What is Unraid and how to build an Unraid media server

[Jamie]

Thanks, Paul.

This sounds good to me.

Jamie

[Jamie]

Paul, do you do temperature control of the discs drives through unraid? I did a preclear over weekend and didn't have any issues. Today I started a new preclear and 2 drives in my drive array have shot up to 46 degrees C.

I tried dynamix.auto.fan and Ipmi but they can't seem to see my fans. I would like to ramp up the fan speed when the drive hits 45 C. The two drives seem to be maintaining 46 degrees C for 4 hours now, but I don't want to do a reboot into the BIOS until the preclear is done. I have control in the bios and I will set the fans to the highest level. There are three levels in the BIOS to set the fans at and I have it at 2 for now.

[Pauven]

Yes, with the help of plugins I control my case fans from Unraid. The nice thing about this approach is that you can monitor your drives, set temperature limits, and have the system automatically adjust cooling based upon drive temps.

You will need plugins "Dynamix System Temperature" to read the temps, including your array temp, and "Dynamix Auto Fan Control", self explaining.

With the fan control plugin, you should be able to manually adjust your fan speeds without rebooting into BIOS.

Also, you may need to install the plugin NerdPack (aka Nerd Tools), which in turn lets you install a lot of other Linux apps. I think you might need to install Perl or something similar for one of the other plugins above to work, and NerdPack is the best way to do this.

[Pauven]

I might be wrong about the requirement for the Dynamix System Temperature plugin. It's good to have it regardless, but I'm thinking it may not be required to monitor your drive temps, which is a stock Unraid capability.

[Jamie]

The Dynamix system temperature control is needed too. I set the temperature and fan settings as shown below. I started the array and within a minute the temperatures climbed to 46 - 47 degrees C. I did not hear the drive speed ramp up like I expected. The fans seem pretty quiet. I expected to hear them wale. The array fans, 3 of them, are connected by a 3 way cable splitter to one slot. They made a large amount of noise when I was putting things together but when I was ready for unraid things quieted down a lot. I have 2 fans in the back, 1 CPU fan, and the 3 for the array.

Things seemed to be fine today until I added 4 - 4tb drives to the array and added 4 more unassigned drives to be precleared. I started the preclear as before and the temperature readings soared. I canceled the preclears before starting the temperature investigation.

Here are the temperatures for the drives.

Hot drives.jpg (376.75 KiB) Viewed 8087 times

Here are the fan speeds. Maybe give up on the splitter for the 3 fans in the array. Their reporting a pretty high speed that is the combination of the 3 fans.

Fan speed.jpg (335.26 KiB) Viewed 8087 times

Here are the temperature settings.

temperature settings.png (168.06 KiB) Viewed 8087 times

Here are the fan settings

Fan control.jpg (218.52 KiB) Viewed 8087 times

[Pauven]

Sounds like you don't have the sensors and fan control set up properly. Sometimes you have to play around with the drivers and the selected sensors.

I'm confused by the splitter. I thought the case had three large fans and one fan speed header that you connect directly to the motherboard. You didn't connect that with a splitter to any other fans, did you? It needs a direct connection.

Full speed on the fan control is 255, in case you were wondering. They should get just as loud as during the boot. Your description sounds like they aren't reaching full speed

[Jamie]

There are 3 fans connected to one header beneath the fans. On the right side 3 long fan cables come out of the header and I connect them into the splitter to Fan 2 slot. I seem to recollect that after the splitter was connected the speed ad noise lever of the fans went down considerably. I will have to look at it tomorrow.

[Pauven]

Did the splitter come with the case, or is that something you picked up separately?

If the splitter has 4 wires (PWM), one is the speed sensor wire, and it should only go to one fan, not all 3. If it has all wires going to all fans, the cutting the speed sensor wire on two of the fans should resolve the speed reporting issue.

A pic of the splitter would be helpful here.

[Pauven]

Here's a link to a 3-way PWM fan splitter:

https://www.amazon.com/Phobya-3-Way-Spl ... 4497&psc=1


The thing to note is that on two of the fan connectors there are only 3 pins (power, ground, PWM signal), and only one connector has all four pins (including the speed signal).

If on your splitter all three of your connectors have all four pins, that is bad. But like I said, you can cut the extra pin/wire on two of them to fix it.

[Jamie]

I finally managed to fix the issue. I found that if I had only the fan wires from the far right and middle fans connected to the 3 way splitter the fans started up full speed and maintained a less quiet more noisier faster mode. When I connected the far left fan the all the fan speeds went to a quiet mode.

I decided to connect just 2 array fans to the splitter and put them on the fan 2 slot. I put the third fan on the fan 3 slot. I connected the 2 back fans to a splitter and placed that to the fan 1 slot.

I have been running the array for an hour now and the temps are holding at 35 degrees C. I will watch them through the day.

I think that I still need to play with the unraid temperature and fan controls, but I will wait on that for later.

Jamie