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The default for UnRaid is to run without a swap file as it is not needed for built-in functionality. It only becomes potentially necessary when adding new application functionality to the basic built-in capabilities that can demand more RAM in aggregate than is physically present.

USB3 drives seem to be much more susceptible to failure than USB2 ones. It is suspected that this may well be because USB2 drives run much cooler that USB3 ones but that is just a guess at the end of the day. Heat is not friendly to electronics and this is important in a device that is left plugged in and operational 24x7. Quite why USB3 drives seem to run much hotter is not obvious to me unless it is just a limitation of current design or chip technology.

If there is an indication that files are unprotected (and you have a parity protected array) then this means that files are on a cache that is is a single drive which is not redundant and this disappears when the files are later moved to the protected array. If the cache pool has multiple drives configured to give redundancy then you should never see such an indication. Not sure what you mean by ‘need a parity validation’? Even a drive that is ‘empty’ from a file perspective still has non-zero sectors that are used to contain the files system structure information and thus cannot be ignored for parity purposes. It is only sectors that contain purely zero bytes do not affect parity. Also any sectors that belong to files that are now deleted will rarely be zero filled. There is also an assumption in your statements that the drive sectors are used serially starting from the beginning - this is typically not the cases as the file system selects sectors in a more random manner than that. Unraid can avoid accessing all drives to update parity when writing new data but this imposes a significant performance penalty. You might find this section of the online documentation useful in describing the two different approaches Unraid has to updating the parity drive.

It can be difficult to sort out the lost+found folder. You can use the Linux ‘file’ command to identify the type of each of the files.

If you start the array in normal does it now mount? If so is there a lost+found folde?

Are you talking about something other than the total powered on time that is available as part of a disk’s SMART information?

I think you mid-understand how parity checks works? When writing new data parity is calculated in real-time and written immediately to the parity drive. What a parity check involves is reading a given sector off all array drives, calculating what the parity sector should contain and then comparing that to the actual sector on the parity drive. As such all array drives are always involved in a parity check. You might be interested in the Parity Check Tuning plugin which allows a parity check to be run in increments spread over several days. This is typically used to run a scheduled check only outside prime time at the cost of it taking longer to complete.

What address are you using when trying to access the GUI via the LAN? It appears that DHCP is configured so it is possible for the IP address to change between boots if you have not reserved a particular address for the server at the router. In the diagnostics it looked as though the server was given the address 192.168.0.220 - have you tried that? the parity drive being disabled is unrelated to the GUI issue - it means that a write to it failed for some reason. You can re-enable it by: stopping the array unassigning the parity drive starting the array to ‘forget’ the parity drive stop the array re-assign the parity drive start the array to rebuild the parity dtive contents.

You should post your system’s diagnostics zip file (obtained via Tools->Diagnostics or diagnostics’ from the command line) attached to your next post. That way we will have a chance to give informed feedback.

whatever is causing this is outside Unraid control. It is likely to be BIOS related, but could also be something at the hardware level.

USB devices managed by the Unassigned Devices plugin can be added dynamically plugged in/removed without problems.

As long as each user had there own login then Windows should maintain credentials at the user level.. what is important is that you connect any private/secure shares before any public shares to ensure you are using the correct credentials. Windows always re-uses the credentials of the first connection and if you then try and make a connection which needs different credentials will refuse to use any new credentials and always tells you the username/password is wrong.

Why would both users need to access both shares and why would they have the same credentials? I thought what you wanted was each user to have exclusive access to each share so each share can be set up to use a specific user’s credentials. Am I missing something?

Not sure what you mean by this? It is quite normal for a single client to have multiple samba connections. What Windows will not allow is each samba connection to have different user credentials.

Did you actually press the Balance button to start the conversion to RAID1? Pressing Done on any page in the UnRaid GUI simply exits the current page taking no action.

In my experience if you are just going to run Unraid purely as a NAS then 4GB is sufficient. It is when you start running VMs or any non-trivial docker containers that more RAM starts being required, and the majority of users now-a-days probably fall into this camp.

Handling of unmountable disks is covered here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘manual’ link at the bottom of the UnRaid GUI.

You can run scheduled scripts you create via the User scripts plugin. the Unassigned Devices plugin supports running a user supplied script when a specific drive is plugged.

I guess I could have quoted this part of your post and just replied Yes to avoid the confusion that then arose. I thought I was being clear but obviously was not

Why would you think doing anything in terminal is not a manual action? Anything you do in terminal is by definition a manual action as it is not being done via the GUI. Some people expect that if they change the Split level then Unraid will move files around to match the new Split Level without the user needing to take any other action. I was just clarifying that this is not the case.

You can change Split Level but this will only apply to new files. Unraid will never automatically move existing files between array drives. You would have to take manual action to get files moved between drives. In this case the Afterbang folder is at level 3 and thus its contents are allowed to be stilt across drives. As you surmised you would need level 2 for this not to happen.

It sounds as if you are doing an initial data load? You can never move data from cache to array as fast as you can upload data. For this reason it is normally recommended that for initial data load you not bother to use the cache. regardless, Make sure that you have set the Minimum Free Space values for both the shares and the cache to be bigger than the largest file you intend to copy. If you do that then when necessary UnRaid should transparently switch to writing directly to the array by-passing the cache when the free space falls below that value.

You might want to try the ‘df’ command to see if the USB drive is correctly showing as mounted at /boot?

Why not simply add the 2 x 1TB drives to the array to get 2TB extra space? UnRaid does not require all array drives to be the same size. You wil then have 4 data drives protected by 2 parity drives

there is quite a detailed description of Split Levels here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the UnRaid GUI.