itimpi

The error message you give us saying that there is a problem writing to the flash drive (which is what is mounted at /boot). Have you tried putting the flash drive into a PC or Mac to check it?

Yes - as was mentioned you want to use the Unassigned Devices (UD) plugin to make this easy if they are standard NTFS. Having said that I would still recommend that you try this out just in case there is something slightly unusual so that only windows handles the drives correctly.

The only question in my mind is whether the drives in the Windows drivepool are usable outside the pool? This is not something I have any experience of but if that is the case then an alternative approach might be needed (such as running a Windows VM under Unraid to support the drivepool drives that still being used at any point).

Sounds as if you are trying to use a server for Unraid with very little expansion capabilities? In terms of a graphics card then Unraid itself does not require one (although some motherboards might) as it is administered using a browser and this can be done over the network. There are HBA boards that support more than 6 ports. I have a LSI one with 16 ports. I believe there are others with even more. You can also have multiple such HBA boards if you have the free motherboard slots in your server.

Sounds to me if you could do what you want in 2 steps: use the spare connector to add the 8TB parity2 drive and build parity2 so you are running with dual parity. use the Parity Swap procedure to replace 2 existing 4TB drives with 2 8TB drives. With dual parity these can be done in parallel. I would recommend keeping the removed 4TB drives intact until the Parity `swap process has completed and the 8TB drives are now successfully showing what was on the removed 4TB drives just in case anything goes wrong.

You do not mention what the size is of your current parity drive?

This is a known (believed to be firmware) issue with some models of Samsung SSDs. It is a spurious warning in that the drive is not really anywhere near the temperature it is reporting.

The reason the Films share shows as unprotected is that it has files on the unprotected cache pool. Note that with Use Cache=No those files will be ignored by mover. the isos share shows as protected as it has no files on the cache. Are you sure you understand how the Use Cache setting works? The GUI contains extensive built in help. You can toggle it on/off at the individual field level by clicking on the text describing the field or at the whole page level by clicking on the ‘?’ icon at the top right. There is more detail in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page.

The docker containers start order can already be set from the UI by using drag-and-drop to change the order on the Dockers page

If you do a firmware update then it is still in place if you later put it back in the Unraid system.

According to the diagnostics you were getting I/O errors on both parity drives and so they have been disabled. As a result parity will need rebuilding on them. The SMART reports for those drives look OK so maybe you disturbed the cabling when adding the new drive so carefully check both SATA and power cabling to the parity drives. If you want to test the drives then you can run an extended SMART test on the drives but I think the cabling is a more likely suspect. You can use the process described here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page to rebuild parity on these two drives (they can be done at the same time).

You can always use the process documented here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page to go to any Unraid release for which you can obtain the zip file for the release.

You need the Yes value if you want mover to attempt to move files from cache to array. The mover app ignores shares that have the No value set. The required process is covered here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page. BTW: The GUI contains extensive built in help. You can toggle it on/off at the individual field level by clicking on the text describing the field or at the whole page level by clicking on the ‘?’ icon at the top right.

How did you copy the files across? Vdisks for VMs are normally Linux ‘sparse’ files which means the physical space used can be less than the logical size. However it is possible when copying the vdisk files you used a method which removed the ‘sparse’ part so the files now occupy their logical (larger) size.

When you create vdisks for a VM they are created as Linux ‘sparse’ files which means only sectors that are written to actually occupy physical space. In other words the physical space occupied can be less than the logical size of the vdisk file. However over time as the VM runs you can expect the physical space to grow as more parts of the vdisk file are written to and therefore allocated physical space increases.