Drive Bender Alternatives?

I guess the old saying "The third one is the charm" has some basis:
right now I am in the process of loading my third build of the server
box. First two didn't work for reasons unknown... but now DriveBender
seems to be behaving as expected.... or maybe the UI has finally soaked
in to my limited gray matter....


Per Char Jackson:
One guy mentioned 30-55 Mbps in his Amazon review, so it's not
blindingly fast but you have all night.

I am getting high teens/low twenties with 5 drives connected directly to
the mobo's SATA headers. The Big Card doesn't arrive until Friday.
When that happens, we'll move all the drives over to The Big Card, add
some more drives, and see what happens to the Mbps..... But, as you say,
it's not like I need a lot of speed day-to-day... but higher would be
better for the initial load, which is looking like at least three days
right now.


My aging CPU runs in the neighborhood of 20-30%, typically. I'm of the
opinion that file serving is a low impact activity.

Right now mine is running low-to-mid-seventies with occasional ventures
into the eighties.
--
Pete Cresswell

Per (PeteCresswell):

I am getting high teens/low twenties with 5 drives connected directly to
the mobo's SATA headers.

Just switched from LAN to a direct connect via Ethernet cable between
the Windows box and the NAS it was loading from.... tripled my Write
speed on the Windows box from high teens/low twenties to mid-sixties
Mbps.
--
Pete Cresswell

On Wed, 12 Oct 2016 14:36:52 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

Per (PeteCresswell):

I am getting high teens/low twenties with 5 drives connected directly to
the mobo's SATA headers.

Just switched from LAN to a direct connect via Ethernet cable between
the Windows box and the NAS it was loading from.... tripled my Write
speed on the Windows box from high teens/low twenties to mid-sixties
Mbps.

What equipment did you bypass by doing that, an ancient switch or hub?
That's a significant bottleneck. Glad you found that.

--

Char Jackson

Per Char Jackson:
For me, the 4220 is nicer than the 4020 because the 4220 has SAS
connectors on its backplane instead of SATA connectors for much less
cable clutter, and the 4220 comes with three 120mm fans while the 4020
comes with four 80mm fans (and everyone with the 4020 gripes about
having to pay to upgrade to the 3x120mm fan option). Plus, I think the
4220 is a bit cheaper at $329. I haven't checked the Amazon price.

Well, the 4220 arrived today.

Took the old machine apart, and now I am putting it all together in the
4220 case. SAS card won't be here until early next week.

And then I found *this*: http://wsyntax.com/cs/killer-norco-case/

The good part is that I don't have any 3TB drives in the array.... the
bad part is that I might want to retire some to be used there in the
future.
--
Pete Cresswell

On Fri, 14 Oct 2016 17:52:21 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

Per Char Jackson:
For me, the 4220 is nicer than the 4020 because the 4220 has SAS
connectors on its backplane instead of SATA connectors for much less
cable clutter, and the 4220 comes with three 120mm fans while the 4020
comes with four 80mm fans (and everyone with the 4020 gripes about
having to pay to upgrade to the 3x120mm fan option). Plus, I think the
4220 is a bit cheaper at $329. I haven't checked the Amazon price.

Well, the 4220 arrived today.

Took the old machine apart, and now I am putting it all together in the
4220 case. SAS card won't be here until early next week.

And then I found *this*: http://wsyntax.com/cs/killer-norco-case/

The good part is that I don't have any 3TB drives in the array.... the
bad part is that I might want to retire some to be used there in the
future.

I don't have that style (hot swap) of Norco case, so I can't offer any
specifics, but even the reviews on Newegg and Amazon mention the
occasional failure, although usually not as spectacular as in the story
above. That was about 4 years ago, so hopefully things have improved a
bit.

With power off, I would inspect the drive bays and backplane closely. If
possible, watch how well each drive aligns with its backplane
connectors. If you have any doubts and you're willing to give up the hot
swap capability, simply remove the backplane and connect your cables
directly to the drives. Yeah, I know, that's not why you chose this kind
of case... I think you'll be fine, but be careful. Don't install all of
the drives at one time, and be sure your power supply is rated to handle
the number of drives you plan to use.

Please keep us/me posted.

--

Char Jackson

Per Char Jackson:
My aging CPU runs in the neighborhood of 20-30%, typically. I'm of the
opinion that file serving is a low impact activity.

How many physical drives do you have dedicated to DriveBender?

The 16-channel card arrived and I have been building up the NorCo box
one drive at a time.

Everything was a-ok up to six or seven drives and then the OS seemed to
slow down a lot.... but now, after a couple of re-boots, response seems
back to normal.

Mirrored almost all of my NAS box on to the 5 drives in the DB pool when
I was running just with the mobo SATA headers connected to the drives.

Now I have just added six more drives and, after DB finishes balancing
the pool on to the new drives, I figure I'll mirror the last of the NAS
box and then start enabling Duplication folder-by-folder.

I *really* hope this build holds up. I am hoping that your suspicion
of a bad drive (and I did find one that double digit bad sectors) was
the root cause of the problems I was having.

Is anybody aware of a functional limitation on the number of physical
drives under Windows-7 ? "Functional" because even so MS says it will
support a lot of drives, maybe a lower-power CPU is overwhelmed after a
certain point. (Intel Core2 Duo GHz w/4 gigs of ram)



--
Pete Cresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:


Is anybody aware of a functional limitation on the number of physical
drives under Windows-7 ? "Functional" because even so MS says it will
support a lot of drives, maybe a lower-power CPU is overwhelmed after a
certain point. (Intel Core2 Duo GHz w/4 gigs of ram)

https://download.microsoft.com/downl...2003_en-us.pdf

(from "Windows Server 2003/2003 R2 Retired Content")
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down...190a24fa6=True

Page 4051

"Reviewing the number of supported disk drives

The number of disk drives you can use for each server is limited only by the
available memory for FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, and UDF files systems.
"

So each partition, the $MFT or the FAT takes space in memory.
Obviously, the actual block-level driver requires a small
amount of memory, but perhaps smaller than those two items
might be on an overall basis.

"Using mounted drives

Mounted drives are useful when you want to add more
storage to an existing volume without having to extend the
volume.

A mounted drive is a local volume attached to an empty folder
on an NTFS volume.

Mounted drives are not subject to the 26-drive limit imposed
by drive letters, so you can use mounted drives to access more
than 26 drives on your computer.
"

*******
And when having these "scaling" discussions, there is a big difference
between the OS block level and file system level, versus File Explorer
behavior.

File Explorer can exhibit scaling problems in even trivial situations.
A folder with 40000 files in it, can cause File Explorer to lock up,
spin its wheels and so on. This happens typically when you move
half the files out of the folder to another place, and File Explorer
is asked to re-calculate a view of the folder for you. If the folder
had BMP files, maybe it computes thumbnails of them, or gets
lost while managing the thumbnails. There are many potential
pitfalls.

That's entirely different than say, writing a C: program to call the
file system, and do the file system equivalent of a DIR. That
will always be snappy (until you run out of pool memory that is).

And if you wanted more exact answers, you could do some level of
simulation in VirtualBox. But VirtualBox in the host OS, may
exhaust "handles" in the host, while trying to make devices
in the guest. So at some point, you run into a VirtualBox
limitation, and not a (guest) OS design limitation.

Drivers for the hardware are interrupt based. If the file
systems are at rest, the CPU load should be minimal. However,
if the OS insists on Indexing the volumes, that could suck
down resources and generally make a mess. If you want to
use the build-in search indexer, use the control panel for
it, and move the search index to its own partition. That
way, the Windows.edb file won't have thousands of fragments.
And it cannot test the limit on how many fragments a file
can have in NTFS. The most fragmented file on your computer,
is likely to be Windows.edb on a well used Indexer (i.e.
program it to index the entire disk, for multiple disks).

Paul

On Wed, 19 Oct 2016 21:02:11 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

Per Char Jackson:
My aging CPU runs in the neighborhood of 20-30%, typically. I'm of the
opinion that file serving is a low impact activity.

How many physical drives do you have dedicated to DriveBender?

I've mostly been using 15 drives for the DB pool, with a 16th drive
hosting the OS. There have been times when I extended the DB pool to as
many as 24 drives by plugging in external units, but I'm not a fan of
external drives so that has always been temporary. Whether I have 16
drives connected or some greater number, I've never noticed a slowdown,
but that could be a function of how I use that machine.

The 16-channel card arrived and I have been building up the NorCo box
one drive at a time.

Did you have to buy new SAS-SATA cables then?

I *really* hope this build holds up. I am hoping that your suspicion
of a bad drive (and I did find one that double digit bad sectors) was
the root cause of the problems I was having.

I've had bad drives before that have affected overall performance, but
even more often I've had bad SATA cables. It's hard to be impressed by
the SATA cable spec, especially the connectors.

Is anybody aware of a functional limitation on the number of physical
drives under Windows-7 ? "Functional" because even so MS says it will
support a lot of drives, maybe a lower-power CPU is overwhelmed after a
certain point. (Intel Core2 Duo GHz w/4 gigs of ram)

Does Task Manager support the theory that the CPU or RAM are being
overworked? I've been known to leave Task Manager running for weeks at a
time so that I can keep an eye on things, but there are also tools built
into Windows that will monitor any of dozens of resources for you, then
report on averages and high water marks.

--

Char Jackson

Per Char Jackson:
The 16-channel card arrived and I have been building up the NorCo box
one drive at a time.

Did you have to buy new SAS-SATA cables then?

Yes. Going to try to return these guys (which turned out to be the
wrong direction anyhow):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Had to order these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1
which seem to be working a-ok.

If/when I want to populate the 5th backplane, I'll get one of those
breakout cables that goes in the proper direction (it's looking like
"Reverse Breakout" is the term-of-art)and use the mobo's SATA headers.
--
Pete Cresswell

Per Char Jackson:
I've mostly been using 15 drives for the DB pool, with a 16th drive
hosting the OS.

Where are you with the 6-drive vibration-related limit?

Are you using the muy-expensivo enterprise-grade drives?

Or are you using lower-grade drives and hoping for the best?


I had my box running a-ok for quite a few weeks after a system rebuild,
but now it's gotten weird again.... and, having recently discovered the
6-drive thing, I have to wonder if I have shot myself in the foot by
populating the box with various retired, non-enterprise-grade drives.
--
Pete Cresswell

On Thu, 19 Jan 2017 14:49:02 -0500, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

Per Char Jackson:
I've mostly been using 15 drives for the DB pool, with a 16th drive
hosting the OS.

Where are you with the 6-drive vibration-related limit?

The limit either doesn't exist, or I'm accidentally avoiding it because
the case has 3 stacks of bays with only 5 drives per stack.

Are you using the muy-expensivo enterprise-grade drives?

Nope, the least expensive drives I can find. It's a mix of newer Seagate
4TB and Samsung 2TB units.

Or are you using lower-grade drives and hoping for the best?

I wouldn't say 'hoping'. More like 'expecting'. The 2TB drives were
purchased in 2009 and have been running ever since. Some of the 4TB
drives are about 2 years old, while 2 are less than a year old.

I had my box running a-ok for quite a few weeks after a system rebuild,
but now it's gotten weird again.... and, having recently discovered the
6-drive thing, I have to wonder if I have shot myself in the foot by
populating the box with various retired, non-enterprise-grade drives.

No such problems here, so I'm not sure what to say. How's your cooling?
Programs like HD Sentinel will give you the temps, current and
historical, as well as SMART data, etc.

--

Char Jackson

Per Char Jackson:
No such problems here, so I'm not sure what to say. How's your cooling?
Programs like HD Sentinel will give you the temps, current and
historical, as well as SMART data, etc.

Now that drive damage from vibration has been eliminated (???) I'm
starting to think maybe something flaky with the system - especially
since my previous troubles were cured when I rebuilt the system.

Next thing, once I have finished error-testing all the drives, I will
jiggle/wiggle/re-connect all the cables.

If that does not help I think I'll rebuild the system one more time -
and, just on GPs, replace the SDD card I'm using as the System drive
with a plain old hard drive.

Failing all that, I'll get an i7 board/CPU and move to that - the
rationale being that the backup box could, in a pinch, temporarily
replace my 24-7 PC if/when it were to fail.

I *really* don't want to drop fifteen hundred bucks on another NAS
box.... -)
--
Pete Cresswell

Per Paul:
IBM used to put an operational humidity curve in the hard drive
spec, which is the only reason I was interested in the humidity
angle. At high humidity, the IBM graph suggested a max drive
temp of 35C. I've not seen any discussion of the interpretation of
this curve, or whether we should be taking it seriously or not.

Sounds like I need to add a humidity sensor to my little remote server
climate control box..... I always leave the heating/cooling for the box
active even if the PC is shut down - just to avoid really-cold
starts....but I have no clue as to the humidity out there where it
lives.
--
Pete Cresswell