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What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Show off your HTPC builds, NAS Servers, and any other hardware. Great place to ask for hardware help too.
Manni
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Manni » Sat Mar 19, 2022 1:41 pm

Hi all, I hope everyone is well.

I just wanted to update the thread because I finally received my case and was able to build my Unraid server properly. In fact, I decided to build two, because I found two cases at a decent price.

Here are the beasts:
Servers.jpg
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On the left is the server for all my 4K disks, hence called UNR-A4K. That's the 3770K with 16GB RAM, and where I put my Windows VM. That's the one I care about most. It has an LSI 16-port and an 8-port adapters, so 24-port in total. For now I'm only using the 16-port with data disks (I'll try to stay around 14 disks if I can for now) and the 8-port adapter for the two parity disks. Here's the inside:
Inside UNR-A4K.jpg
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On the right is my server for all my 2K disks, hence the UNR-B2K moniker. It's the 2500K with 16GB RAM. That one has the 9305-24i, also 24-port. Currently I only have 6 drives and no parity as I'm moving content to it, but I plan to have 18-20 data drives and two parity drives when everything is there. No VM, though I could. Here is the inside:
Inside UNR-B2K.jpg
Inside UNR-B2K.jpg (802.48 KiB) Viewed 3054 times
I have a 1TB cache SSD in both. I've also added a Noctua controller to adjust the speed of the chassis fans, because they made as much noise as a jet. Most of the time I need them at about 2/3 of the speed. I also moved the GPU to the slowest PCI slot, that way I can have two controllers in each server both at PCI 2.0 8X. At some point I'll upgrade the B server to PCI 3.0 to lift the PCI bottleneck, but 170MB/s is fine for now. The A server maxes at 250 MB/s for all drives, which is plenty for my drives.

I've also installed a USB 3.0 extension on each so that I can connect both a USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 from the front. Handy if I need to connect an external USB 3.0 drive for example.

I have now started the process of moving all the data from my QNAP TS859 and Synology DS2411+1211, which will be reconverted into backup devices with older HDDs when all is done. I have a 30-step to do list to make sure that I keep everything and move the drives as they become available, so wish me luck. I reckon the whole transfer will take me at least a month.

I plan to use the unbalance plugin to move my data around in the 4K server as I've started using it with 12 4TB older drives and I'm replacing the 4TB with 6TH as they become available.

Oh and I recommend to uninstall the old pre-clear plugin, it's not compatible anymore and is causes issues, I installed the Dynamix preclear plugin for unassigned devices that works great, and there is also a docker version (no GUI).

I've also installed the "Fix common problems" plugin, which is very nice as it detected a few issues.

Once I'm done, I'll have one server with all the data I need regularly, and another one with the data I need less often. Both are near instant to get online, unlike the Qnap (8-10 minutes) and the Synology (2-4 minutes). When/if I upgrade the drives in a few years, I'm hoping to have only one server with active data and the other one for backup. Right now I'm only using my existing WD Red and Red Pro 6TB, as I have purchased half of them fairly recently (it was the max size for my fairly old NAS boxes).

Thanks again Paul for all the help, these are your babies too, I think I would have bought the wrong case(s) without you. :)
Last edited by Manni on Sat Mar 19, 2022 8:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Pauven
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Pauven » Sat Mar 19, 2022 2:32 pm

Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 1:41 pm I decided to build two, because I found two cases at a decent price.
:shock: 8-)
Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 1:41 pm I have a 30-step to do list to make sure that I keep everything and move the drives as they become available, so wish me luck. I reckon the whole transfer will take me at least a month.
Good Luck!!!

Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 1:41 pm Oh and I recommend to uninstall the old pre-clear plugin, it's not compatible anymore and is causes issues, I installed the Dynamix preclear plugin for unassigned devices that works great, and there is also a docker version (no GUI).
I haven't done a pre-clear in a while, so thanks for the heads up.

Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 1:41 pm Thanks again Paul for all the help, these are your babies too, I think I would have bought the wrong case(s) without you.
Consider me a proud uncle! Your new storage beasts sound great. And I can tell you like your label maker too!

My only real suggestion at this time is perhaps rethink your server names. My current server name, Tower, is actually a common regret mainly because of how long it makes my UNC paths. If I had it to do over, I'd just call it T1. My next server will definitely be T2. For you, U4K and U2K might be good choices if you see the benefit in shorter names too. You could even go super short with just U4 and U2.

I've resisted renaming Tower to T1 mainly because I don't want to deal with the hassle of repointing MyMovies - even though technically it should work, MM has one too many bugs related to this for my comfort. Since you have to endure this pain regardless, your window to change your server names is still wide open.

Related, I also wish I had used shorter Share names. My "4K" share is perfect, "DVDs" is a bit long, "Blu-rays" is very long, and "TV_Series" is ridiculous. I wish now I had 4K, DV, BR, and TV. And for TV Series Seasons I should have standardized on S1, S2, instead of Season 1, Season 2, or worse yet including the show's name in the season folder's name.

Bad (and what I have currently):
  • \\Tower\TV_Series\The Big Bang Theory\The Big Bang Theory Season 12\

Good (love how this would be half the length yet conveys the exact same info):
  • \\T1\TV\The Big Bang Theory\S12\

On a separate note, I'm surprised you didn't do an NVMe SSD instead of SATA, especially for your VM running UNR-A4K. For regular caching over GbE, SATA SSD's are fine. But if you have faster networking, or VM's, the extra performance of NVMe might be nice. Can't really fault your choice, it's solid and likely good enough for your needs at a good price. I've got 10GbE and 5GbE devices in the house, and like to store some data on my NVMe cache drive for easy access, plus I run several big VM's and Dockers from the cache drive, and I appreciate the extra speed in this config.


Thanks so much for sharing your progress. Glad to see your builds are nearing completion, and even more so that you're enjoying the upgrade vs. your QNAPs and Synology's.
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Manni
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Manni » Sat Mar 19, 2022 7:06 pm

I like your suggestion about shorter names. I had already done one step in that direction, shortening share names and using only lowercase and _ instead of spaces. I might go one step further and go for A4K and B2K. I need to use the letters A and B because I've started labelling drives, drive bays using A and B (for example DA01 vs DB01 for the first drive of each server), and although I do like my label maker indeed, there's no way I'm going to start again.

By the way, I used to have lots of issues with MyMovies moving titles or renaming shares until about a year ago, but I did a long debugging session with Brian and I think we finally manage to squash most bugs. I haven't had any issues since, and I've been renaming/moving things a lot with my QNAP failure, moving hundreds of titles at the same time. Even recently, I changed the server names and it went fine. I So you might want to give it another try (of course, YMMV, try at your own risk, etc).

Re not using NVMe drives, I think you might have forgotten that I didn't buy any of these parts. The only parts I bought for these unraid servers (apart from small things like the Noctua fan controllers) are the cases, the controllers and the SAS cables. Everything else (MBs, CPUs, RAM, SSDs, HDDs, PSUs) comes from what was lying around. My previous motherboards only had SATA, not NVMe, and the two 1TB SATA SSDs were old ones. I use NVMe SSDs in my new Ryzen 5950X build, but before that I was using SATA SSDs, so SATE SSD it is for the servers.

The VM is only used for MyMovies CM and CCC, so an SATA SSD is fine for my needs. Still beats a spinner!

My copy with MC seems to stop when I close the putty window, and I don't understand why. When I try to use screen to list the sessions, there is none. Any idea? Is there a way to close the putty window without closing the session? I thought it was always the case. [EDIT: scratch that, I think I had forgotten to start screen before running that MC session :oops: ]

Jamie
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Jamie » Sat Mar 19, 2022 8:24 pm

Hi Paul,

Have you moved from unraid 6.8 to 6.9, yet? Reason why I ask is that I wonder if you have fixed your ironwolf drives for the 6.9 ironwolf disabling bug, yet? I am on 6.8 and I'm wondering whether I should do the ironwolf fix and upgrade. Now I see that if I goto 6.9 that I have to get a new preclear app. Thanks Manni for mentioning it.

Things are going good right now and I just don't want to spoil the broth.

Jamie

Manni
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Manni » Sat Mar 19, 2022 8:30 pm

Hi Jamie,

Alternatively you could skip 6.9.x and go directly to 6.10 (though I'd wait for 6.10.1).

Maybe they've fixed the issue with Seagate drives?

There are a few nice features in 6.10, I especially like the integration of a file manager in the GUI (it's a plugin but it's only supported in 6.10) and the ability to upload files or to split the parity check in different sessions.


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Pauven
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Pauven » Sun Mar 20, 2022 12:11 pm

Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 7:06 pm although I do like my label maker indeed, there's no way I'm going to start again.
:lol:

Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 7:06 pm I used to have lots of issues with MyMovies moving titles or renaming shares until about a year ago, but I did a long debugging session with Brian and I think we finally manage to squash most bugs.
Definitely haven't squashed this one, and Brian didn't even respond: https://www.mymovies.dk/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=46703

Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 7:06 pm SATA SSD is fine for my needs. Still beats a spinner!
Amen!

Jamie wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 8:24 pm Have you moved from unraid 6.8 to 6.9, yet?
No, not yet. After my server troubles cropped up a month ago, I've been too busy to troubleshoot the issues. Unraid is running fine right now, but no Dockers or VM's or Unassigned Devices. I need to resolve those issues first before worrying about fixing the drives and attempting the upgrade.
Manni wrote: Sat Mar 19, 2022 8:30 pm Alternatively you could skip 6.9.x and go directly to 6.10 (though I'd wait for 6.10.1).

Maybe they've fixed the issue with Seagate drives?
IIRC, 6.10RC1 didn't resolve the drive issue. And I've never seen any Lime Tech reaction to this issue, so it's doubtful it's even on their radar. But one can hope.
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Pauven
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Pauven » Sun Mar 20, 2022 12:38 pm

I'm watching SpaceInvader One's RC3 video, thanks for posting! The file explorer and root share stuff seems like it is solving problems I don't have, but are nice all the same.

But the cumulative parity check definitely caught my attention! Nice.

I see RC4 got released yesterday. With the increase in recent activity, we might be getting close.
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Pauven » Tue Mar 22, 2022 6:57 pm

Trying to troubleshoot my Unraid issues. My leading theory right now is that some of my plugins are incompatible with 6.8.x, and I need to upgrade to get them working again. Of course, to venture into 6.9.x and beyond, I need to resolve my Seagate drive issue. I figured I would capture some notes here in case anyone else wants to see.

I'm following along on the guide in the first post here: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/103938- ... mmary-fix/

I did everything with the Array stopped, and of course while still on Unraid 6.8.3.

I downloaded the SeaChest Utilities, unzipped, copied to my flash, copied again using MC to the /tmp folder, and chmod +x them to make the executable.

I have 4 Seagate Exos drives, ST8000NM0055-1RM112, installed, drive letters sdt, sdu, sdv, sdw. I used sg_map at the command line to figure out that these correspond to sg19, sg20, sg21, and sg22.

I ran:

Code: Select all

SeaChest_Info_x86_64-redhat-linux -d /dev/sg19 -i | grep -E 'EPC|Low C' 
to check how sg19 was configured, and repeated on sg20-22:
image.png
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The guide mentioned that Low Current Spinup should be disabled, but that they weren't sure if it was a required change. Mine were already disabled. EPC was definitely on, so that's my target.

I ran:

Code: Select all

SeaChest_PowerControl_x86_64-redhat-linux -d /dev/sg19 --EPCfeature disable
to disable EPC on sg19, and repeated on sg20-22:
image.png
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I used SeaChest_Info again to check the status, and it looks like everything is working so far, EPC no longer shows [Enabled]:
image.png
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Out of curiosity, I ran SeaChest_Info for my non-Seagate drives, thinking it wouldn't return any info at all. Surprisingly, it reported full stats for both my WD and HGST drives. The WD drives don't show EPC or Low Current Spinup at all, and the HGST drives show EPC [Enabled]. I'm not messing with these drives, they were working fine, but it was interesting to see.

While I was here, I decided to check the firmware of these four drives. All had the same firmware, SN05, and checking Seagate's website I discovered that this was the latest firmware version (almost 4 years old now). I guess I had hoped that perhaps a newer firmware was available that fixed a major bug, but I'm not really surprised at the lack of firmware updates, as I've never heard of anyone updating HD firmware before.

Note that while doing this, I came across a nice command that made it easy to see all of my Seagate drive info at once:

Code: Select all

SeaChest_PowerControl_x86_64-redhat-linux --scan --onlySeagate
image.png
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The next step was to shut down the server - completely turning off the power. I let the server have a few minutes of peaceful rest to let the last of the electrons dissipate. Then I powered back on, and during boot up I inserted a couple more pre-cleared Segate drives to see if they needed update.

Once Unraid was back up and running, I repeated the first few steps to run the SeaChest_Info tool again to verify EPC and Low Current Spinup both remained disabled. A minor curveball, the two new drives I had installed changed the sg## values for the all the drives, so I had to grab the new numbers to check the values.

Sure enough, the four drives I had updated still had Low Current Spinup and EPC disabled, yay! The two new drives are a different model, but one I recognize from the Unraid forum thread, so I know it's problematic too, so I decided to go ahead and update them.

image.png
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I left Low Current Spinup alone, as other users have commented it doesn't seem to make a difference, and only disabled EPC.

All was good, so now I'm going to venture an upgrade attempt again. I'll start with making a backup of my flash drive, a step that saved my arse last time I upgraded to 6.9.2. I'm definitely a bit scared to go down this path, as with 4 of these drives in my array, there is no quad-drive failure recovery. Fingers crossed!!!
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Manni
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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Manni » Tue Mar 22, 2022 7:05 pm

Thanks for taking the time to document this, and fingers crossed as you say! I did upgrade HDDs f/w a few times, especially with the old WD green that would drop out of my old Thecus NAS, but not recently.

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Re: What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

Post by Pauven » Wed Mar 23, 2022 3:27 pm

Manni wrote: Tue Mar 22, 2022 7:05 pm I did upgrade HDDs f/w a few times
So you're the guy.... ;)

Which reminds me of the time back in the early 2000's that a buddy of mine was trying to watch the Oscars in HD via over the air broadcasts. He was super psyched to see it in HD, and was bummed when he realized they were sending regular def over the HD channel. He called up the station, and the guy was like "oh, so you're the guy... yeah, gimme a sec... how about now?" and sure enough beautiful HD appeared on his screen. :lol:


So far so good. I upgraded to 6.9.2 and then immediately did a few tests. I spun down all drives, then spun up all drives (something which could cause errors with EPC Enabled on 6.9.x), and all was good. I did a parity check, and it completed in record time (beating my previous best by 0.1MB/s). Previously on 6.9.x, I could only make it to 66GB of a parity check before all hell broke loose, and that's not even 1% of the way through.

It's still too early to celebrate, but all signs point to this issue being resolved by disabling EPC on these Seagate drives.

Unassigned Devices was freaking out on 6.8.3, and now it is working fine on 6.9.2, so I think I was right that they changed something that broke compatibility with older versions.

Next step is to get my Dockers and VM's enabled again. I haven't run the MyMovies VM in over a month! I'm sure it will have a lot of catching up to do.
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