Lantesh

I would love to be able to access an optical drive via my network direct from Unraid just like a share. The reason for this is I no longer own a DVD or Blu-Ray stand alone player. I do have my library ripped to mkv, and use Emby to access the library, but on occasion I'd like to be able to simply play a DVD or Blu-Ray direct from the server over the network, whether on another PC, tablet or Chromecast.

Well I think I have my answer. I can't even complete a short smart test. It fails 10% in to the read. I guess the preclear operation pushed this old drive over the edge. Time to order a replacement.

I started converting my discs from reiserfs to xfs, and decided to preclear a drive after removing from the array. The pre read, and clear went fine. Then during the post read the process crashed. Unfortunately I shut down the server after this happened, and I had not saved the log. I've attached the smart attributes from the drive settings page. There is a current pending sector error. At this point I'm wondering if I should run pre and post read again and see if it finishes correctly, or consider retiring the drive. Any thoughts are appreciated.

I just ran the update, and all went well upgrading to 6.7.2. I think I'll stick with that. It's cool that that release candidates are available via the same update tool, but I'm not doing anything bleeding edge that requires any new features. Thanks for letting me know though.

Thanks Hoopster! I don't know how I missed that. Sure enough the upgrade to 6.7.2 is available right where you suggested. Thanks so much.

After moving my Pro licensed server sat unused for a year. Several days ago I decided to dust it off, and get it running again. After firing it up I saw that an update was available, and upgraded from 6.3.5 to 6.5.3 using the typical plugin upgrade path. All went smoothly, and the server is operating just fine. However the upgrade plugin has disappeared, and I've noticed that 6.5.3 is not the latest stable version. I'm assuming that due to my old hardware that 6.5.3 is the last version that my motherboard can run, and perhaps that is why the upgrade plugin is no longer visible. That's my guess anyway. My other thought is maybe the licensing system has changed, and I am no longer eligible for upgrades due to the age of my license. Can anyone shed some light on the situation for me?

Central repository/Wiki: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki That is very unfortunate, and a hard lesson learned. I never work more than an hour without making a backup of the data I’m currently working with. I also save every few minutes to my local copy. Sounds like you’ve got a much better system in place now to prevent future loss. It would have been prudent to ask questions prior to starting such a labor intensive process. That is what these forums are for. I always make inquiries before diving in. Unfortunately that is the nature of a free public forum. There aren’t any paid employees reorganizing it. Every individual here is nothing more than another community member. Be appreciative that we can come together as a community to help each other. This forum may not be organized like a tech manual, but what can you expect for free assistance? You can always reference the Wiki instead if the personal help is not satisfactory, but I find it much better to talk with others. To be honest I think you are expecting a lot for the minimal cost of unRAID. How much of your time would the price of unRAID buy? I would imagine perhaps enough time to write one letter. Can I bill you for my reply here?

Looks like you've got a decent plan laid out. As garycase said just make sure you use the correct split levels, and you will be fine.

User shares offer much more flexibility over disk shares. If you don't want to mess with split levels you can keep it simple by restricting a user share to one drive. After you've written a significant amount of data to that drive simply change the setting to another drive. When you restrict a share to a given drive that restriction only applies to writing data, not reading it. So if you have a share called "Movies" and you once had it restricted to drive 1, and later changed that to drive 2 it will now only write to drive 2, but the end user when accessing the Movie share over the network will see all the files on both drives. If you don't want to actively manage it that closely allow the share to span multiple drives, but keep split level turned completely off. Set the share to use "most free" and files go to the most free drive, and never split the file tree. So a single movie will have all files copied to the same drive, the one that has the most free space. Finally you can always move files from one drive to another manually to free up space on one drive, and fill in on another. Simply telnet in, and use the Midnight Commander file browser that is built in to Unraid. I use this all the time to move things around. The shares don't care what disk something is on. So you are free to rearrange your data all you want.

Nice build. I like the cable management that case provides.

Thank you gentleman. I appreciate the feedback. I will leave things be for now.

Assuming one's system is functioning normally is there really any compelling reason to migrate to XFS at the moment? I realize that RFS is no longer being developed, but I was thinking until I'm ready to replace a drive I'm not really feeling any sense of urgency. I currently have 3 2TB data drives, and 2 2TB parity drives. I do not have any free SATA ports on my motherboard, and I don't have an expansion card. So it is not physically possible to connect another drive at present. So I'm thinking until I need more storage, and want to invest in new hardware it seems best to just leave well enough alone. Your thoughts?

Thanks for the explanation garycase. That makes perfect sense.

Out of curiosity why don't you leave the old parity drive in place? Add your new 8TB drive in the parity 2 slot, and leave parity 1 alone for now. If you don't need any additional added capacity immediately you are better off leaving it in place. Then when you can afford to buy another drive for the parity 1 slot you can then recycle the old drive, and add it to the array.

As the others have already said replace your current drives with higher capacity drives. You may have other reasons to build a new system, but if capacity is the only issue the easiest short term solution is to replace the drives.