BACK after giving up, couldn't be happier


kreene1987

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Hey all, I've recently gone through testing unraid, and I wanted to write up on my experience and why I am keeping my money for now, potentially starting over with a fresh installation in the future if I can find some time.

 

So back in October, I learned about Unraid an immediately got excited. I tried to install on 2 computers, one of which wouldn't boot. First was an emachine T6520, second is an HP home desktop with a 6-core AMD processor and 9GB of DDR3 ram from ~2012 (model number escapes me at the moment).

 

Because my home was built in the 60's, there is no wiring, so I am stuck with wireless or near my router in the basement. Caviat being that I don't have a crawlspace nor time/effort/cash to wire my home. Both of these NAS devices were wired to my ASUS RT-N56u gigabit router, but some of my tests were done over wireless and some to my other Windows NAS over wired gigabit.

 

SO, on to the review:

Installation was a breeze on the USB stick, and my first try was on my current NAS hardware with live hard drives unplugged and a test HDD plugged in (along with the USB thumb drive). Computer WOULD NOT boot into Unraid. Posted just fine, but as soon as I selected the USB drive, absolutely nothing happened. Tried hard ports on the back, wired ports on the front, and even a USB 2.0 add-in card. Nothing. After reading on the forums someone else had the same issue with Emachine, I just moved on to an old computer sitting unused at a friends house that I am borrowing to test Unraid.

 

Placed in borrowed HP computer, booted to USB, and whala! Everything read in perfectly, all 9GB of RAM reported, and Memtest came back with no errors after 10+ hours of running over night. After installing CA and UA, I got Plex set up sharing all of my media from a test external HDD, and plex was streaming to my devices, hooray!

 

I also installed linuxserver.io and others (shout out to those guys making life easy!) as possible of the following:

Sonarr

CP

Mariadb

Nextcloud (beta)

PlexPy

PlexRequests

LetsEncrypt/Nginx

DelugeVPN

Dolphin

 

I set up shares as needed and they worked great!

 

All was working more or less perfectly in testing, so I started data migration to the PC. I added 2x WD Black 1TB drives (1 parity), 1 x 1TB Green Drive, and an old 640GB for cache. I precleared all of them and they returned no errors, drives have had easy life for less than 1 year in my Gaming PC.

 

Moving files sadly started off around 5 MB/s and just got worse from there. It basically formed a mountain range between 2.5-5 MB/s in windows SMB copy. Terracopy had the same results. tried ACHI, IDE, and RAID modes in BIOS with no change in speed. This is over USB 3.0 from a WD MyCloud, so I should see ~100 MB/s sustained. I moved the drive USB port around, used Dolphin to move them, tried mv command, nothing could achieve over 5MB/s transfer max, with ~3.25 average. I eliminated the cache and assigned the drive to the array to test speeds with that, and still no change.

 

After a painfully slow transfer process of files to the NAS (should have been a clue) I started seeing complete loss of control at the NAS. Drives are over 90% full (hitachi is ~24% full) but I can't keep this thing going for more than 12 hours. I am unable to get ANY response from the terminal or by logging in via IP or "tower". I am getting one error on the console that reads:

 

SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[] 70 00 02 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 04 01 00 00 then lots more 00's.

 

When I reboot, there are no errors, no data is missing, and sb[] seems to be a good drive with nothing but photos and movies on it (appdata elsewhere). The only thing different is an alert from "fix common problems" for an unclean shutdown.

 

For kicks I eliminated disk sb[] (WD Black) and rebuilt the array without it, yet the issues persist.

 

I have swapped power supplies to ensure it is not hardware, and testing a Windows hard drive it stays live for 48+ hours straight. Under windows I am getting ~!110 MB/s wired from test NAS to current NAS, under Unraid I am getting 3-5 MB/s.

 

Therefore I am at day 60 of testing and writing that while I may take it for another spin sometime in the future, I am going to stick with my current slow dual-core computer that sustains ~120 MB/s over wireless vs a computer that I can't get more than 5MB/s out of and I can't keep alive for more than a few hours.

 

So if anyone has any advice for perhaps starting over with my current dockers and settings but re-establishing the array such that I can attempt to get good speeds out of this thing I'm more than willing to listen, but I have read all of the forums I can take in via search and I really don't know what could possibly be causing Unriad to have such slow transfers and lock up. I am also on somewhat of a limited timeframe with wife and kids and normal life, so I'd hate to lose all of the work I have put in getting everything together, I'd really rather just move on than start from scratch.

 

I know the first comments are going to be "attach logs, attach diagnostics, etc." and I will try to get to them, but I am out of trial time and I am not sure what I can and can't get off the computer at this point. Luckily my NAS was still online for keeping current all files. I will also say that I have looked in the logs, and everything SEEMS fine and dandy, alerts come through great, until it locks, then the terminal says "Login:" and keystrokes are accepted, but nothing happens when I try to log in. Unraid GUI is completely frozen trying that. I have not tried safe mode (probably to my demise, perhaps that would have fixed it lol).

 

So... I will wait with bated breath for anyone that may be having/has had the same experience, but at this time I can't trust an OS that can't feed movies/tv or even photo slideshows to me and use my gigabit network with the hardware that is capable of doing so under Windows.

 

Thanks for reading, looking forward to getting some input.

 

Last question: Can I, without rebuke and cussing, extend my user trial with a new email and new stick by copying over all files except for the key? I really want to have the same results as most, and the functionality and ease of use is fantastic, but I am at a complete loss on daily useability of data to and from the machine.

 

I should also add that parity speeds are ~90 MB/s and 1TB completes in just under an hour. So internally the array is working quite well. All apps work as expected for as long as the computer is live. I have NOT tried a NIC card but considering it shows eth0 properly connected to gigabit, I trust that is not the issue (again, works under Windows as well).

 

So I guess help or tell me to GTFO, either works, but for now I will passively wait for a bit more development of the core software and compatibility (I'd really like it to work on my old Emachine!)

 

Thanks,

 

kreene1987

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Sounds like you have mostly done your homework, but you didn't say exactly what the destination of your write speed test was. You would never get 100MB/s when writing to the parity array, and caching only applies to those specific user shares you have configured to use cache.

 

Also, AHCI is the correct mode. IDE might work but wouldn't perform as well, and RAID is totally inappropriate.

 

If you decide to try again get help from the forum instead of trying to figure it all out by yourself. Maybe if you had posted diagnostics we could have determined what your problems were.

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Sounds like you have mostly done your homework, but you didn't say exactly what the destination of your write speed test was. You would never get 100MB/s when writing to the parity array, and caching only applies to those specific user shares you have configured to use cache.

 

Also, AHCI is the correct mode. IDE might work but wouldn't perform as well, and RAID is totally inappropriate.

 

If you decide to try again get help from the forum instead of trying to figure it all out by yourself. Maybe if you had posted diagnostics we could have determined what your problems were.

 

I apologize for not being clear. This was from the 2 computers wired with both running Windows. Unprotected to unprotected disks (internal HDD on Emachine Windows NAS to external USB 3 on Windows HP). Unraid was not a part of that transfer speed. I'd be glowing to get 50+ MB/s honestly since one drive is a WD green.

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Why did you go 60 days with Unraid and never once post to the community forums seeking advice or help?

 

Completely valid question, and honestly I guess I never thought it would help. I searched and changed and searched and changed and utilized these forums very intentionally, but with my background in computer building and the testing that I did, I guess I just narrowed it down to the OS as the sole source of the issue without assistance. As far as fixing, this is something that I didn't have a TON of time to invest in and therefore I ran into the issues late in the trial. Copying almost 2.5TB of data 5MB/s at a time takes a while ha.

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Why did you go 60 days with Unraid and never once post to the community forums seeking advice or help?

 

Completely valid question, and honestly I guess I never thought it would help. I searched and changed and searched and changed and utilized these forums very intentionally, but with my background in computer building and the testing that I did, I guess I just narrowed it down to the OS as the sole source of the issue without assistance. As far as fixing, this is something that I didn't have a TON of time to invest in and therefore I ran into the issues late in the trial. Copying almost 2.5TB of data 5MB/s at a time takes a while ha.

Many of the users on this forum have backgrounds in building, testing, and lots of other areas of computing, maybe even as much as you. ;) Many are using the OS without these issues and have been for many years.
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... Many of the users on this forum have backgrounds in building, testing, and lots of other areas of computing, maybe even as much as you. ;)

 

:) :)

 

... and with a good background it shouldn't have taken more than a couple days to realize a bit of peer assistance would be helpful.

 

Nevertheless, it IS possible to extend the Trial license.  As noted on the web site, Limetech allows up to 2 extensions of the 30-day trial:  https://lime-technology.com/try-it/

 

If you do that, you should definitely post on the forum to get some help with your configuration.

 

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Just a few comments -

* Linux USB 3 support has often been problematic, not sure why.  The Linux drivers for it are being improved though, so if you need USB 3.0 support, try the very latest beta or RC, because it will have the latest Linux kernel and drivers.

* That sense data error usually comes from a SAS card, using mvsas or mpt2sas or mpt3sas or similar, and they are not nearly as 'friendly' with their messaging.  They also are more likely to have issues.  Try using motherboard ports instead, and AHCI if at all possible.  And if you see 5MB/s again, abort it, something's wrong, grab the diagnostics right then and post them here.

* If you are formatting your data drives with ReiserFS, keep them under 90% full.  If you want to test data drives with more, use XFS instead.

* Somewhat surprised the eMachine wouldn't boot, unless it was too old.  You are sure there were options in the BIOS to boot from a USB drive?  You might try creating a bootable flash drive with Rufus, with any OS, see if it can boot anything.  If it can boot from a USB drive, it can boot unRAID (at least I have never heard of one that couldn't).

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Oddly enough I recently had a situation where my write was extremely slow (around 5MBps)

 

I replaced an old hard drive and that seems to have sped it back up

 

Now my typical speeds are once again 70-80MBps over gigabit with occasional drops to 50-60MBps... I'm using 1 parity + 4 data disks (no cache)

 

I am using the reconstruct-write mode rather than the default read-modify-write (using that is extremely slow)

 

My drives are 3x ST4000VN000, 1x ST3000DM001, 1x ST2000DM001 running on the onboard Intel SATA controller...

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May I suggest 2 things -

 

1. From what I've read its better to move your data over without parity, then add a parity drive. This way it doesn't have to calculate parity during file transfer which slows things down

 

2. You can ask Limetech to extend your license and see what they say, if you are interested in it still

 

Finally you seem like a pretty advanced user, you can probably try a similar Windows/Linux solution for data pooling etc.

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SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[] 70 00 02 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 04 01 00 00 then lots more 00's.

 

When I reboot, there are no errors, no data is missing, and sb[] seems to be a good drive with nothing but photos and movies on it (appdata elsewhere).

 

I also have a 2 TB drive that is very nice after boot.

Array fine, all green.

Some time later it will time out and never come back until next reboot.

 

The slow transfer speed along with that error makes me point at the drive in first place.

Replace and try without it to rule it out as root cause.

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Alright so I have to say this forum is fantastic and I am really glad to see some people willing to lend a hand. Honestly I have not had that experience in other forums, so maybe this Unraid IS worth a shot.

 

So I think based on the internal computer kicking around files at 90 MB/s+ and parity checks killing it right at about that speed as well, I think the source MUST be the onboard NIC. So what I plan to do is hack together a temp solution with a new drive and a new install of Unraid, and attempt transfers with and without a gigabit NIC card to see if I see any differences. It looks as though I can bring over most of my array/share/plugin/etc. settings to a new fresh install (I brought in my USB drive to see what all files live on the boot drive), so perhaps if I can find a way to get it to show some speed I will do another trial and purchase. The only problem I see here is the software is seeing the NIC as gigabit and is properly set up with mtu 1500 or whatever it is.

 

Sorry for the crabby OP post all, I am just used to a more "figure it out yourself" community.

 

P.S. I am not concerned at all about the USB 3.0 drive or speeds to/from it. It is my backup for my backup and will only run every ~3 months or so through a different computer backing up critical data. It is my cold storage drive.

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SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[] 70 00 02 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 04 01 00 00 then lots more 00's.

 

When I reboot, there are no errors, no data is missing, and sb[] seems to be a good drive with nothing but photos and movies on it (appdata elsewhere).

 

I also have a 2 TB drive that is very nice after boot.

Array fine, all green.

Some time later it will time out and never come back until next reboot.

 

The slow transfer speed along with that error makes me point at the drive in first place.

Replace and try without it to rule it out as root cause.

 

I will note that I did rebuild without this drive and the error message was gone but the OS still hangs after a certain period of time (hours, under a day). I believe it to be unrelated. Did you get any SMART errors? This drive has been nothing but solid so far, but I'm not eliminating the possibility of it being bad.

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Just a few comments -

* Linux USB 3 support has often been problematic, not sure why.  The Linux drivers for it are being improved though, so if you need USB 3.0 support, try the very latest beta or RC, because it will have the latest Linux kernel and drivers.

* That sense data error usually comes from a SAS card, using mvsas or mpt2sas or mpt3sas or similar, and they are not nearly as 'friendly' with their messaging.  They also are more likely to have issues.  Try using motherboard ports instead, and AHCI if at all possible.  And if you see 5MB/s again, abort it, something's wrong, grab the diagnostics right then and post them here.

* If you are formatting your data drives with ReiserFS, keep them under 90% full.  If you want to test data drives with more, use XFS instead.

* Somewhat surprised the eMachine wouldn't boot, unless it was too old.  You are sure there were options in the BIOS to boot from a USB drive?  You might try creating a bootable flash drive with Rufus, with any OS, see if it can boot anything.  If it can boot from a USB drive, it can boot unRAID (at least I have never heard of one that couldn't).

 

1) USB 3.0 functionality is not hugely important to me, but thanks for the note. Will it cause issues or just downgrade to 2.0?

2) Drives are all XFS per the recommendation of the manual.

3) Flat out it just says "Boot Error" after the SMART procedure on boot. Where other computers go to the unraid menu, it just says "Boot Error" and hangs. Weird for sure. It shouldn't be too old, as there are some people with much older hardware here. It's a 64-bit chip as well. AMD 3400+

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I will note that I did rebuild without this drive and the error message was gone but the OS still hangs after a certain period of time (hours, under a day). I believe it to be unrelated. Did you get any SMART errors? This drive has been nothing but solid so far, but I'm not eliminating the possibility of it being bad.

Unfortunately no SMART errors on that drive. Even preclear passed.

 

Is that AMD 3400+ a single core CPU? Or is this the emachine?

Single cores are too weak since unRAID6 anyway.

 

The only problem I see here is the software is seeing the NIC as gigabit and is properly set up with mtu 1500 or whatever it is.

If the onboard NIC is a Realtek make, then there might be issues.

Probably a lot of lost packets - you can see on the dashboard page if you switch to errors.

Combined with a single core CPU I noticed heavy fluctuation in transfer speeds.

 

A diagnostic file would be really helpful!

 

We should try to work on one topic at a time.

a. slow network throughput

b. system hangs

 

Of course not forgetting the other when dealing with one, but not mixing actions and feedback.

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1) USB 3.0 functionality is not hugely important to me, but thanks for the note. Will it cause issues or just downgrade to 2.0?

When users have had problems, the solution usually was to either try a USB 2.0 port, or try a USB 2.0 flash drive (in a USB 2.0 port).

 

3) Flat out it just says "Boot Error" after the SMART procedure on boot. Where other computers go to the unraid menu, it just says "Boot Error" and hangs. Weird for sure. It shouldn't be too old, as there are some people with much older hardware here.

A 'Boot Error' means the drive that the system thinks it should boot from is not bootable.  So there are 2 possible issues:

- The system is trying to boot from the wrong drive.  If it tries to boot from one of your hard drives, such as a data drive or parity drive, then you would get a 'Boot Error'.  Many older BIOS's will try to 'help' you every time you make a physical change in the attached drives, by setting the boot order to a hard drive, not your USB drive.  So you will usually have to enter the BIOS and 'fix' the boot order every time you add or change the physical drives.

- The drive isn't bootable.  The acid test would be to see if the drive will boot other machines.  If so, it's bootable, and there's something wrong with this machine.  But older machines can be more picky about what's bootable.  For maximum 'bootableness', make sure it's a decent mainstream USB 2.0 drive, not too big (1GB to 16GB), single partition, formatted in FAT (but you can try FAT32), and you have successfully run make_bootable on it.

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1) USB 3.0 functionality is not hugely important to me, but thanks for the note. Will it cause issues or just downgrade to 2.0?

When users have had problems, the solution usually was to either try a USB 2.0 port, or try a USB 2.0 flash drive (in a USB 2.0 port).

 

3) Flat out it just says "Boot Error" after the SMART procedure on boot. Where other computers go to the unraid menu, it just says "Boot Error" and hangs. Weird for sure. It shouldn't be too old, as there are some people with much older hardware here.

A 'Boot Error' means the drive that the system thinks it should boot from is not bootable.  So there are 2 possible issues:

- The system is trying to boot from the wrong drive.  If it tries to boot from one of your hard drives, such as a data drive or parity drive, then you would get a 'Boot Error'.  Many older BIOS's will try to 'help' you every time you make a physical change in the attached drives, by setting the boot order to a hard drive, not your USB drive.  So you will usually have to enter the BIOS and 'fix' the boot order every time you add or change the physical drives.

- The drive isn't bootable.  The acid test would be to see if the drive will boot other machines.  If so, it's bootable, and there's something wrong with this machine.  But older machines can be more picky about what's bootable.  For maximum 'bootableness', make sure it's a decent mainstream USB 2.0 drive, not too big (1GB to 16GB), single partition, formatted in FAT (but you can try FAT32), and you have successfully run make_bootable on it.

 

Same USB drive as is booting in the HP is not booting in Emachine. I have even attempted with it being the ONLY drive in the system. Not sure what is up on that one.

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Newer machines don't have the same issues as the older ones do.  You may want to try some of this advice on an older wiki page (hasn't been needed with current systems):

 

  If the Flash will not boot, read over the following tips

 

In particular, there may be a BIOS setting for how a USB drive should be treated as, such as USB-Floppy, USB-Hard drive, or USB-Zip drive.  Try them all, if you have those settings.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Set the boot order to as follows: Forced-FDD, USB-HDD, USB-ZIP

Try disabling USB 2.0 support (this will default to USB 1.1).

Try switching on or off any Fast Boot feature.

Try Switching on or off USB keyboard support.

 

This bit of advice is in the V6 manual but not on the page linked by RobJ (why is the documentation so spread out took me forever to sift through it and woke out which bits are still valid)

 

I had lots of problems getting my machine (HP Microserver NL36) to boot from USB I tried the HP tool as its a HP machine but this would not format the drive when run on Windows 10 and kept messing the USB drive making it drop off the system

 

So I moved to a Win 7 machine, formatted the drive with Rufus this restored the USB drive and then used the HP formatting tool (not sure if that was required but in the end it worked)

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  • 6 months later...

Alright guys so some good news, I bought a license last night and I was able to move to a more modern PC with:

 

Core i5 - 3570K (no Vt-d, sad)

4GB Ram (needs more!)

SSD Cache (Corsair M4)

3x1TB Drives, 1 parity

4TB external for media (that I can replicate if I lose)

 

So far apps I have installed are:

-CouchPotato (Migrating to Radarr soon)

-Deluge

-Dolphin

-LetsEncrypt/Nginx

-Nextcloud

-Sonarr

-Plex Media Server

-PlexPy

-PlexRequests (Someone JUST turned me on to OMNI today on FB Plex Pals group, likely migrating to that)

-Radarr

-Windows 10 VM (I have no idea what to do with it, just sitting there for now)

 

With a brand new installation I have found none of the issues I was previously having, I was able to get CA installed with all of the dockers, apps, get the array set up to my liking, and speeds are 80+ MB/s in parity checks and I have had zero issues with lagging multiple local streams from the box. It 100% meets my needs now and I am very thankful to have taken a second swing.

 

I have everything behind Nginx and letsencrypt and can access it from the internet anywhere in the world. Right now my wife is on vacation and can stream her workout video's via plex app or on her phone. 

 

Looking forward to the continued support as I continue to learn. I have been up about 75 days now with a few shutdowns from power loss to my home and for purchasing the license, but I think I may just go ahead and say I must have done something wrong on the old computer, there is really no reason I can find I should have been having my previous issues outside of perhaps rushing something beyond what the old computer could take.

 

Woohoo!!!

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