular rail to handle...which in the end, stressed the supply and failed it.

So I ended up replacing the Antec with a Corsair CX600 supply. The overall wattage is 50W less than the Antec, but the single 12V rail is capable of 40A output. This will allow for a maximum of 11 7200RPM drives (with headroom) to be connected to the system, should I ever upgrade my UnRAID license to Pro.

The Antec will be put to good use. I will most likely replace the supply in the newer Workhorse computer, that is usually on 24/7, replacing its generic stock supply. Or I may use it in the video editing machine...no, most likely in the Workhorse.

September 5, 2012

Finding out that I'm running out of space...so I'm going to be doing a major over-hull of the server. Getting a new motherboard and IO card. Will be changing the case and going for a UnRAID Pro license. The motherboard I picked up is the Asus P5B-VM DO. It is a motherboard highly recommended by Lime Tech, and is a board that they have used in their own retail systems. It supports the Intel Socket 775 CPU, has GigLAN, and has 6+1 on-board SATA ports. It should be a direct replacement of the current ECS motherboard.

The IO card I picked up is the Promise SATA300 TX4. It is a PCI SATAII controller that supports up to 4 SATA drives. It to is one of the IO controller cards that Lime Tech uses in their own servers, so it is pretty compatible with UnRAID and I should have any issues.

So with these two items, along with the current Bytecc SATA150 card, I'll be able to populate up to 12-13 drives. At that point, I'll be maxing out my power supply.

Now I have to decide on the case and signup to the Pro license.

September 8, 2012

Looks like I'll be getting a new case made by Antec. The Antec Nine Hundred Two V3. It was on a clearance sale from the local computer shop, and was under $70 before taxes. Not a bad price. This case I've heard mixed reviews on. The hardcore gamers say it is too flimsy, but it is one of the recommended cases on the Lime Tech site. It has lot's of 120mm cooling fans, a 200mm cooling fan at the top, bottom mounted power supply area, pretty good cable management, but the golden ticket...9x 5.25" drive bays. The eventual plan is to use 3 4x3 Hot Swap card cages to give me a max of a 12 drive server (11 data, 1 parity). In the end, the setup will be very similar to Lime Tech's RB-1200 server.

September 13, 2012

Disassembled the old server, and started to swap parts over the new Antec box. Overall the install went good. Really no issues. I was hoping to use one of the Yate Noon fans internally, but the bracket that would hold it had to be removed when the hard drive card cage is used for mounting drives.

Issues started when powering up the system. I got a bunch of BIOS errors. I made changes to the BIOS, but would then loose them after every hard power-down. Pretty sure that indicates that the internal CMOS backup battery is not longer holding a charge. I figure since this board is dated, even though new, it was mostly sitting on a shelf for a prolonged period of time, which drained the CMOS battery life. So I have to pickup a replacement.

The BIOS errors though were really concerning. So I found out that the BIOS firmware was too old (for that board, it was showing v.0505). So I ended up flashing the firmware with the most recent version offered from the ASUS website. I set the BIOS accordingly, but again after every power-down, I would have to do a reset.

Finally after many times fiddling, I got UnRAID to load, but when going through the webserver, my drive allocation was all screwed up. Realized soon after that even though the SATA ports are labelled SATA1 through SATA6, it would pair SATA1 to SATA5 as primary master/slave, then pair SATA2 to SATA6 as secondary master/slave. So once I did some cable swapping, then redoing the BIOS, again I got UnRAID to load, and all the drives were recognized in their proper locations.

So I will replace the battery tonight, finalize the BIOS settings, and they system should be good to go. An extra would be that the Promise controller finally comes in the mail, and I can install that before placing the system back in the cellar.

Pics of the bare case, and the final setup will be coming soon.

September 15, 2012

Below are the pics of the bare case and motherboard prior to the new install.

Barebones case

Front of case, showing all the drive bays

Rear of case

Top of case showing the huge 200mm exhaust fan

The spacious room inside

The two hard drive cages. Each cage can hold three 3.5" drives

Each cage has a removable/washable filter

New ASUS board in the box

Motherboard topology - unwrapped

6 of the 7 SATA ports shown here

The boards expansion slots - 1x 16PCIe, 1x 4PCIe, 2x PCI

IO back panel

After everything install, the system was powered up, and this is what you are treated to:

Parity Drive

Drive 1

Drive 2

Drive 3

Drive 4

Drive 5

Though not the best, my cable management skills are getting better.

USB drive out the back of an expansion slot. New cable that interfaces direct with the motherboard via on-board header.

Another shot of the stack of harddrives

Finished product (minus the Promise IO Controller)

December 27, 2012

Lot's has happened over the past few days, with Christmas and all. Now that hard drive pricing has come down a little, time to get back into expanding the UnRAID server. For Christmas I got two 2.0Terabyte Seagate Barracudas. They now populate the parity drive and data drive 1. This started a cascade affect, and the old parity drive (1.5T) has now become data drive 2, the old data drive1 (1.5T) now became data drive 4, and the old data drive 2 (1.0T) now becomes data drive 5. Moving the 750G and 500G drives to data drive 6 and 7 respectively.

To allow for these two additional drives, required the UnRAID license to expand from the "Plus" version to "Pro". This expands the number of drives from a total of 6 to a whopping 20. Though my ultimate goal is to expand the system to a total of 12 drives eventually (power supply limitations). So I'm in the midst still of doing this massive drive swap/upgrade.

This will also allow the use of the Promise SATA adapter card that I picked up earlier (drives 6 and 7 will be connected to it).

November 24, 2013

Can't believe it's been almost a year since my last entry here. This is just one machine I never had to touch. I've been running UnRAID version 4.7 without any issues, but for some reason I decided to upgrade the OS. It was a rather finicky upgrade, but I finally got the most recent version 5.0.2 installed and running. I tried to install a few extra plugins, like the SimpleFeatures plugin...but found out that version 5.0.2 doesn't really support it too well. Hopefully things can be corrected in the near future, as the SimpleFeature plugin has a few things which I would like to use. I like the new look of UnRAID, and now I can upgrade to 3 Gig drives.

December 23, 2013

Well, I've been having some issues with Data drive 7 for the last month (since just before upgrading to UnRAID 5). The drive appears to be slowly dieing, but I was hoping to get by till Christmas, then I could replace it. This past weekend, we had a pretty bad ice storm, and though we didn't loose power flat out, we had a few brown outs. These occurred while I was downloading onto Data drive 6. Now that drive appears to be down, and drive 7 can't be found...big CRAP! Though Data 6 was only being used for downloading content...then transferred to different drives, loosing it is not all that much of a pain other than having to purchase an extra drive when not intending on it. Data 7 is a little bit more of a complex one to loose, since it had a lot of install programs and the sort backed up on it. I was hoping that I would just have to replace that drive, and have it rebuild the image on the new drive before I would have lost another.

My hope is that the Promise SATA I/O card that those two drives are plugged into has faulted, and I will be able to access the drives once they are moved to Bytecc backup SATA controller. I hope to get one more use out of the drives to get a recent parity, then replace them entirely (or in the very least, move them down the chain to an even lesser role). Fingers crossed. But loosing a possible two drives here, and the MediaPVR drive...it's a bit of a sting.

December 28, 2013

This has been a whirl-wind over the last few days. I had the two drives...my old 500G drive as data drive 7 and a 750G drive as data drive 6 both go down. I knew data 7 was failing...it's been on a slow death path for the past month, and I had hoped that it would get me through until Christmas, when I could replace it. Data 6 drive was a sudden surprise of it having issues due to the ice storm that created one too many brown-outs. With both drives faulted...the UnRAID array couldn't be started. I ended up picking up a new 1.0T drive from the local computer shop to replace the old Data 7 drive. I tried everything to get the system back up and running, but nothing worked.

I ended up removing Data 6, Data 7 and the new drive, and reconfigured the server with the 5 good data drives. After performing a parity-sync, I added the new 1.0T drive as the new Data 6 drive. Now having 6 good drives in the array, I then added the old 750G drive back into the fold, and created a new UnRAID configuration. Doing this would preserve any data that I had on that drive. It came up as a good drive still, and I'm currently performing a new parity-sync on the 7 data drives.

Once this new parity-sync is completed, I will add the failing 500G drive back in, create a new configuration, which hopefully will "see" that drive...at least long enough that I will be able to extract/move the data from it to the other drives...and then just remove it from the system. Fingers crossed that this will work since the data on that drive is pretty important, since it is all my install files, backups, and other pretty important files. There is just a wealth of information...which I'd hate to see lost. I will update the final outcome.

I did learn one valuable lesson from all this, and that is to replace a failing drive when it starts to occur...as opposed to when it is most convenient, since incidents could occur outside of your control, which could take down other drives. Just not worth the risk.

December 28, 2013 *UPDATE*

I was able to salvage the 750G drive (old Data drive 6), and everything seemed to be working with it, but when doing a parity-sync, it came up with over 9000 errors...indicating that it could very well be on its way out. I ended up moving everything off of it in the event it does finally fail. After the system had completed the parity sync, I powered down with hope that I could do the same thing, but with the 500G drive (that I knew was failing). It started to look promising when I powered on the system and it realized the "new" drive was present. But when I went and reconfigured the system, it was treating the 500G drive as a new drive and indicated that it was unformated...DAMN. My worst fear came true...I had lost the data on that drive. Well...as much as it pains me, I have to try and look at the positives. Most of the stuff on that drive I may not have bothered to really look at again. Majority of the data, I may be able to just re-download. Vital information that I had on Xlobby...I have in google docs. MediaPortal files I can always get again. So all is not lost...just will take a while to get back. Time to move on.

In the end, I will have to pick up an additional drive for the system...another 1T drive to get back to the current standard. Doing so will put me around 10T of storage space. Pretty impressive from when I first started this project 5 YEARS ago. Wow, time flies, and overall, despite this setback...which I could have prevented had I replaced the drive earlier, this system still has been one of the most stable and reliable systems I have ever built.

December 31, 2013

To finish off the year, I ended up picking up a 2 Terebyte drive to replace the faulting 750G drive currently in slot 7. I was going to pickup two 1T drives, but they would have been more expensive for the same amount of space...so I went with this drive.

Finally will get back the same drive count that I had before the major failures...and more space to boot. And time to rebuild the lost data...as I require it.

September 14, 2014

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been playing around with a new Multi-zoning setup to replace my aging Xlobby configuration. This system would be more streamlined to what the family utilizes. I chose to use Raspberry Pi's loaded with Squeezelite/Shairport. The Logitec Media Server (LMS) I found out could be configured on the UnRAID server from following this post in the UnRAID forums. Then ultimately following the instructions on overbyrn's website. LMS has been running great, and without issue. I currently have 2 Pi's setup....with the plans to increase the system to 5 total.

April 4th , 2015

Added another 2 Terebyte drive to the system as Drive 8. Though Drive 3 is exhibiting errors, I'm moving everything off it to Drive 8 in the event of an actual failure, but currently the system is now 12.5T in size....simply awesome. System added the new drive without issues.

May 13th, 2015

I've been logging into my home system remotely for the last few days, and noticed that the parity drive had disconnected itself from the UnRAID system. In doing so, the system is basically left unprotected. I tried adding it back in, and it does, and goes through the initial stages, but when I do a parity check, the drive disconnects over and over again. So thinking that the drive is faulting, I have picked up a Western Digital WD20EFRX "Red" drive to replace it. The "Red" series are specific for using in server systems that are on 24/7 in home and small office enviroments. It's a little more expensive in the upfront costs, but a vital drive like the parity drive needs the robustness. The cost savings I figure will come down the road, as I will have to replace the standard desktop drives as they wear out more quickly.

I will most likely test the old parity drive out as another data drive, and see how long it lasts for. The drive is barely 2.5 years old, so I'm a little surprised that is has actually faulted...but since it was the parity, it is written and read the most out of all the drives.

April, 2016

Man, power outages in my location have been brutal on my server. Though it didn't help that my server was plugged into the wrong outlet on the UPS (non-battery backup) but still should have been surge protected. The most recent outage corrupted the parity disk as well as one data disk. The system read both disks as corrupt and would not start the array. After fiddling with it, the system wanted to format the data disk....gulp. So before I would allow that to happen, I connected the drive into a windows machine, then used some software to read and copy off the contents of the drive. I also did a drive check on it and found it didn't have any errors, so the drive was good, but UnRaid still viewed it with issues.

So with the drive removed, the parity drive was still giving me issues of corruption, but doing a disk check on it revealed it too was still healthy with no errors. After looking through the forums, I found a post that basically indicated to use the New Config tool to startup a new UnRAID. Did this, parity disk started. I added all the data disks back into the system (minus the one "faulted" data disk), and started a new parity check. Once completed, I added the data disk back into the stream, did a format, and now have almost completed adding the data back onto the disk. Once done, I will do another parity and finally have the system fully running again.

During this time though, I have also found that one of my other data disks are on its last legs, and doing drive checks revealed it had many errors, and is on its way to failure...oh well, I still have the old parity drive kicking around, which I can check and use if good.

But man, these power outages are brutal. I'm also looking into a quick way, now that the UnRAID box, router, and main switch are all on the battery backup, to figure out a quick app to connect to the server and shut it down in event of future power outages. To prevent this sort of corruption, or worse, drive failures in the future.

June, 2016

Well it didn't take long, but the faulty data drive died. So I took my old parity drive, which I suspected that didn't have any issues, and started to use that. All is good again, and now have even more space as the drive is 2TB in size.

June, 2017

The big news is that I just upgraded the UnRAID OS to 6.3.5 from 5.02. Nice interface, and getting used to the new Docker system. Had more parity disconnect issues, but I don't feel it is the drive that is the issue. Will be investigating the cable, and possibly the motherboard port. The entire system is aging though, so anything could be starting to go.

July, 2017

Continuing with the issues I was seeing. Problems went further that I was loosing network connection. I had setup two dockers, Plex and LMS, and both were giving me issues, drive issues...all sorts of issues, to the point that the server would just disappear from the network. I finally plugged an external monitor into the server, booted and waited. Finally after a day or so, I had a memory error pop up on the screen. BINGO!!!, I was still running off of the original 2 sticks of 512MB of memory. Reading the UnRAID specs for OS 6, the basic memory requirement was still 1G, but to do alot of the additional functions and dockers, many users indicated that up to 4Gig or more of memory is required. Since I had the MediaPVR computer sitting defunct, I ended up swapping out the memory from that computer (4Gigs). The UnRAID server has been running rock solid. LMS stayed connected, I could build a Plex library without issues. The system in whole just seemed more robust. Glad I had that memory available.

Jan, 2018

Had drive 1 fail, so had to pickup a new Seagate 2Tb drive to replace it. I am going to perform some drive test on the failed drive, and maybe fix it up again. Also have had a 1.5 Tb drive sitting, for the same reasons (failed previously in the UnRAID box). Maybe these drives could be saved. There are plenty of free software on the net that can be used to validate hard drives, so will try out one of those.

April 1st, 2019

I've been using UnRaid on OS 6.3.4 since June 2017. When I did a recent attempt to update the version to 6.5.3, it indicated I didn't have the space on the flash USB. So out went the little 250Mb Firefly I had been using since my UnRAID inception, and in with a Lexar 16G Jumpdrive. The whole process went easy enough, and I was up with the new flash drive and upgraded version in about a half hour.

I've also been investigate intermittent drive failures of late, and I'm thinking that the issue is the UPS. It celebrated its 11 year birthday, which is well past the life of a UPS. I think it was putting out some noise that is interfering with the electronics connected to it. In the case of the UnRAID box, screwing up the power line which mucks with the hard drives. I've also been experiencing WIFI/Internet issues, which I've deduced to the router, which was also connected to the UPS. So I'm going to migrate over to a whole house surge protection system soon, and most likely not even worry about a UPS system.

May 17th 2020

With a second UnRAID server coming online in a few weeks, I figured a naming update from standard "Tower" was called for. I know it is a little cliche, but I decided to name the two systems after Greek methodology; Zeus and Cronus. Also the systems are currently running UnRAID 6.8.3.

Feb. 2nd, 2021

During some regular maintenance (blowing out the dust bunnies), I swapped the 2x2GB sticks from Cronus into this Zeus, upping its memory to 6GB. It should help overall. Also added a 1TB external drive I had sitting around not doing anything. Will most likely use this for some temporary storage location or something. Another thing I discovered is the Linux version of qbittorrent has been upgraded to include RSS feed information. This is something that was missing in previous versions, and resulted in using a separate Windows machine to perform torrent functions. Now that it is included, it now frees up that machine, and being a Dell Optiplex with a Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 CPU (2.66 GHz) with 4 Gigs of RAM, it should do nicely as the new Cronus machine. Downloads now can be done via Docker along with Sonarr.

Feb. 17th, 2021

I've had some mixed thoughts on upgrading the CPU in this system. Since its inception in 2008, this UnRAID server has used a very basic Celeron 440 single core processor. Now on UnRAID 6, the demands of the system is putting a load on this CPU. I've watched the CPU load top out at 100% a few times. As one of my final upgrades to this system (outside of upgrading the hard drives of course), is to put a better CPU in it. I researched what I could do with this motherboard and RAM combo, and I thought about maxing the CPU with a Q6700 quad. But I've read mixed results with using that speed of processor. The board doesn't overclock well, so adjusting the RAM speeds for matching that sort of CPU could be troublesome...and I didn't want to bother purchasing all new RAM to suit a Q6700, and not to mention the CPU cooler would also have to be replaced with one that can handle a CPU that runs at over 100W. I decided to instead get the fastest CPU that uses the 800MHz FSB that suits the memory I have which is an E4700 Core2Duo. It has two cores clocking at 2.6GHz each, utilizes a 800MHz FSB, and has 2M Cache. It also only increase the power consumption to 65W (from the Celeron 35W), which allows me to keep using the Arctic Cooling CPU cooler. The E4700 was also available on Ebay from a vendor close by, so it was cheap and inexpensive to ship.

I also discovered upon pulling the old CPU was that it was not a 440, but an un-released 460 that ran at 2.4GHz. Not sure what to do with this relic, since it was a CPU that was never formally for sale to the public. May just keep it for nostalgic reasons.

Mar. 14th, 2021

Drive 4 has been slowly erroring its demise, to the point that I decided to finally swap it out for a new 2TB WD Red Plus (same drive as the parity). System is currently rebuilding itself. At some point I should upgrade drives 2, 5 and 6 to at least the same type of drives, as they will most likely be the next to fault.

Only other thing was that I upgraded UnRAID to the current stable version 6.9.1, released a few days ago. No issues so far.

June 1st, 2021

Was noticing some glitches with LMS cutting music out while listening. Brief cuts, then the music would come back. Also watching video (movies or shows), that were on Plex, would just randomly stop. Just some general weird occurrences. I started to wonder if I was having network issues with the server as I use ControlR to monitor the system, and it even kept on recycling its connection. I monitored the switch port and noticed that every few seconds the status LED would go off and back on. Changed ports on the switch...same thing. Changed CAT cables, still same thing. I was finally able to investigate if down to the motherboard's onboard NIC adapter. Unfortunately the board (and most of the electronics) are well over 10 years old in this system, and of all the computers in the house, this has been running nearly non-stop for all this time, well, I guess the adapter decided to finally go.

I ended up purchasing a cheap TP-Link TG-3468 GIGLan adapter for it (I used the same to upgrade the LAN NIC in the BES computer not long ago). I also turned off the onboard LAN in the motherboard BIOS. All seemed to go well, the new adapter was recognized as ETH0 and no issues on the LAN side.

But upon powering the system back up, and going online, Data drive 1 just decided to flake out and UnRAID removed it from the array, basically emulating its data. The drive started to accumulate UDMA CRC errors. This error generally doesn't mean there's an issue with the drive, but the cable connection between the drive to motherboard. I double checked the SATA cable, even though I know I didn't mess with it when installing the new NIC. Fired the system back up, and force the system to rebuild the data on the drive. After nearly 35,000 UDMA CRC errors, and over 12 hours or doing a rebuild/parity check (with an estimated 30 hours to go...OUCH!), things just weren't right.

I ended up actually replacing the SATA cable outright. System is now currently rebuilding the drive. It's been 10 hours, with only 3.5 hours more to go (that's more like it), and 0 new errors, I guess the cable went bad. Why? I have absolutely no clue, since all drives were good before shutting down to change the NIC. Did a proper shutdown, and didn't even touch any cabling that would affect that drive, so yeah. No clue why it would just suddenly break down like it did.

Rest assured, I'm going to be extremely careful when putting the cover back on, and putting the system back to its rightful place in the server room. Luckily it wasn't the drive, as I didn't really want to have to purchase that right now.

September 18th, 2021

Just over 5 years ago, I replaced Data 3 with the old parity drive (June 2016 entry), and finally that drive actually ended up faulting. It was a slow methodical demise, as the Reallocated sectors grew to over 6000 errors. So I was able to attain another WD20EFZX drive on sale from the local computer shop. The system is now rebuilding.

September 23rd, 2021

Had a power failure the other day, just after adding the new hard drive. After that, the UnRAID system would disappear from the network. After happening a few times, I noticed that the server wouldn't start up properly. A couple of the case fans had gradually seized up from age, and figured that the power supply may be on its way out. It wasn't until I disconnected a couple of the hard drives, finally the system stayed on. I ran through memtest to verify that the memory wasn't faulting. I also pulled the Bytecc card out since I wasn't using it. Since things seem to be working, I plugged the two drives back in, and cleaned the one fan. Currently everything is working again, but will continue to monitor the power supply. It may need replacing.

December 26th, 2021

The local computer shop had on sale the WD20EFZX drives for $50 off, so I snagged two of them to replace the older and smaller 1Tb drives in the system (Data 5 and 6). Installed the first on Christmas day and rebuilt without issue. Now swapped out the second drive and the system is currently rebuilding the data to it. System capacity is now increased from 13.5 Terabytes to 15.5 Terabytes.

The two 1 Terabyte drives will be used in Cronus, and that system will take on a new RAID scheme. Most likely RAID 5 where there will be some redundancy and allow for future expansion. It's current RAID setup is RAID 0 (Striping).

January 8th, 2021

New year, just wanted to show a view of the current Zeus desktop. Hard to believe this system has been rocking it since first built in 2008. It's come a long way, and still lots of life left before it finally gets retired:

November 26th 2022

A few things have occurred since last posting almost 2 years ago. I picked up an APC 1000W Backup UPS earlier this year. It has smart technology which allows it to communicate with Zeus (via USB), and will do an orderly shut down in the event there is a power outage. Installed on both Zeus and Cronus is the plugin called NUT (Network UPS Tools), which is a client/server monitoring system that allows Cronus to share the USP and be shutdown as well in a power outage event.

In the last week, I have also been updating the hard drives file system from reiserfs to xfs. Reiserfs though is still good and robust, but it isn't maintained anymore, whereas xfs has been a solid file system for over 20 years. Been a slow process, but one that I hope will pay dividends for aiding in protecting data from power fails, system crashes or hardware fails.

Also did some research on using a 2nd cache drive (or using an unassigned drive) for docker appdata. Had a Hitachi 160Gig laptop drive not doing much, so I squeezed it in the system, and have set it up with all the dockers connected to it.

January 14th 2023

So, some bad news. Late last season, after I had updated UnRAID from 6.9.2 to 6.10, I was getting random crashes that required a hard reboot. These crashes occurred sporadically, sometime 2 or 3 times in a row, then run for a few days, then happen again.

I thought at the time it may have been the upgrade, so I down graded back to 6.9.2, and the crashing frequency seemed to decline (but still occurred).

I blew the system out of dust, thinking that it may be overheating, even though the monitored temperatures were all recording that they were fine.

During this time, I had syslog report out to Cronus, but it would only report that it had communication to Zeus, and when a crash happened, it just reported a lost connection.

Looking at the syslog, unfortunately would recycle on a reboot, so I never got to view what the crash was. Though I did notice, that after a reboot, when I looked at the syslog within Zeus, I noticed network connection errors, but this seemed to happen when the system was booting up, and figured that these errors were occurring until the LAN card drivers were installed/running.

Over time, the crashing seemed to happen less frequently, and I seemed to be able to run the server without issues. I decided to update the machine to UnRaid 6.11.3 (was the current stable build at the time). Zeus ran straight-out for over 20 days without any crash occurrence. That was until a few days ago. It crashed, and now when I try and boot, it may get to the login screen, but usually errors out and crashes shortly after.

I connected Zeus to a monitor and keyboard, and this is what I have been seeing:

Here is the network errors:

And this was the last one that occurred after I had logged in via command prompt:

Now, I have performed MEMTEST on the memory in the system, and it has come up as passed. So I figure the problem could be:

a) PSU failing

b) motherboard failing

c) CPU failing

d) any combination of a), b), c)

So believe it or not, I have the old ECS board that I had used in the very original UnRAID setup. I moved the CPU, and memory over to it, and loaded a trial version of UnRaid on a flashdrive, and have been running it the past day with out any issues, which appears to remove case c) above. The next test will be to integrate the PSU into the mix and see if there is a voltage issue, even though when in Zeus's BIOS, the monitored voltages are all within range. But it is looking like the ASUS P5B-VM DO could be finally done for. Not a surprise, since the integrated LAN died about a year and a half ago, and it has been zapped with plenty of power outtages and brown outs over the past 8 years.

So I'm currently looking at options that won't break the bank, but in the end doing a major overhaul to Zeus and with that, coming up with a new name which will be announced in the future.

What will happen to the CPU and memory from Zeus, well, I will be piecing together another media machine, so it is basically there now. I pulled a small SSD 128Gig drive from a down laptop, and will use that as the boot drive. I'll get a cheap graphics adapter for it, and it should work decently enough.

January 17th 2023

I have on order a motherboard/CPU/memory combo package. It consists of a Supermicro X10SL7-F LGA 1150 mother board, Intel Xeon E3 CPU that runs at 3.1 GHz, and 16 Gigs of ram. I purchased it off ebay, and though is dated, it should be able to run the system better than what the ASUS system was capable of. I'll update more once the package gets here, but below of some pics of the board as advertised:

Not too sure if that USB EDC 2SE stick will also be included, or they were using that to test if the system operated correctly, so I don't have full details on it yet, nor do I know the make of the RAM or officially what the Xeon processor actually is. I'm assuming that the ad indicated a 3.1GHz CPU that it is a Xeon E3-1220/1225, but will find out.

During this downtime, I've also had the chance to cleanup and reconfigure the cabling in the Antec case. I figure that as the CPU cooler is passive, I will have to make sure ample air flow can get to the heatsink. The Antec case top fan was a specialized 200mm size. It died a few months back, and it is difficult to replace, so I'm going to fit the top of the case with a 140mm fan, and close off any surrounding holes, so air will be forced out through the fan itself. I think that will be better to exhaust the heat from the passive CPU heatsink.

January 26th, 2023

Motherboard was delivered. Also received a few days back new SATA cables and power extensions. Just waiting on an I/O faceplate for the motherboard, and I can start putting it all together, fire it up, and do some preliminary testing.

If all goes well at testing, I will then officially come out with the new name for the system...it will no longer be called Zeus (R.I.P.).

*UPDATE*

Motherboard installed. Took some mucking around in the BIOS to get it up and running. Tried out the IPMI interface, works good. Check out all the temp readings, and everything appeared to be fine. So connected the UnRAID flash drive and booted up into UnRAID easily. System is currently performing a parity check. It is fast though. On my old setup, a parity check of all the drives would take over 15 hours. Now, just 5 hours.

I still have some playing around to do. I want to setup a link aggregation between the server and router, since the motherboard has 2 NICs, and I've been reading up on my router (Netgear Nighthawk R7000 running DD-WRT) is capable of it. I'm also still waiting on an I/O shield plate for the motherboard. Once that comes in, I would like to get some pics of the new install.

January 27th, 2023

With the new hardware installed, and almost all the wiring cleaned up. All tests have passed, and the UnRaid system has gone through a parity check. I'd like to introduce the server (formerly named Zeus): Spielberg. Yes named after Steven Spielberg. Why? like naming the music server after a current, influential music artist, and the UnRAID system primarily being a movie/TV/video distribution system, it would ony be fitting to name it after a current popular, influential individual in the film making industry. Steven Spielberg has not only won many top level awards and accolades, he has written/directed some of the most influential, artistic film of the modern era, one being a personal favorite of mine - Saving Private Ryan.

Long live Spielberg, man, legend and machine.

Some pics of the system during its live testing:

January 31st, 2023

The I/O faceplate came in at last, and I was finally able to put Spielberg back into place in the server room, fully assembled. Once powered back on and unraid loaded, I was able to setup the dual LAN with two ports on the router and create a Link Aggregation connection between the two. Why? Once working, it creates some redundancy should one LAN line go down, the other takes over. The second reason is to increase the throughput between the router and the switches. I figure if multiple computers connect to Spielberg (for Plex services), the single LAN connection between the server to the switch is no longer the bottleneck. I was able to test the setup and run 4 streams of 1080p video to my work computer, BES, HTPC and Kodi Games Room, and all played without issues. The other thing to verify that aggregation was working was to disconnect one of the LAN lines between Spielberg and the router, and it should continue with a connection...which it did.

So Spielberg is fully operational. I hope to have many years with this setup...more than what I had with the previous setup.

February 26th, 2023

Got a new 3Tb WD WD30EFRX Plus drive. This will replace the 2TB parity. The old parity will then replace data disk 2, which is the last smaller drive I have in the system. All data drives will then be at minimum 2Tb, with a total system size of 16Tb. New Parity drive is currently rebuilding without any issues. Once the drives have been swapped and parity checks completed, I'll update the drive config image above to suit the new current setup.

February 27th, 2023

The 2Tb Western Digital drive that was used for Parity is now the new Data 2 drive, replacing the older 1.5 Tb drive. This gives the overall NAS 16Tb of space to work with. Drive was formatted and rebuilt without any issues. System is running full tilt again.

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