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For ZFS I see a lot of people say to roll out a custom blend of linux or BSD or what have you. Is the ZFS thats bundled in the Freenas releases not as powerful if you dont want to run any other services etc? Seems like that would be the best "idiot-proof" route for people who arent too comfortable with anything other than windows/mac?
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# ? Nov 30, 2011 19:36 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 07:32 |
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BotchedLobotomy posted:For ZFS I see a lot of people say to roll out a custom blend of linux or BSD or what have you. Is the ZFS thats bundled in the Freenas releases not as powerful if you dont want to run any other services etc? My personal reasons for not using FreeNAS is everyone says to stick with an older version, which runs an older version of ZFS. But FreeNAS is a perfectly acceptable solution. I'm just EDIT: The Napp-it script takes care of just about everything. It's not as streamlined as FreeNAS but its not that much of a bigger step.
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# ? Nov 30, 2011 20:18 |
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Just ordered an N40L on Newegg for $250 with a copy of WHS 2011. Two very quick questions: 1) Is WHS 2011 worth using over Ubuntu? My main PC is a macbook air which I'll be using to access it, but I'll mainly be using this to stream to a boxee. 2) How big of a USB thumb drive does WHS 2011 need? 3) Should I be using a special type of thumb drive for Ubuntu/WHS? Are write/reads going to become an issue? Residency Evil fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Nov 30, 2011 |
# ? Nov 30, 2011 23:01 |
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Residency Evil posted:1) Is WHS 2011 worth using over Ubuntu? My main PC is a macbook air which I'll be using to access it, but I'll mainly be using this to stream to a boxee. 1) It's certainly easier than Ubuntu to get working correctly, if you're used to Windows. But it sounds like you aren't, so it might actually be tougher to get everything perfect. 2) It needs a 160 GB hard drive or a partition on a larger drive. This is non-negotiable for dumb reasons. 3) If you're committed to a thumb drive, then a purpose-built OS like FreeNAS, UnRAID, or NexentaStor is a lot easier to deal with. Otherwise, you will have I/O issues, both in terms of bandwidth and media, requiring both a pretty high-quality drive and software tweaks to the OS's logging and paging to mitigate.
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# ? Nov 30, 2011 23:31 |
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Residency Evil posted:Just ordered an N40L on Newegg for $250 with a copy of WHS 2011. If you go the WHS route, I'd just install it onto the hard drive. It will carve itself out a 60GB partition and the rest will be left open for storage. You can backup the OS from the WHS dashboard to an external drive for a little bit more protection, too. Ubuntu will run better of a USB drive, I wouldn't want to run WHS 2011 on one personally. I'd go after something with decent quality for sure, just not sure what that means as far as brands and models and whatnot.
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# ? Nov 30, 2011 23:35 |
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Thanks for the help guys. I've been using an Ubuntu File server on an old P3 1Ghz that has a hodge-podge of drives and that I've been adding hard drives to piecemeal. It's currently an unholy combination of an 80gb PATA boot drive, 2x250GB PATA drives, and a 500GB drive connected to a SATA PCI card (if any of you guys do hospital IT you'll understand). I should add the original PC is one I picked up for free in college 7 years ago or so. The idea is that I'll be migrating all of the old data to this new N40L. My new server will have: 1x2TB SATA drive 1x500 GB SATA (from the old computer) 1x250GB SATA (comes with the N40L) Hopefully it should tide me over until hard drive prices come back down and I can get some more 2TB drives. The reason I was hoping to use a USB stick for booting is to keep the OS and data separate and not take up a drive bay, but it seems like this may not be possible if I want to use Ubuntu or WHS. As for WHS vs Ubuntu, I'm kind of ambivalent either way. I've been using Ubuntu and it's been fine, but I really don't ask it to do anything beyond run rtorrent and share SMB to my boxee. I'm sure WHS could do this too, but as I'm on a mac I don't think WHS has anything to offer me beyond Ubuntu as I don't have any windows PCs that I could back up to this thing (am I wrong?). FreeNAS sounds kind of interesting, especially now that it looks like version 8 has come out and has ZFS support. Any thoughts on using FreeNAS in my situation? Mainly, would it be possible for me to use the SATA drives I have now and add more 2TB drives in the future, a la Drobo? I've looked at UnRAID but it looks like it's a bit more of a pain as far as support/packages go. Residency Evil fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Dec 1, 2011 |
# ? Dec 1, 2011 00:33 |
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Residency Evil posted:Just ordered an N40L on Newegg for $250 with a copy of WHS 2011. Got a Link to that? the only N40L I see on Newegg is $350 Dollars
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# ? Dec 1, 2011 19:20 |
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Steampunk Hitler posted:Got a Link to that? the only N40L I see on Newegg is $350 Dollars The N40L was one of the shell shocker deals on Newegg yesterday. For a few hours they dropped the price to $250, but it's back to normal now.
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# ? Dec 1, 2011 20:51 |
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I'm not completely sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes: One of the servers I do work on has been having issues and I've been left in charge of fixing it (I'm a developer, not IT, so I don't really know what I'm doing). First it stopped booting. The RAID controller output was showing that one of the two drives had failed. Not a huge deal, this is supposed to be RAID 1. So the drive was replaced. After the replacement, no physical drives were being detected by the controller, so the controller was then replaced. At this point I'm told to get it working, so I go into the RAID settings and load the "foreign config" that was set on the original drive. It turns out the original config was not RAID 1, and was actually RAID 0 for some reason (??). At this point I realize I've already lost anything that wasn't backed up externally, so I set up a new RAID 1 array. I reboot, the controller detects the new RAID 1 virtual drive. I reboot again and now it can't detect anything at all again, not even the physical drives in the settings menu. Does anyone have any idea what the hell is going on?
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# ? Dec 2, 2011 18:41 |
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Freeze posted:I'm not completely sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes: The controller is probably loving up whilst trying to create a partition table. Maybe do a low-level on both drives and try again?
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# ? Dec 3, 2011 08:17 |
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Ugh, the fan on my Microserver N40L moves a little bit on bootup, then stops, and the server shuts down after 15 seconds. Anyone have this happen, or is it DOA?
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# ? Dec 3, 2011 20:04 |
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Anyone have any experience with E-350 motherboards and SATA/SAS cards? There's hardly any information out there. I have a question though, how do expansion slot cards (RAID/SAS/SATA/Whatever) work with FreeNAS?
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# ? Dec 4, 2011 13:29 |
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Odette posted:Anyone have any experience with E-350 motherboards and SATA/SAS cards? There's hardly any information out there. as long as FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE came with a driver for it, it's cool. I suspect you could roll your own drivers if you were so inclined and happened to have a card that isn't supported natively, but I have not made that effort. Also, I guess FreeBSD 8.x is part of FreeNAS 8 but I don't know if that one's up to the recommended stage yet since it still lacks a lot of features for some reason.
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# ? Dec 4, 2011 16:28 |
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Hamburglar posted:Where do you add hdparm -S242 /dev/sdX in a boot script? Or does that only apply if using Linux or something? (meaning I will have hdd spindown in Windows 7?) sdX should really be sda/sdb or whatever your storage drives are called. Also spindown is for treehuggers. evil_bunnY fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Dec 6, 2011 |
# ? Dec 6, 2011 16:31 |
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I've got a synology ds211j with 2x2TB drives running raid 1. I'm looking at removing the raid setup so I just have two partitions on the drive. Googling gave me this. I'm a total noob when it comes to the telnet commands and whether or not this will work on the latest versions. That page was made in 2007, are there any more up to date commands or an safer method? I'd like to keep the original data that is on the raid.
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# ? Dec 7, 2011 22:14 |
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Odette posted:Anyone have any experience with E-350 motherboards and SATA/SAS cards? There's hardly any information out there. They'll appear as PCI devices to the system, and then it's up to the system to have a driver for it.
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# ? Dec 8, 2011 00:07 |
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Is there a recommended frequency to scrub a ZFS pool? Do you just cron it at some point? I'm on Openindiana/RAIDZ2 if that matters.
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# ? Dec 10, 2011 14:47 |
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BnT posted:Is there a recommended frequency to scrub a ZFS pool? Do you just cron it at some point? I'm on Openindiana/RAIDZ2 if that matters. Conventional wisdom is once a month with enterprise, once a week with consumer.
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# ? Dec 10, 2011 23:44 |
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Okay so I recently posted this in the Hardware Questions Megathread and was pointed to this wonderful thread. I have been looking into building/buying a server for basic storage, streaming, virtualization and maybe a little transcoding on the side. Virtualization and storage is going to be the main purpose for this server. Now I have never really worked with servers before, so I am curious how server hardware compares to desktop hardware. What hardware specifications I should be shooting for to achieve this goal. Would I be better off building this server using energy efficient desktop hardware? or should I stick with Server hardware. Any help would be much appreciated.
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# ? Dec 11, 2011 01:09 |
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likw1d posted:Okay so I recently posted this in the Hardware Questions Megathread and was pointed to this wonderful thread. I have been looking into building/buying a server for basic storage, streaming, virtualization and maybe a little transcoding on the side. Virtualization and storage is going to be the main purpose for this server. Now I have never really worked with servers before, so I am curious how server hardware compares to desktop hardware. What hardware specifications I should be shooting for to achieve this goal. Would I be better off building this server using energy efficient desktop hardware? or should I stick with Server hardware. Any help would be much appreciated. Unless you're going to be have such a heavy load that a single socket won't satisfy your compute or memory needs then it's doubtful you need server grade hardware. You should start by figuring out what your resource requirements are. How much ram do you need/want, how much processing power do you need/want, etc.
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# ? Dec 11, 2011 05:44 |
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likw1d posted:What hardware specifications I should be shooting for to achieve this goal. Would I be better off building this server using energy efficient desktop hardware? Yes. Get hardware that's esxi5 compatible*, and a processor that supports vt-x and vt-d extensions, and as much ram as you can stuff in the box. Storage is a bit trickier. While esxi5 can and will utilize normal sata disks, if you are wanting to use large raid5+ volumes for your datastores then you'll be needing a hardware controller on the hardware compatibility list. How much storage are you looking to utilize, and what sort of redundancy to you want? *A ton of stuff is compatible even if its not on the hcl, a safe bet would be intel chipsets for mobo/nic.
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# ? Dec 12, 2011 03:43 |
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devmd01 posted:Storage is a bit trickier. While esxi5 can and will utilize normal sata disks, if you are wanting to use large raid5+ volumes for your datastores then you'll be needing a hardware controller on the hardware compatibility list. How much storage are you looking to utilize, and what sort of redundancy to you want? You can also run FreeNAS in an esxi VM, present the SATA disks to FreeNAS to make a RAIDZ array, then present the RAIDZ array back to esxi to store the rest of the VMs.
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# ? Dec 12, 2011 09:28 |
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DNova posted:You can also run FreeNAS in an esxi VM, present the SATA disks to FreeNAS to make a RAIDZ array, then present the RAIDZ array back to esxi to store the rest of the VMs. Is that a thing? Is that a thing people do?
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# ? Dec 12, 2011 09:38 |
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FISHMANPET posted:
I haven't tried it myself, but I want to. My friend has been doing so for a while and it seems to work pretty well. I was a bit about it at first too.
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# ? Dec 12, 2011 09:48 |
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DNova posted:You can also run FreeNAS in an esxi VM, present the SATA disks to FreeNAS to make a RAIDZ array, then present the RAIDZ array back to esxi to store the rest of the VMs. And where do you store FreeNAS? Perm configured and attached USB volume?
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# ? Dec 12, 2011 10:25 |
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Evilkiksass posted:And where do you store FreeNAS? Perm configured and attached USB volume? Wherever you want (except the RAIDZ array obviously). I think my friend has it on the same device as esxi.
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# ? Dec 12, 2011 12:05 |
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FISHMANPET posted:
I do this and it's amazing. I have the following hardware config: Xeon E3-1230 Supermicro mATX C202 16GB ECC 4GB USB thumb-drive with ESXi v5 40GB SSD ESX local datastore/host cache on internal SATA IBM m1015 SAS/SATA card with IT firmware (vt-d passthrough into Guest #1) \- 7 x Hitachi 3TB 5400-RPM drives (RaidZ6) \- Intel 20GB SLC SSD (ZIL) Guest #1: OpenIndiana/Napp-It, 1vCPU, 6GB dedicated RAM, ~16GB vdisk ZFS Raidz6 with ZIL on the SSD Lots of NFS and SMB exports, including an NFS export for the main ESX datastore I use NFS for exporting the storage to ESX, as ESX freaks out and takes forever if it boots when an iSCSI target isn't available. NFS is a lot more graceful, and the other guests are just unavailable until Guest #1 starts and the NFS datastore is online. Large NFS reads and writes are absurdly fast (300MB-500MB/sec) for guests, and easily saturate the gig interface for SMB or NFS over the network. I'm using this thing to store and process lots of video and it's perfect for these large, sequential reads and writes. I imagine if you had something with more random I/O (like a database or an Exchange server) it might be a bit of a dog unless you got faster drives. Lastly, I'm always at or near 100% memory usage on ESXi with 16GB. At some point I might grab another 16GB but I have some bills to pay at the moment, heh.
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# ? Dec 12, 2011 14:56 |
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Can the N40L run PS3 Media Server well enough for HD transcoding & streaming? About how much power does it use if you run it 24/7? The PSU is a meager, what, 150W?
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# ? Dec 15, 2011 19:24 |
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ashgromnies posted:Can the N40L run PS3 Media Server well enough for HD transcoding & streaming? Would love to hear peoples input on this.
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# ? Dec 16, 2011 01:57 |
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According to my UPS my N36L is pulling 45-65 watts. I don't think I have any power management stuff setup so I'm not sure what it would do when idle. Some of the people on that Aussie overclocking site swapped out the PSU for something much smaller and got the power draw down to practically nothing. e: I loving breezed through calculus but god drat I can't do basic subtraction to save my life. Galler fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Dec 16, 2011 |
# ? Dec 16, 2011 04:30 |
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Those Athlons in the Microservers are barely faster than early P4s, but they're far ahead of the Atoms at least. But that's still not enough to transcode at 26+ FPS especially in HD. Maybe if they add more GPU accelerated encoding options into open source libraries we'll have a chance. Microservers run at a baseline of about 15w and each hard drive you add brings it up like another 7 w each. I have a GT 520 in mine with two drives (including the OS disk) and it's at like 42w. I think with a 65w PSU I'd get it another 5w lower from the efficiency curve. For reference, I have a 11 drive NAS besides this that has a far faster Athlon running about 75w idle. I haven't really measured the Microserver with any power management enabled nor after hours of idling.
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# ? Dec 16, 2011 05:44 |
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FISHMANPET posted:
When I asked you about your testlab setup, this is one of the big things I am pondering on. I have a settled ESXi box, but am now looking to build a a storage box, either VM or physical. VM saves me on the moola per hardware, but the headache/management/performance of the VM scares me. ninja edit, I'm an idiot, it was corvettefisher I was discussing this with.
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# ? Dec 16, 2011 07:33 |
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Moey posted:When I asked you about your testlab setup, this is one of the big things I am pondering on. I have a settled ESXi box, but am now looking to build a a storage box, either VM or physical. VM saves me on the moola per hardware, but the headache/management/performance of the VM scares me. For testing I would do something like that in a heartbeat, but no way would I trust my actual data to that house of cards.
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# ? Dec 16, 2011 08:16 |
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Help!code:
What's the concensus on appropriate action to take with this sort of issue?
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# ? Dec 18, 2011 06:54 |
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Nam Taf posted:Help! 77 write failures seems pretty high. Is there anything telling in /var/adm/messages (or the equivalent)?
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# ? Dec 18, 2011 11:33 |
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Wheelchair Stunts posted:77 write failures seems pretty high. Is there anything telling in /var/adm/messages (or the equivalent)? Here is what I found in /var/log/messages. I've culled it to the boot that was done today - half the file is the standard initilisation crap and then it starts going downhill. The following seem to catch my eye, for the wrong reasons : code:
The interesting thing though is that it's ad10 that is making GBS threads the bed, not ad4 or ad6. This is completely beyond me as I'm only really a neophyte BSD/*nix user, so any help is greatly appreciated.
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# ? Dec 18, 2011 14:17 |
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if it were me, and it were personal data that i didn't care that much about, i would clear the error once, power off then back on, and see if it returns.
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# ? Dec 18, 2011 15:44 |
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I'd like to add that I scrubbed this data about a week ago. Also, I've previously cleared off an error from the array but it was not resulting in read or write errors. I forget the error name too, unfortuantely, though if I had to guess I'd say it was ad6 complaining about its file system. It rebuilt and was fine. That was at least 2 months ago.
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# ? Dec 18, 2011 16:48 |
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Nam Taf posted:What's the concensus on appropriate action to take with this sort of issue? when that happened to me (twice) the first time was a bad SATA cable, the connector had vibrated loose. the second time, my power supply connector had broken in a cross country move and again had managed to vibrate itself loose. Just enough in both cases to keep the drive on SOME but not permanently connected.
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# ? Dec 18, 2011 17:31 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 07:32 |
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These 4 drives are in slots so I'll just check everything's secure (no reason it isn't) and clear, plus keep an eye on it. Maybe I'll scrub it overnight too. Ultimately, about 50% of the stuff on there is replacable and about 40% of the other 50% is stuff I don't care too greatly about to be distraught if I lose it. Besides, the 4 1TB drives from the old array with all the same data (except some of the replacable stuff) still sit happily on my desk so I guess I can get it back in a pinch. e: I just booted it up and it's loaded the array fine with no intervention. It just resilvered 512 with 5 checksum errors: code:
Nam Taf fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Dec 19, 2011 |
# ? Dec 19, 2011 09:54 |