This post started with a quick experiment, but after hardware incompatibilities forced me to swap SSD drives, and subsequently lose a data volume, it turned into a much bigger effort. My two Unraid servers have been running nonstop without any issues for many months, last I looked the uptime on v6.7.2 was around 240 days. We recently experienced an extended power failure, and I noticed 5 parity errors, on both servers, after the servers were restarted. ...
I have been happy with my server rack running my UniFi network equipment and two Windows Server 2016 (W2K16) instances. I use the servers for archiving my media collection and running Hyper-V for all sorts of home projects and work related experiments. But, time moves on, one can never have enough storage, and technology changes. So I set about a path that led to me replacing my W2K16 servers with Unraid. I currently use Adaptec 7805Q and 81605ZQ RAID cards, with a mixture of SSD for caching, SSD RAID1 for boot and VM images, and HDD RAID6 for the large media storage array. The setup has been solid, and although I’ve had both SSD and HDD failures, the hot spares kicked in, and I replaced the failed drives with new hot spares, no data lost. ...
It’s been a year and a half since we moved into the new house, and I finally have the servers racked in the garage. Looks pretty nice compared to my old setups. My old setup was as follows: Two DELL OptiPlex 990 small form factor machines with Windows Server 2008 R2 as Hyper-V servers. One server ran the important 24/7 VM’s, the other was used for testing and test VM’s. The 24/7 VM’s included a W2K8R2 domain controller and a W2K12 file server. For storage I used a Synology DS2411+ NAS, with 12 x 3TB Hitachi Ultrastar drives, configured in RAID6, and served via iSCSI. The iSCSI drive was mounted in the Hyper-V host, and configured as a 30TB passthrough disk for the file server VM, that served files over SMB and NFS. These servers stood on a wooden storage rack in the garage, and at the new house they were temporarily housed under the desk in my office. ...
I previously blogged here and here on my research into finding power saving RAID controllers. I have been using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-4i4e controllers in my Windows 7 workstations and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e controllers in my Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. These controllers work great, my workstations go to sleep and wake up, and in workstations and servers drives spin down when not in use. I am testing a new set of workstation and server systems running Windows 8 and Server 2012, and using the “2nd generation” PCIe 3.0 based LSI RAID controllers. I’m using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i with CacheVault and LSI MegaRAID SAS 9286CV-8eCC controllers. ...
This post continues from my last post on power saving RAID controllers. It turns out the Adaptec 5 series controllers are not that workstation friendly. I was testing with Western Digital drives; 1TB Caviar Black WD1001FALS, 2TB Caviar Green WD20EADS, and 1TB RE3 WD1002FBYS. I also wanted to test with the new 2TB RE4-GP WD2002FYPS drives, but they are on backorder. I found that the Caviar Black WD1001FALS and Caviar Green WD20EADS drives were just dropping out of the array for no apparent reason, yet they were still listed in ASM as if nothing was wrong. ...
I’ve been a longtime user of Adaptec SATA RAID cards (3805, 5805, 51245), but over the years I’ve become more energy saving conscious, and the Adaptec controllers did not support Windows power management. My workstations are normally running in the “Balanced” power mode so that they will go to sleep after an hour, but sometimes I need to run computationally intensive tasks that leave the machines running 24/7. During these periods the disks don’t need to be on and I want the disks to spin down, like they would had they been directly connected and not in a RAID configuration. ...