itimpi

Yes - the inner tracks on the drives are alway run significantly slower than the outer ones.

Set it to No under Settings -> SMB. Which device do you WANT to be the Local Master?

I understand that - the question is why is this happening to you and not all the others using this plugin. Feels like there may be some additional factor at play.

Normally one does it via the GUI Manually deleting/renaming the .plg files should only be considered if troubleshooting and doing it via the GUI is not practical. No idea why that particular plugin should cause your symptoms - it is now a widely used plugin.

Looking at the diagnostics it does not appear that any driver is loaded for the 16e card, not sure why. Is as if Unraid is not seeing it even though it shows up at the PCI level.

Do you have a backup of the flash drive? Can you see it’s contents when plugged into Windows?

Not quite sure what you have done? Are you saying you can no longer boot from the flash drive? What you said implies you might have removed the flash drive while UnRaid was running? You cannot do this without upsetting UnRaid - the flash drive must be plugged in all the time Unraid is running.

Yes

I must admit that even when over the limit I would expect the GUI to load - just not be able to start the array. Not sure what to suggest maybe someone else will have an idea.

Are the files on disk1 and disk3 being read or written? Just asking as if you are writing new files it is quite possible UnRaid would spin up other drives to check if a files already exists on one of them. in addition you mention a disk is failing. If UnRaid has problems reading or writing to it (or if it is disabled and being emulated) then all drives would be spun up to try and calculate what should be there using their contents + parity.

That looks good - running without -n should repair and get you back in operation when you next start the array in normal mode. No corruption is being reported so all your data should be intact.

In the special case of 2 drives they happen to be mirrors because of the way parity is calculated. When you expand beyond 2 drives this is no longer true. However the basic process then is still as you describe for a drive failure where you replace the broken drive and the system then rebuilds the parity/data drive to get you protected again.

Are you saying there IS another drive plugged in that takes you over the limit? It is not clear to me if by ‘flash drive’ you are referring to the UnRaid boot drive (which does not count towards the licence limit) or another flash drive that would. If you ARE over the limit then the only way to start the array would be to remove the extra drive, or to decide to pay the cost of upgrading to UnRaid Pro (which has no attached devices limit).

Yes, and if it then prompts for -L provide that as well. At least the error reported shows why it was not mounting.

I guess the next step should be follow the process documented here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the Unraid GUI for handling unmountable drives. I would suggest that at this stage just run the file system check (I.e. not the repair) and post the results here to see if the recommendation is to to then proceed with the repair.

No, the boot drive does not count. However anything like another USB drive or a card reader does count. If there is nothing obvious at your end then it might be a case of looking through the diagnostics carefully to see exactly what drives are being seen by Unraid to identify the culprit. The commonest mistake is to leave a removable drive plugged in (or a spare drive)) which if present at array start time DOES count, although once the array is started such drives can be plugged in without invoking the device limit check.

When you simply unplug (or unassigned) a dtive from a parity protected array then Unraid will use the combination of the other drives plus parity to emulate its contents. So the system continues to operate as if the disk was present. If there are no files on the emulated drive there will still be space used as part of the file system control information -that will be why it is showing 3.02GB used. if you want to permanently remove the drive (rather than replace it with a working one) then the procedure to use is documented here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI.

According to your diagnostics you have too many devices attached for a Plus licence. Have you got some removable drives plugged in that take you over the limit?

I believe the Unraid boot device is expected to use MBR partitioning, not GPT.

What files are these? Their names might give a clue. Have you checked whether the problem occurs if the Docker and VM services are set to disabled and you boot in Safe mode to disable all plugins? That would be a useful data point as to whether it is a core Unraid issue, and if it works in that mode you have a method of investigation by gradually enabling services/plugins until the problem occurs again.

I see. You are talking about only needing read access and exploiting the fact that UnRaid sees files in a folder with the name corresponding to the share name even on drives that are not mentioned in the Share settings. I wonder if this might later lead to some confusion if the user ever tries to write files to that share?

I do not think that you can easily set up all pools under the same share. A pool a user Share can only normally be associated with a single share. Maybe @JorgeB had something else in mind?

Loading of each plugin is controlled by there being a .plg file for the plugin in the config/plugins folder on the flash drive. Renaming these to have a different extension and then rebooting is a way to control which plugins are loaded.

I think that the help is actually not correct as it mentions new files resulting in an ‘out of space’ error. That is not true as if the User share Use Cache setting is Yes or Prefer since then new files can instead be written to the array.

I suspect the /mnt/disks folder is simply empty because you have no Unassigned Devices mounted (which is where the UD plugin mounts them).