• Disk in parity slot is not biggest - same size parity as drive in the array


    Xenor
    • Minor

    Hi,

     

    Today my LSI card came in, and I wanted to add a parity drive. I have two 14 TB drives - one is already assigned to the array, the second one is intended as a parity drive. Unfortunately, when I try to assign it as a parity, it says that 'Disk in parity slot is not biggest'.

     

    As per some very old topic, I've tried looking for HPA in my syslog, but it returned empty:

    root@Home-unRaid:~# cat /var/log/syslog | grep "HPA"
    root@Home-unRaid:~#


    I tried connecting the drives through the LSI card and directly to the motherboard SATA, both return the same problematic result.

     

    You can see my disk assignments below:

    image.thumb.png.89317cd5766f7c6d51247b93e7804756.png 

     

    I've also attached diagnostics for both when I connected drives directly to MOBO and when I connected them through the LSI card.

     

    I am not sure if this is a bug specific to the pre-release version, I never used any other version than 6.10.0-rc2, and I only got the LSI card allowing me to expand my array.

    home-unraid-diagnostics-20220119-2229-through-lsi.zip home-unraid-diagnostics-20220119-2216-directly-to-mobo.zip




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    By doing some further digging, I've managed to find a difference between how partitions are made on those disks. I'm not sure why the difference is there though, I mean the array 14 TB drive was formatted in Unraid and the same is done for a parity drive, right? Could that be why I can't assign it as a parity drive?

    image.png

    Edited by Xenor
    Link to comment

    I have used 'Unassigned devices' plugin in unsafe mode to delete the partition on my soon-to-be parity drive and formt it as XFS and that's all it took. You can see the state after formatting the drive on the screenshot.

     

    So, to sum up - my problem was that the drives were identical, but my designated parity drive had an existing partition that had a different start point, hence it had a lower sector count, and it seems like that confused Unraid, even though the drive would be formatted after assigning it as a parity drive.

     

    I guess, there is some room for improvement here in terms of message displayed, but I leave it up to you if it's worth pursuing.

     

     

    Screenshot 2022-01-19 at 23.41.19.png

    Screenshot 2022-01-19 at 23.45.45.png

    Edited by Xenor
    Link to comment

    It's known issue, Since v6.2 Unraid accepts partitions starting on sector 2048 for SSDs, so if there's already a partition starting on that sector it will be used, instead of creating one starting on the default sector 64 for disks.

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    @JorgeB

    Quote

    The solution is use the "Erase" button on the disk info page. To do this with a parity device requires array Stopped and device tagged as 'New'. Clicking Erase will wipe the partition table of the device. Upon returning to Main the device size should represent partition 1 starting at 32K offset (64 512-byte sectors or 8 4K sectors) from start of disk.

     

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