NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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Fancy_Lad: May 15, 2003; Would you like to buy a monkey?

Has anyone played around with Xpenology? It is the Synology OS based off of their GPL code, so should be kosher from a legal standpoint.

For the hell of it, I spun up a VM on my ESXi system and gave it some disks using this Idiot's guide:
http://xpenology.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=558&start=40#p1632

Initially it was just to play with it as I had never messed with any of the Synology stuff before, but I must say that the Synology Hybrid RAID with 2 disk redundancy is a pretty darn slick looking feature. I'd much rather be able to just buy whatever disk I can find on sale at the time whenever I need to add more space to my fileserver rather than having to drop a few hundred bucks on a full array of like-sized disks when expansion time comes.

I want at least 2 disk redundancy (which rules out Unraid). I have concerns about support on Xpenology, but getting actual Synology hardware that would handle the amount of drives I'd like to run would nullify any price advantage that I might gain vs just full arrays and RAIDZ2.

Are there other options out there with similar functionality?

I have a Server 2012 R2 Preview VM I'm planning on playing with next to check out the dual parity option in Storage Spaces. Is btrfs a viable option yet? Been out of the loop for a bit...

# ? Aug 26, 2013 18:07

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 20:30

Krailor: Nov 2, 2001; I'm only pretending to care; Taco Defender

AlternateAccount posted:

Well, last week I bought the HP Microserver N54L that was on sale(but not at its lowest ever price) on Newegg. I went back and forth on OSes for a while. Tried Unraid, tried Server 2012's drive pooling, ended up just going with DrivePool itself, which seems to be a pretty fantastic product for $20. The build quality and design on the microserver is definitely good, it doesn't really feel like a low-end product. I'd like one of the new G8s, but...

All that said, I can't seem to find a straight answer online. My transfers seem to run ~60-70MB/s, and that's really fine for me, but is there no way to improve the performance of the onboard network and enable jumbo frames? Do I need to just get a card and put it in?

Thanks for this thread.

You might want to try installing a modded BIOS (http://homeservershow.com/hp-proliant-n40l-microserver-build-and-bios-modification-revisited.html). This will get you full speed on the extra internal and external SATA ports as well as enabling hot-swap for all drives. It also it looks like Write Caching is disabled by default, I saw some speed improvement after I enabled it.

# ? Aug 26, 2013 18:10

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

http://www.u-nas.com/xcart/product.php?productid=17617&cat=0&featured=Y

So I was going to buy this neat case and realized that it'll only accept a 1U PSU (SFX is out due to the mount point config it seems) and that I'm going to have to hookup 1 or 2 molex connectors to that backplane + whatever SATA drive I'll be using as the boot drive. Anyone with this case or a similar model with a pico / 1U PSU they could recommend for home use? The options I'm seeing leave me between picoPSUs with a serious risk of not having enough current drive on the 5V and 12V rails for 8 drives + CPU & SAS controller... or noisy 1U PSUs that will only ever work in a closet or basement where I'd better keep it ventilated.

Fancy_Lad posted:

I have a Server 2012 R2 Preview VM I'm planning on playing with next to check out the dual parity option in Storage Spaces. Is btrfs a viable option yet? Been out of the loop for a bit...

The btrfs wiki tells me it only supports RAID0, RAID1, and RAID10 modes in one spot while in another it says it's there but is in experimental status. I doubt it'd meet most of the needs of people in this thread looking to get a balance of data safety and cost while being as hands off as possible.

# ? Aug 26, 2013 19:19

AlternateAccount: Apr 25, 2005; FYGM

Krailor posted:

You might want to try installing a modded BIOS (http://homeservershow.com/hp-proliant-n40l-microserver-build-and-bios-modification-revisited.html). This will get you full speed on the extra internal and external SATA ports as well as enabling hot-swap for all drives. It also it looks like Write Caching is disabled by default, I saw some speed improvement after I enabled it.

I wasn't going to bother with this because the fifth sata is used for the OS on an SSD which is plenty fast, but hot swapping and write caching would be worth it. It caches writes to RAM I assume? So I'd need more of that. Also this will not break the current install will it?

# ? Aug 26, 2013 19:42

Krailor: Nov 2, 2001; I'm only pretending to care; Taco Defender

AlternateAccount posted:

I wasn't going to bother with this because the fifth sata is used for the OS on an SSD which is plenty fast, but hot swapping and write caching would be worth it. It caches writes to RAM I assume? So I'd need more of that. Also this will not break the current install will it?

Nope, it shouldn't have any affect on the current install.

# ? Aug 26, 2013 21:31

kill your idols: Sep 11, 2003; by T. Finninho

Fancy_Lad posted:

Has anyone played around with Xpenology? It is the Synology OS based off of their GPL code, so should be kosher from a legal standpoint.

For the hell of it, I spun up a VM on my ESXi system and gave it some disks using this Idiot's guide:
http://xpenology.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=558&start=40#p1632

I remember seeing some stuff about a port of the DSM. I have a 712+ and its amazing. I really wanna check this out and see how it acts inside a VM. Might take over the FreeNAS role for alot of people once it matures.

Shameless plug: I have x2 Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 Add-on Card's for sale if any packrat goons are interested. They need some tweaking to run in ESXi for you AIO people, but anyone running bare-bone OS's for their NAS and need 8 more ports for drives that run sata 3 speeds, let me know. I've ran the AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 instead ESXi for awhile.

edit: The N40L is now showing as disco'd on Newegg. Hope some good deals come up like when it was around $280; I still want one of these little guys.

kill your idols fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Aug 27, 2013

# ? Aug 27, 2013 20:29

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

I've got an N36L I'm going to be decommissioning sometime in the next month pending build and verification of my next NAS, and I was aiming at a $150-ish price shipped or sold locally.

# ? Aug 27, 2013 21:11

jmoney: May 15, 2003; what might have been

rock2much posted:

Let me know how it works out. My general impression is if I put that OS drive into another NAS it'll say "I don't know how I got here so I'm not going to let you in. Put me back!" and I'll have to reinstall an OS. I'm waiting for a slave drive kit to arrive so I can try and pull anything I really want to keep.

Just to follow up, I did get my new server in and so far the migration has worked great.

One hitch is, for some reason, my primary drive it is reporting the size and contents of all 4 drives from the original WHS v1 install. So I have a 1 tb drive claiming to have over 5 tb worth of data. I saw this when it was in use in the acer, but I assumed it was the drive extender tricking the OS, not some hard drive wizardry. And DE didn't support compression, so it's just a bunch of empty placeholder files that report the size of the real file mixed in with regular files. It wouldn't be such a big deal, but I took the opportunity of starting from scratch to reorganize my shares, so now I have to hunt down the files that I can figure out are the real ones from this crazy drive.

But other than that, the migration to drivepool was easy, everything about this server kicks rear end.

# ? Aug 28, 2013 05:28

rock2much: Feb 6, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Nice, thanks for the follow-up.

# ? Aug 28, 2013 07:06

Falcon2001: Oct 10, 2004; Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.; Pillbug

I have a weird issue - I'm running the latest version of FreeNas, and I'm using an Intel Pro/1000GT network card - in my settings on ifconfig I can clearly see it's autonegotiating with my switch at 100 mbps - but I can't figure out why. It's a gigabit router, other devices connect at gigabit with no issues.

Devices in question:
NAS running FreeNas 9.1.1 Release with a Intel Pro/1000 GT NIC
Buffalo wzr-hp-g300nh running latest DD-WRT
(for testing) - My desktop running win8

Here's what I've done so far:

* Verified that the network adapter is supported by FreeBSD 9.1.1 via http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/hardware.html#ETHERNET
* Verified cable was Cat5E and not some jacked up cat5.
* Verified pins all look good on cable.
* Swapped cable between router/NAS to another cable, no improvement.
* Swapped ethernet cables between my desktop/router and nas/router to no effect. Desktop still manages gigabit.

Alright, leaving this here for posterity's sake, but I fixed it by switching to the onboard realtek instead of the Intel. Why doesn't the intel work? god only knows. At this point I'm just quitting while I'm ahjead.

Edit: to make this post useful: anyone know how to install a 7zip unzipper directly on FreeNAS? Pretty slow over the network.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Sep 1, 2013

# ? Sep 1, 2013 08:45

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

Falcon2001 posted:

Edit: to make this post useful: anyone know how to install a 7zip unzipper directly on FreeNAS? Pretty slow over the network.

Once you've got jails setup, install with "pkg install p7zip" for the binary version. All you need is described in the freenas documentation.

# ? Sep 1, 2013 14:00

Falcon2001: Oct 10, 2004; Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.; Pillbug

D. Ebdrup posted:

Once you've got jails setup, install with "pkg install p7zip" for the binary version. All you need is described in the freenas documentation.

Ah, alright - I was having trouble finding a summary of what exactly a jail was, but I tracked it down and managed to put one together.

Edit: sort of good. Was trying to figure out why I was getting long hangs and as far as I can tell the PKGBeta repository is down? (at least according to https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng#Availability_of_pkgs_for_Download ) - I guess at this point I need to go ask the FreeBSD thread for help rather than the storage thread. Either way, thanks.

Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Sep 1, 2013

# ? Sep 1, 2013 15:56

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

This may be a stupid question, but whatever.

I have a basic model Synology Diskstation and when I access it from my laptop as a network share, moving files from one folder on the diskstation to another on the diskstation takes a long while because apparently the file is relayed over the (wireless) network through the laptop. I seem to remember this is by design the way Windows handles this kind of things.

What I'm wondering is whether there is some software tool or whatever that can help signal the diskstation that it is an internal move to make it near instantaneous, apart from logging into the web interface and using the dsm file browser.

# ? Sep 1, 2013 22:17

Megaman: May 8, 2004; I didn't read the thread BUT...

Is there something better than RAIDZ3 in terms of flexibility? I've noticed some alternative RAID solutions in the thread but have no idea what they were. I'm running hardware independent RAIDZ3 with freenas. But If I take away freenas my data is worthless, and if I lose 3 disks (yes, I understand 3 disk failures is a ridiculous amount), my data is worthless. Is it possible to get more flexible than what I'm running? Or should I not bother thinking further into my storage situation?

# ? Sep 1, 2013 22:34

Ninja Rope: Oct 22, 2005; Wee.

What do you mean if you take away freenas? You can read the data on freebsd and solaris and linux too, even if freenas stopped existing. You also need to lose 4 drives with RAIDZ3 to lose data, losing 3 just loses all redundancy.

It sounds like at this point you should be thinking about off-site backups. If your place burns down or you get robbed or you/someone else rm's all your data, it's gone no matter what the RAIDZ level or operating system you're using.

# ? Sep 1, 2013 23:21

Mr Shiny Pants: Nov 12, 2012

Megaman posted:

Is there something better than RAIDZ3 in terms of flexibility? I've noticed some alternative RAID solutions in the thread but have no idea what they were. I'm running hardware independent RAIDZ3 with freenas. But If I take away freenas my data is worthless, and if I lose 3 disks (yes, I understand 3 disk failures is a ridiculous amount), my data is worthless. Is it possible to get more flexible than what I'm running? Or should I not bother thinking further into my storage situation?

If you are worried about this it might be worth keeping your zpool version at a version that can be read by most operating systems. If you do this you can import your pool into Linux, FreeBSD and any Solaris derivative.

# ? Sep 2, 2013 00:29

PirateDentist: Mar 28, 2006; Sailing The Seven Seas Searching For Scurvy

Flipperwaldt posted:

This may be a stupid question, but whatever.

I have a basic model Synology Diskstation and when I access it from my laptop as a network share, moving files from one folder on the diskstation to another on the diskstation takes a long while because apparently the file is relayed over the (wireless) network through the laptop. I seem to remember this is by design the way Windows handles this kind of things.

What I'm wondering is whether there is some software tool or whatever that can help signal the diskstation that it is an internal move to make it near instantaneous, apart from logging into the web interface and using the dsm file browser.

Have you tried using File Station through the DSM browser interface? Should all be local then.

# ? Sep 2, 2013 06:07

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

PirateDentist posted:

Have you tried using File Station through the DSM browser interface? Should all be local then.

Yeah, that's what I meant with this:

Flipperwaldt posted:

apart from logging into the web interface and using the dsm file browser.

I guess I was hoping for some command line utility or something I could add to the Windows Explorer contextmenu.

The diskstation I've got is a bit underpowered and logging in to the browser interface is a bit sluggish. Not to mention I use a four foot password because it's internet-facing.

File Station also doesn't merge folders properly. With "paste - skip" it doesn't actually check the contents of a folder, it just checks if a folder with that name exists and skips if it does.

Which is all a bit annoying if you just have to move one or two files or merge a folder.

But I guess I'm not overlooking something evident and will just have to deal with it.

# ? Sep 2, 2013 09:37

PirateDentist: Mar 28, 2006; Sailing The Seven Seas Searching For Scurvy

Flipperwaldt posted:

Yeah, that's what I meant with this:

Whoops. That's what I get for trying to post advice when I've been up too late. :downs:

Have you tried to SSH/telnet into it and copying the files through the CLI that way?

# ? Sep 2, 2013 13:53

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

PirateDentist posted:

Have you tried to SSH/telnet into it and copying the files through the CLI that way?

I have not, but I have a feeling I might soon, once I read up on what that is and how it works. Thanks.

# ? Sep 2, 2013 14:19

BlankSystemDaemon: Mar 13, 2009

Flipperwaldt posted:

I have a basic model Synology Diskstation and when I access it from my laptop as a network share, moving files from one folder on the diskstation to another on the diskstation takes a long while because apparently the file is relayed over the (wireless) network through the laptop. I seem to remember this is by design the way Windows handles this kind of things.

Are you sure this is still true? Moving I just moved 700GB of files within a few seconds, even though my files are attached via cifs - and replicated the exact same results with nfs client on OSX.

# ? Sep 2, 2013 18:10

FISHMANPET: Mar 3, 2007; Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

If you're moving files between shares it has to copy them from the server to your client and back to your server. If the files are on the same share then it's a move operation that doesn't touch the client.

# ? Sep 2, 2013 18:45

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Bizarre. All I can say is that if I'm moving stuff using the FileStation -same disk, partition, share, as source and destination- it's drat near instantaneous and that when I do the same thing from the laptop in Explorer, it takes minutes, during which time the wireless connection is saturated. Whatever happens technically, in the background, I have no idea.

x86 Win7, using cut and paste from the contextmenu if that makes a difference. Other than that, I don't know what relevant details could be.

It's possible this isn't the expected behaviour, but it's happening for me anyway.

# ? Sep 2, 2013 19:10

Triggerle: Jun 3, 2001

I have set up a n54l with 16GB ram and 3 seagate 4TB drives.

On the internal thumb drive I have installed ESXi. An Openindiana virtual machine is installed on a vmdk disk image on the 250 GB drive that came with the n54l. I gave the machine 12 GB of ram. The 3 4TB disks are passed through raw to the Openindiana machine (like described here).

I set up a zpool with raidz (ashift for the zpool is 12).

code:

~$ sudo zpool status
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
          c4t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        tank        ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz1-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c4t1d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c4t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c4t3d0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Speeds on the machine are not really satisfactory:

code:

~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tank/movies/test.file bs=1MB count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
100000000 bytes (100 MB) copied, 8.174 s, 12.2 MB/s

~$ sudo dd if=/tank/movies/test.file of=/dev/null
195312+1 records in
195312+1 records out
100000000 bytes (100 MB) copied, 0.77414 s, 129 MB/s

Needless to say smb performance over the network is similarly bad.

What do I look for?

# ? Sep 2, 2013 19:46

kill your idols: Sep 11, 2003; by T. Finninho

Triggerle posted:

What do I look for?

What the ZFS settings your using?

Is this bench being done on the ZFS Server itself, or over network from another *nix box? Have you turned testing it from another machine on the same network, but with NFS?

Does the Openindiana virtual machine just have the basic SMB setup to share the pool, or did you tweak it somehow?

kill your idols fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Sep 3, 2013

# ? Sep 3, 2013 00:48

Triggerle: Jun 3, 2001

kill your idols posted:

What the ZFS settings your using?

Is this bench being done on the ZFS Server itself, or over network from another *nix box? Have you turned testing it from another machine on the same network, but with NFS?

Does the Openindiana virtual machine just have the basic SMB setup to share the pool, or did you tweak it somehow?

The test is being done on the ZFS server via a ssh console. I have an ubuntu virtual machine running next to it so I did the test with NFS.

code:

~# mount 192.168.0.138:/tank/movies /mnt
~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test.file bs=1MB count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
100000000 bytes (100 MB) copied, 18.0394 s, 5.5 MB/s

As for the pool AFAIK I used standard settings. I just created the pool with

code:

sudo zpool create -O casesensitivity=mixed tank raidz1 c4t1d0 c4t2d0 c4t3d0

~$ sudo zfs create tank/movies
~$ sudo zfs set aclinherit=passthrough tank/movies
~$ sudo zfs set aclmode=passthrough tank/movies
~$ sudo zfs set aclinherit=passthrough-x tank/movies
~$ sudo zfs set sharesmb=name=movies,guestok=true tank/movies

# ? Sep 3, 2013 06:29

kill your idols: Sep 11, 2003; by T. Finninho

Triggerle posted:

zfs

Did you try to disable sync writes? Are these 4K sector drives?

code:

sudo zfs set sync=disable tank/dildos

zpool create bagofdicks block-size 4096 raidz1 drive1 drive2 drive3

kill your idols fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Sep 3, 2013

# ? Sep 3, 2013 06:53

FCKGW: May 21, 2006

WD released new Red drives today, a 4tb 3.5" drive and a 1tb 2.5" drive.

StorageReview has reviews of both up.
http://www.storagereview.com/wd_red_4tb_hdd_review_wd40efrx
http://www.storagereview.com/wd_red_25_1tb_hdd_review_wd10jfcx

Also PCPerspective gave it a really good review as well
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Western-Digital-Red-35-4TB-and-25-1TB-NAS-HDD-Full-Review-WD-Red-Mini

FCKGW fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Sep 3, 2013

# ? Sep 3, 2013 16:54

BonoMan: Feb 20, 2002; Jade Ear Joe

Hey guys, got directed over here after posting in the quick hardware questions thread.

We're starting an animation project for a client that is expected to go for 12 months. It'll be me, an animator, and an illustrator working alongside me. The ideal solution would be to have something connected locally to my machine that is decent enough for me to actually work off of (it's animating lots of illustrator files in after effects, there's virtually zero other "media" involved), but that my illustrator can also access directly from her machine and dump files into as she builds them/updates things that are already there. It's a lengthy investment time wise for the project, so I'm trying to build a solution that's small and stays in our office (we share an office) and away from the rest of the media work.

1 TB of data would be plenty of storage. What might be the best solution? A NAS? An internal HDD in my machine that she has network access to?

# ? Sep 3, 2013 21:24

darkbob87: Jan 20, 2006

I'm wondering if anyone here has thoughts on the 2 TB Toshiba DT01ACA200.
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-3-5-Inch-SATA3-Drive-DT01ACA300/dp/B00B229W04

I boot from an SSD, want to upgrade the HDD I keep games (and only games) on. That Toshiba is only $85, which seems to be a pretty solid price for a 2 TB drive.

EDIT
I'm open to any and all HDD suggestions, by the way, be it WD, Seagate, or Samsung. This is not for a NAS, rather for my desktop.

darkbob87 fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Sep 3, 2013

# ? Sep 3, 2013 23:39

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Anandtech posted a 4TB NAS drive roundup

http://anandtech.com/show/7258/battle-of-the-4-tb-nas-drives-wd-red-and-seagate-nas-hdd-faceoff

# ? Sep 4, 2013 14:35

Whooping Toff: Oct 21, 2010; *ahem*

I do beg your pardon.

I'm looking for a 2 bay, as small as reasonably possible NAS enclosure that's fairly cheap to buy in the UK.

What sort of things should I be looking at?

I would probably be putting 2 4TB drives in (most likely WD reds) and they will be in raid 1. I need gigabit lan but I'm not bothered about wireless or anything else really.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 19:43

DashingGentleman: Nov 10, 2009

Whooping Toff posted:

I'm looking for a 2 bay, as small as reasonably possible NAS enclosure that's fairly cheap to buy in the UK.

What sort of things should I be looking at?

I would probably be putting 2 4TB drives in (most likely WD reds) and they will be in raid 1. I need gigabit lan but I'm not bothered about wireless or anything else really.

Before I got my n40l I considered one of these:
http://www.zyxel.com/uk/en/products_services/nsa310.shtml?t=p

Seem to go for £70-80, get good reviews for what they are. Do check they can take 4gb drives though.

# ? Sep 4, 2013 19:58

Triggerle: Jun 3, 2001

OK, so after a couple days of searching I decided to take another look at the BIOS. I found Writecache=Disabled. I must have seen that a couple times already. How embarrassing.

With writecache enabled I get 280 MB/s write speed locally and about 80 MB/s over the network now, which is fine for a N54L, I think?

# ? Sep 4, 2013 21:12

kill your idols: Sep 11, 2003; by T. Finninho

Triggerle posted:

OK, so after a couple days of searching I decided to take another look at the BIOS. I found Writecache=Disabled. I must have seen that a couple times already. How embarrassing.

With writecache enabled I get 280 MB/s write speed locally and about 80 MB/s over the network now, which is fine for a N54L, I think?

Glad you got some speeds back. Considering, I feel, anything over 80 MB/s over giga networking with basic routers/switches/nics; I'd say cool. I guess you could squeeze some more out if you tweaked your settings and network, but is it really worth the trouble for a NAS? I dunno, someone correct me.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 05:15

Ninja Rope: Oct 22, 2005; Wee.

Doesn't enabling write cache harm ZFS's ability to recover from crashes?

# ? Sep 5, 2013 05:17

kill your idols: Sep 11, 2003; by T. Finninho

Ninja Rope posted:

Doesn't enabling write cache harm ZFS's ability to recover from crashes?

During a power failure, I think, right GUYZZZ?

# ? Sep 5, 2013 05:30

Proud Christian Mom: Dec 20, 2006; READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD

QNAP TS-212s still a good device?

# ? Sep 5, 2013 05:47

MMD3: May 16, 2006; Montmartre -> Portland

Hoping someone in this thread can help me out, I have an issue that has been a pain in my rear end for a good long time now and I've kept putting off actually dealing with it.

I have a Drobo S 5-bay eSATA attached storage device. I know there's not a ton of love for Drobo in this thread but I really don't think the issue is with the Drobo in this particular case so I'm hoping there is advice someone may have that is Drobo-agnostic.

I recently upgraded to Windows 8 from Win7 but the problem started when I was on Win7.

My drobo is maybe 80% of the way full with 5x 1TB drives in it. One day I had some files end up corrupted, I'm pretty sure I know which folder the files are in, I primarily use my Drobo for housing all of my raw photography files (I moonlight as a pro photographer). I also use it for just general media storage, videos, music, etc.

When the files showed up corrupt, I couldn't navigate into the folder they were in. I could pull up the other files in Lightroom but not a subset of the files in the folder that I'm suspecting are the culprits. Windows 7 began insisting on running CHKDSK every time I restarted if the drobo was mounted. If I didn't catch it in time and cancel out of the CHKDSK it could be a very long process, pretty sure it was over an hour it would take to check the entire volume, I typically left the house or went to sleep or something or just manually rebooted so I could skip chkdsk. If I were to let it run all the way through it would tell me that there wasn't enough free space on the volume to complete the fix. Without knowing how much space it actually needs or if it would actually solve the problem I've just continued ignoring it.

This went on for probably the past year or so where I'd just skip chkdsk and continue using the Drobo without any issue.

Cut to upgrading to Win8 last week. At first the Drobo was mounting fine and I was able to access everything no problem, at some point though windows started throwing an alert in the action center warning me that corrupt files were detected and I needed to restart in order to solve the problem. Last night I restarted right before i went to sleep, without giving me any indication that Windows was going to kick off a CHKDSK session it just hung on the load screen (with the Windows icon and animated circle) . It was still going 20 minutes later when I finally just decided to go to sleep and check it in the morning. This morning it was sitting on the start screen so I log in to discover that my Drobo isn't mounted but everything else looks fine, no alert messages or anything.

So I have to do some fiddling w/ restarting the drobo and unplugging/replugging it in for it to mount again. and then the cycle will seemingly repeat again with subsequent reboots if I leave the drobo on when I reboot.

My questions are these...

is this something that seems like it will be fixed if I just give CHKDSK enough free space on the volume by moving a bunch of stuff off of it?
are there 3rd party disk fixes that may do a better job?
is there a way to just disable chkdsk or hide this particular drive from initiating it?
why doesn't Windows 8 give me a little more clarity into what it's attempting to do rather than just sit there and hang on the load screen?
am I an idiot for asking for help in this thread? is there some other thread or resource I should be looking to?

Thanks in advance for any light you may be able to shed on this for me.

# ? Sep 5, 2013 20:17

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 20:30

Prince John: Jun 20, 2006; Oh, poppycock! Female bandits?

MMD3 posted:

is there a way to just disable chkdsk or hide this particular drive from initiating it?

Does this help?

quote:

the proper way to disable CHKDSK from starting up is using the /x switch on chkntfs command in command prompt. The /x switch will exclude a drive from the default boot-time check. If you have drive C: as your hard drive, then the command to disable chkdsk from scanning C: drive would be:

chkntfs /x c:

If you have 2 drive, C and D, you can disable chkdsk with the command below

chkntfs /x c: d:

then go ahead and reboot.

# ? Sep 7, 2013 00:07

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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