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RFOneWatt

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Everything posted by RFOneWatt

  1. Did you get this sorted? Seems to me you did everything correctly. So, to be clear - You had a standalone 8TB drive that was getting full. You bought a new 12TB drive. You downloaded and installed DrivePool. You created a brand new Pool consisting of your old 8TB drive and the new drive 12TB drive, giving you a new Virtual Drive, G: Because G: is considered a new drive, you are going to want to MOVE all of your files from E: to G: That's all you should have to do. In the future when you add drives to the pool you won't have to do anything and you should simply see the new free space from the new drive. Since this is a new pool, it's empty. ~RF
  2. Very true. In my old age I tend to vote with my wallet more and it irks me when a multi-million dollar company f#$ks up and offers nothing to the consumers that it shafted. Though I do understand that Seagate is certainly no Maxtor. I just ain't giving them any more of my $$ on personal principal. ~RF
  3. Throw them in the gutter. Better yet, toss them through the front window of Seagate HQ. ST3000DM001 Excessive Failures Because of these drives (and a few prior issues with Seagate drives) I will never purchase a Seagate product again... No reason to when I can get HGST's for the same money.. I haven't had a bad HGST drive yet! (Out of about 30) ~RF
  4. This is a bullshit post. DrivePool works. And has worked well for years. You paid a trivial amount of money for a fantastic piece of software that simply performs and you act like you were served up the complete opposite. What bugs have you encountered that have inhibited your ability to use the product? How many support tickets have gone unanswered? You are not entitled to free updates for life while simultaneously expecting someone to fix something that isn't broke. I for one am ecstatic that I am able to basically ignore Drivepool. It just works and has never caused me any issues.. I'm sure the Stablebit folks appreciate your enthusiasm for the product and posts like yours probably do encourage them to work harder but you can make the same points without acting like an entitled snot..
  5. I've seen that one before. The reason I went the DIY route with that Vantec's was because of amperage draw however it looks like that Noctua would do the trick as well... Thanks Drashna. ~RF
  6. I swapped out the 80MM's in the rear of both my 4220 and 4224 Norco cases with the Vantec's. With those running on high you could probably get away with all three fans failing on the main fan board and just the two Vantecs in the rear would keep the cases cool. They move that much air. In each case I run all five of the fans (three 120MM Deltas on the fan board and the two rear 80's) through one of these in each case and it works way better than I expected. Variable Fan Controller It's fun to crank them all the way up (on the fan board I used the fastest 120MM Delta's I could find) and watch the cases hover. <grin> My servers are in my basement and on high you can hear them throughout the whole house. (and I live in a cinder block and plaster house built in the 50's.) With the above fan controller around 1/4 the way up they are nice and quiet and I haven't had to move the knob it in three years on either machine. ~RF
  7. Check out the Vortec Tornado series of fans. They are ungodly loud but move an unbelievable amount of air. I use them to cool 48 drives and they have been great. Pair them with an inexpensive adjustable fan controller and they are completely tolerable and you always have the option of turning them up if needed. Just two 80MM Tornados in the back of your Norco at 1/4 speed will amaze you. I too would love automated fan controller software but I've never had good luck with any type of software fan control. (I.e.Fanspeed) I'm sure it's due to the difference in controllers on motherboards. ~RF
  8. THIS: Nobody knows about it. Fix that problem and everything else will fall into place. I remember when I first stumbled upon DrivePool. I've been doing this stuff for a long, long time and I was floored with the product. I'm not easily impressed but DrivePool flipped my switches. I actually wrote a damn good "first impressions" review the first night I installed it (which I can't seem to find ATM but will eventually run across.) I do my my best to promote it every chance I get (which is admittedly not very often these days) but with proper advertising and promotion your "little development company" wouldn't be little for for very long. I would charge extra for MAJOR upgrades. If I got an e-mail from you guys tomorrow that said "Drivepool 3.0 available now - 25.00 upgrade fee" I wouldn't hesitate. I don't think most would. I've e-mailed Covecube @ 2:00AM on a Sunday and received an answer within twenty minutes. It doesn't get better than that. You guys have a gem on your hands -- it needs to be treated like one and you guys deserve to GET PAID in the process. Just my 2 cents. ~RF
  9. You just reminded me that I need to return the bad drives to Seagate before they charge me. I haven't had a chance to modify the firmware on any of the drives, which appears to be the best solution (you rock, Drashna) but I do need to do my 5TB pretty soon. For now I throttled the SMART queries in Scanner and at first glance I think its helping.. How much, I haven't had a chance to check yet... -T
  10. When I did call I asked about upgrade paths and "he" (I'm gonna say HE rather than THEY because I know when I call again I'll get a different story) said there was nowhere to go with these drives. That's not what I remember when dealing with Seagate in the past, I think I'm gonna have to be a squeaky wheel -- They absolutely KNOW there are issues with these drives. Heck, they RMA'd three drives that were almost a year out of warranty. (I just found four more 2TB units also.. they are gonna love me!) THANK YOU THANK YOU for that link. I'm reading through it now and it looks like it's going to do the trick! It appears any problems people were having had to do with fumbling with a boot disk and the CLI --- The firmware modification appears to work fine though. I did some research a few weeks ago and I downloaded a firmware package from someone who said it was sent to them by Seagate to fix the problem.. I downloaded it and it's the same version of firmware that shipped on the drives I just got. (CC54) I'm going to call Seagate Monday but as soon as I get the chance I'll do a couple drives and report back, I've got a couple shelled 5TB drives that need it regardless. Thanks again for doing my research for me Drashna -haha- -Tony BTW, I throttled the SMART queries to once every 60 minutes and I think it has had a positive effect. Not quite sure yet.
  11. I hear that. I'll see what I can do about throttling SMART queries on scanner. Now I'm stuck with eight (now, refurbished) 4TB drives and two 2TB drives that I can't use in either Scanner/DrivePool server. I'm going to call Seagate tomorrow just for the heck of it. They know there is something up with these drives but I couldn't get it out of them. Thanks for the responses guys.I think I'm going to try these drives in a different configuration and see what I come up. I'll reply if I can add anything else - thanks again. ~RF
  12. Hey Guys -- Thanks for the responses and sorry for the late reply. Well, I just got the new drives installed in both servers. They are up to 500-700 on their load cycle count within 20 hours. They are running different firmware. Argh. I can't say I like that answer but I get it....however it's going to bug the heck out of me knowing that it's "not right" and the drives heads are being racked constantly. <rant> I have two new 8TB Seagate archive drives I put in when I first started the RMA process 12-14 days ago. They are up to just 25 on their load cycle count. All of my Hitachi Drives, mostly two years old only have about 300-400. I checked a six year old drive in another server and that's at about 500. Hmmmmmm...any ideas why I can't use any of the APM functions in Scanner? I keep getting "CAN'T SET APM for this disk." This happens on all disks in both servers on both Highpoint & LSI controllers. Are these drives just ignoring APM or any clues as to whats going on? (Excuse my ignorance, I haven't done much reading yet) -Tony
  13. So I just RMA'd a box of ten 4TB drives that were just about two years old and I had a couple of questions regarding these drives and Stablebit Scanner. IN That time these drives racked up a load cycle count of over 300,000. It's kind of scary I didn't know they had an issue until Scanner told me once they hit over 300k. Is there a way I could have been notified sooner or do I not have something set correctly? The other question I have is there are still currently two drives running in a the system showing this SMART error and Scanner / Drivepool is not evacuating the drives. Shouldn't it be? I'm pretty sure I'm missing something..... Thanks!!! ~RF
  14. Good Day! I have a Drivepool system and every time I reboot the server I get a notification that a specific (long gone) drive is missing. Everything is is fine, been ignoring the error for months. Any ideas? ~RF
  15. These work well: http://goo.gl/PqRJ2r Well, WOPR has been upgraded! I swapped out two of my oldest 4TB Seagates and popped them in my backup server (AP1) and installed two new Seagate 8TB archive drives in WOPR. So far so good, I've got two more on the way. Does anybody have any suggestions on the best way to break in / test new drives? So far I've been damn lucky but it's only a matter of time. I was thinking of just letting the BURST TEST in Scanner run for a few days but I'm sure there are better ideas. ~RF
  16. You, my friend have obviously never been in an extremely large datacenter (think: Google, Bing, Backblaze, etc.) where you'll find hundreds if not thousands of Supermicro cases and Mobo's. It's apparent your experience is limited to Small/Medium/Large business' where HP, Dell, etc. are the norm. What was sub-standard about your high end Dell servers? I've been using them exclusively in enterprise applications for 20 years so I'm a bit curious what you found that was sub-standard. The biggest and most important issue with consumer drives in an enterprise is quite simply simultaneous access, not cooling. Keep your drives cool and they will last a long, long time. ALL of the drives discussed in this thread will choke with anything more than a couple of streams. This reminds me of a common flame war in the truck world: Diesel vs Gas trucks. Bottom line is, if you need a diesel -- YOU'LL KNOW. There isn't a question or debate. Same thing with drives: Enterprise vs. Non. You'll absolutely know (or find out the hard way) when you need enterprise drives. As for the Norco, I own two. A 4224 and a 4220 and I just purchased another 4224 for my offsite "cold" storage duties at another location. Norco has to cut corners somewhere to make it affordable. I'm glad they did where they did - (drive trays, inadequate fans.) The drive trays work perfectly fine and I don't remove/replace drives often so that's not a big deal. As for the cooling it was a simple matter to replace the stock rear 80MM fans. You'd be hard pressed to find an environment where this does not solve ALL all cooling problems so that's really a non issue. BTW Drashna: I can absolutely guarantee you don't need to replace the fans on the fan board. Just two of those Tornado 80's is more than enough to cool even the hottest enclosure. The other place they cut corners that might be annoying is retaining the ability to use a standard power supply. On the flip side, if you really need redundant power supplies (and their expense) you're not running a Norco. However having the ability to stick a standard power supply isn't a bad thing for their targeted market, IMO. If you do find that you need power supply redundancy you can find a couple different models that will work in the Norco. (But at that point, because of the expense, you're better off just buying a Supermicro off the shelf.) So, yeah, What's the argument? ~RF
  17. Drashna: JUST DO IT! You know you wanna: http://goo.gl/gaVWb8 I doubt there is anything else that would work better than two of those in the back of your Norco. Didn't you say you had one around the house? and some SCREENSHOTS This is WOPR. Ambient Temp 75-80F Norco 4224 I still say that after 30 years of doing this stuff DrivePool is one of the very few pieces of programming that I've been thoroughly personally impressed with. I remember the first night I found DrivePool I wrote a HUGE first impressions review and I can't remember where I saved the darn thing. Derp!!! Anyways, when I put WOPR online I raped my existing server (AP1, Dual Xeon 5630, 64G RAM) of most of its 4TB drives so that WOPR was fully populated. It is now time to start repopulating AP1. It makes no sense to just buy drives to sit and spin but AP1 has a couple more years of usefulness to warrant the electricity used so I just ordered three of those Seagate Archive 8TB drives to slap in WOPR. I'll put three of the 4TB drives from WOPR back in AP1 and call it a day. These archive drives seem to be the perfect fit for Drivepool when it comes to semi-cold storage. (if that's a thing) ~RF
  18. Nicely done!! For pictures, you of course mean screenshots yes? ~RF
  19. You old? I was 12-13 y/o when I was running my C-64 BBS ... on C-Net! So don't feel bad. Those 1581's were a finicky bunch until about their last run when the finally got most of the bugs out.. by then it was too late though! ~RF
  20. Nahhh, sorry. The 4220 isn't for sale.. It's only a few months old and it's actually in use now with a 6TB pool of a few junk drives (except for the feeder disks.) I actually walked into my radio collection room this morning looking at some of my pieces. Ever since Drashna mentioned those 8TB platters my mind has been spinning. 24x8TB = what?! I honestly did not need the 4224 at the time I ordered it (about 6 months ago) but I saw no other way to upgrade the motherboard/processor/RAM in my 4220 without any downtime. Because I was working with Highpoint cards I knew I'd be running into some weird issues and it would take a few days for me to feel the warm, comforting stability fuzzies that should always accompany a new, important machine. SO.. after a bit of deliberation I ordered the 4224 case and just put all of of the new components I had been collecting in that. It only took two days to be sure it was stable. I expected much worse and it could have been as I did run into the strangest freakin' problem in all my 30+ years of doing this stuff. If I didn't happen to have two identical Highpoint 2740's on hand I'd still be in limbo waiting for an RMA from Highpoint -- again. I swear, the problem was so freaking weird it's still bugging the crap out of me because I fixed the problem by swapping cards in the machines, that's all....and so I still don't know the answer....as I said before I'm by no means a hardware guy but I've built quite a few servers. I do have one of these I might be willing to part with. It's not dirt cheap though, esp. once you throw in shipping: Sans Digital 8 Bay Tower Raid - The one I have is black. Honestly you'd be better off just buying the Norco 4224. The difference in price isn't that much and you wouldn't be settling. Never settle!! I got my 4220 for $319.00 shipped from E-Bay. Not too bad. it's the ancillary items that kill ya but they can be bought and scavenged one piece at a time. Off the subject kinda but exactly how I just built my new server with limited resources (granted,over a shorter period of time but same concept as below:) Whenever I've wanted something I couldn't afford outright (I DETEST credit cards) I try and buy it in pieces (whenever possible.) About 10 years ago I had a dream of having a BIG radio tower in my backyard. And if you want a big freestanding radio tower (no guy wires) in a residential area, well, they are far from inexpensive. Almost impossibly so-for-the-average-joe. Sooo... I bought one 10 ft section of tower at a time over a period of about three years all the while keeping my eyes open for all of the other components I needed for the project. When you're not in a hurry it makes all the difference in the world. An example was the rotor I needed to point/rotate the antenna array on top of the tower. New they cost more than $800 and are built like garbage compared to the old American made stuff. I ended up buying one that was manufactured in 1976, off of E-Bay for 75.00. It was a bit rough but it was all original and it did still sorta work. I then sent it out to a shop to be refurbished, told him to take his time and got it back about a month later, absolutely better than new for about $250.00 total.. Rinse and repeat until the seemingly impossible became possible!! ~RF ...sorry about the babbling.
  21. Contender? I think he's more like THE KING. Then again I've been contemplating a Drivepool install at work and I could see it getting pretty darn close with our CAD guys workload and/or our backups system. But for home use, I think Drashna is the winner ATM. I was just reading some reviews on those 8TB drives --- are they really that much slower in your experience? I use all of the heat equalization features in Drivepool but it also appears to me that some slots simply have better cooling than others(?)... now If I could get a handle on which drive is in which slot in the enclosure I could test that theory out and put the handful of 7200's I popped in the pool in those slots. When I swapped out four 5900RPM drives to otherwise identical 7200 RPM drives (in the 4220 enclosure) the temps went up a few degrees across the board. I have a bank of drives that simply stay between 77-85 and will not get any hotter. I need to spend the time that you did, Drashna, identifying and labeling the drives... which I should have done when I moved most of the drives from the 4220 into the 4224. The only reason I didn't was because I was in a hurry to get th e machine back online......and for the record, THANKFULLY, the 4220 drive caddies slide right into the 4224 chassis. I was dreading all of those little tiny screws. I do have one five TB Seagate that I yanked out of an external enclosure and popped in my pool. I don't think they sold too many 5TB drives... ~RF
  22. I see you have your drives separated by rail -- power supply rail, I'm guessing? Did you have issues? Your case temperatures mimic my temp range just about exactly.... I'm guessing it's because of locations of the drives in the Norco chassis.. IMO about 85-90F appears to be the ideal temperature for HD longevity so we're in good shape. I have a few drives that hang around 75-77F and I sometimes wonder if that's too cool. WOW! I just noticed that those 8TB drives are about $260.00. Not too shabby at all! They have really come down since the last time I looked at drives. (As i stare at my now mostly empty 4220) What's next in the 3.5 form form factor? They went from 1,2,3,4TB almost straight to 8...and no helium!! ~RF
  23. I can't see any reason to replace the 80MM's with 120's if you're not worried about noise. I actually kind of find it silly to cram that many drives into an enclosure and struggle to keep it quiet. That many drives so close together needs serious cooling. The stock fans though are definitely inadequate for anything other than a very cool data center and I am being forced to either leave the A/C in my house at 73-ish while I'm not there or replace the two 80's in the rear of the 4224 with the Tornados. About 1/2 throttle is getting the job done nicely on my 4220. Yeah, those 80's sure do move some air... about 85CFM IIRC. That's just nuts from such a small fan. Do your 8TB platters run any hotter than your 4's?? ~RF
  24. On my 4220 I use three 120MM Delta "screamers" and two 80MM Tornado's in the rear, all in parallel running through this guy: http://goo.gl/yDXnXS I drilled a small hole in the front plate where the slim DVD drive would go and mounted the variable control. I found that with two 80MM Tornado's for exhaust you could lose all the fans on the fan plate with a fully populated enclosure and still be OK.. ....of course you'd be deaf if the server was anywhere near you but for applications where sound isn't an issue these Tornado's can't be beat for airflow. (And longevity from what I've read -- apparently they last forever.) I've got two extras sitting here waiting to go in WOPR if need be. My servers are in the basement and my drives in the 4224 are running between 80-102 with the A/C in the house set at 73.That's OK but much higher than the 85-90 I like to sit at. I think if I leave the house for more than a day or two, with the A/C set at 77-79 I'm going to have issues with the stock 4224. The 4220 with the Delta's and Tornados, with no A/C on in the house, the drives run between 71-90. Absolutely perfect temp IMO.. ~RF 4224 W/ Stock Cooling. Room Temp 73F
  25. I use the SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 to go from the card directly to the backplane (one row of drives per cable) on my Norco 4220. The older Norco cases such as the 4020 use the other cable, the breakout cable (SFF-8087 to Four SATA). Each drive has it's own SATA connection in the 4020. Or you could just plug each SATA cable directly into any drive in the case of your choice. ~RF
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