NAS

[Barry Scott]

Currently trying to transfer my media over to the NAS at a blistering 1.92MB/s. It reckons it's going to take 6 hours to do 33GB of music 

Something wrong there. Is it all cabled? My first real backup was 250 or so GB and it took about 12 hours or so by recollection, I think. 

What program are you using (or are you just copying and pasting a load across)? I know I used something, before I got it all working sweet, that I imagine is not dissimilar to catching a computer version of Aids. It spent most of it's time doing fuck all and slowing my computer down. In the end I used Syncback, which is free and that was absolutely perfect. (Assuming you are using it for backups.)

[Simon Pieman]

Cos when I flow for the street, who else could it be?

[Samdy Gray]

Something wrong there. Is it all cabled? My first real backup was 250 or so GB and it took about 12 hours or so by recollection, I think.  

Yep, all cabled.

Laptop > Router > Homeplug > NAS

I can log into the Homeplug and it shows a throughput of 7MB/s which sounds a lot better. So it appears the bottleneck is actually at the NAS. Currently the NAS is only reporting 184MB of RAM installed when there's actually 512MB, so that could be causing a bottleneck.

I'm not getting on too well with Openfiler now though. Just simple things like wanting to check the HDD temp has do be done through the console rather than being shown on the GUI.

I've done some Googling about my problem with FreeNAS and it appears there is a workaround which involves connecting the HDD to the laptop, running the LiveCD and installing to the HDD and then putting it back into the server and it should boot. Only problem is I now need a SATA to USB cable.

[Simon Pieman]

Does you laptop have a SATA drive? Just remove that and replace whilst you run the live cd. Then once it's installed and shit you can swap them back.

[Samdy Gray]

Good point Pieman.

[Simon Pieman]

It would be if the hard drives were the same form factor. Sorry, long day.

[Samdy Gray]

Laptop is 2.5", server is 3.5".

I've ordered a cable from eBay for £4 so will have to wait for that to arrive then give it a go.

[Simon Pieman]

EBay is great for stuff like that. Got a screen inverter for 2 quid delivered which fixed my laptop in the end

[Samdy Gray]

Yeah, I've ordered shit loads of different bits off of eBay recently (mostly cables) for very cheap. Items that are usually £15+ in Maplin go for 99p on eBay.

[Samdy Gray]

Currently the NAS is only reporting 184MB of RAM installed when there's actually 512MB, so that could be causing a bottleneck.

Looks like I've got a faulty stick of RAM

Off to eBay to buy some more.

Did manage to get FreeNAS installed by using the USB > SATA cable though

[Peter Venkman]

I have stopped using Ebay for anything for the PC except cables, for which it is excellent value as you say Sam only a couple of quid per cable, I have most in my box of bits, pretty much for all eventualities except when I went to Crossfire 5870's in my pc the 2nd one covered up the PCI slot that my soundblaster was in so I bought on ebay a PCI Flex Expansion Slot Riser Card Flexible 6" Extender cable so that I can put it in the case well away from the 2nd card, and that was £3!

Am going to spend this afternoon cobbling together a new system of bits as I found(totally by surprise!) an AMD Phenom x4 9550 quad core in the bottom of my spare parts bin along with a 160gb hard drive, 4670 graphics and 2gb of memory, will probably flog it on for about a £100 as I could do with the pennies!

[Samdy Gray]

I love this little beauty. It's been pretty much maxed out over the last few days transferring data from my laptop to the server. Yet under constant load the CPU never gets above 30ºc and the HDD hasn't gone above 26ºc. The CPU is fanless so it's very nearly silent. I had to put a case fan with an LED in it just so I can tell when it's powered on! It's also only using ~20 watts under full load, so very cheap to run.

Managed to tweak a few settings and have got the transfer rate up to 3.9MB/s, I think my powerline adapters are maxing out at that. I'm considering investing in a Gigabit switch, some Cat5e and a Gigabit NIC for the server. Although, the mobo only has PCI (no PCIe) which I understand will limit the Gigabit NIC to 30MB/s rather than the theoretical full 125MB/s. Still, that's ~10 times faster than what I'm getting at the moment.

Just need to replace the faulty PC2-4200 RAM now to see if that improves speeds a little. Weirdly, it seems the older the RAM you need the more expensive it is these days.

[Samdy Gray]

Can any geeks tell me whether Current Pending Sectors are a bad thing? Google isn't being very productive. I know they should get re-allocated next time the sector is written to, but I don't know if it warrants returning the drive (and going through the hassle of backing it up).

SMART is currently reporting 6 but overall health is marked as PASSED.

[jayohaitchenn]

If it's started to go, replace it ASAP.

[Samdy Gray]

Right, this fella's been giving me stick for the last few days.

I had another pending sector report in SMART. Then, the NAS refused to boot because it failed fsck. I ran fsck manually which picked up on the pending sectors, so I cleared them. Everything was fine, re-ran a SMART test which showed pending sectors had reduced to 0, but reallocated sectors also stayed 0. If they were bad blocks, I would've expected the drive to reallocate them. It would appear they weren't actually bad, because the drive must've now been able to read them ok.

To be safe, I made a bootable ISO of ESTools and ran a full surface check on the disk. This came back with absolutely nothing.

Since then I've had the NAS on for two or three days and I've ripped around 300GB of DVDs. Today I've had two more SMART errors, but this time it's not pending sectors, it's DMA errors. I checked the cables and everything seems seated correctly.

The drive itself seems fine. It's passing SMART and also passed on ESTools so I'd doubt Samsung would let me RMA it. I'm thinking it must be either a faulty SATA cable or possibly dodgy SATA controller on my mobo.

Any geeks have any ideas?