itimpi

Cache pools can be any of the supported formats if there is only one drive in the pool. If you want a multi-drive pool then it has to be a BTRFS variant

Definitely possible. I do this all the time! You DO have to have another USB stick with its own UnRAID licence for use by the VM. There is a post somewhere in the forum that details how to set this up - I will try and see if I can track down the relevant post.

If your motherboard AND processor support IOMMU so that you can do hardware pass-through of the graphics card to the VM then this is possible. It is a lifetime licence and is good for all future Unraid releases. Storage devices are any disk drive or USB device that is attached at the point the array is started. Removable devices can be plugged in once the array is started without counting towards this limit, but many people like the licence level they use to be one that allows such devices to be left plugged in all the time.

Unraid does not have ZFS as a supported file system in the standard distribution, although it is available as a 3rd party plugin. Any ZFS limitations are therefore outside the control of UnRAID.

You cannot use UnRAID features without starting the array ! you must have at least 1 drive in the array to start it - although In extreme cases it can be something like a USB drive that you never intend to use to store data. there is no limit on the Pro version on the number of Unattached devices you have - limitations only apply to the maximum number of drives you can have in the array (28 data + 2 parity) or the cache (24 drives), but you state you do not intend to use the array or cache so these are not relevant. for your extreme case why not use a standard Linux distribution and build you own kernel and KVM/Qemu so you can then be as up-to-date as you want to be.

No. The Unraid licence limit applies to the number of drives attached to the system at array start regardless of whether Unraid is actually using them. If you do not want Unraid features, then why use Unraid in the first place?

No idea what the meaning of those attributes is. Not something I have ever seen mentioned before

Even simpler instead of physically removing and reinstalling the drive is: Stop the array Set the disk to Unassigned Start the array to make Unraid 'forget' the assignment Stop the array Assign the disk back to its slot Start the array

You mention the Unassigned Devices plugin was installed, but not whether you also had the Unassigned Devices Plus one installed. You will need both to handle the format you want to use.

That was only true if you were using the New Config tool. If the disk was disabled then Unraid is going to overwrite the existing contents with what it thinks the disk SHOULD contain taking into account the combination of the other data drives plus parity. This is the correct action to have taken if all your other drives are running without problems and parity is valid. It sounds like a rebuild is what is happening at the moment? In other cases it can lead to data loss.

Have you installed the Unassigned Devices Plus plugin? You will need this for exfat

The output from the commands looks as expected. did you try running the ‘diagnostics’ command via the ssh session? If that completed successfully there would be a zip file created in the ‘logs’ folder on the USB drive that would tell us a lot more about the state of your system. If that does run attach the zip file to your next post.

Is the drive showing as disabled (with a red ‘x’)? you should provide you system diagnostics zip file (obtained via Tools -> Diagnostics) attached to your next post so we can see the current state of your system.

Unfortunately those diagnostics are of limited use as they start from the reboot and do not cover the problem period (by default logs are only stored in RAM). You can follow the steps shown here to get logs that can survive a reboot.

That is an option using the 'diagnostics' command from the terminal session. Another option would be to try df ls -l /boot ls -l /mnt ls -l /mnt/user to check that the flash drive is still online and that the the standard mount points look OK.

I think WireGuard always loads during the boot sequence once it has been activated as it is a system service. It is only the GUI part of WireDuard that is a plugin. However that does not rule out there being some stored WireGuard configuration information causing a problem

You can have up to 28 data drives in the main array (plus up to 2 parity drives) so it depends on what disk size you use. The only limitation is that there is no striping so any single file must fit onto a single disk. In addition the cache pool can have up to 24 drives - not sure if you want to count those towards the total space possible

The Global setting is for NEW disks being added to the array, not for existing ones. You probably want this set to either XFS (whish i think is the default) or BTRFS as ReiserFS is now a deprecated format (although Unraid still supports it for legacy reasons). v5 did not support encryption so you want the standard ReiserFS option. You can change the format for any drive by clicking on its entry on the Main tab. I suspect that the format is currently set to Auto which means Unraid will look at the disk to try to determine its format automatically.

The system would probably correctly identify the format if you simply started the array. However as you are upgrading from v5 the format must be ReiserFS as this was the only format supported on v5.

It is easy to set up the WireGuard VPN server on the 6.8.3 version of Unraid to give you secure access to the Unraid GUI from then internet. More than this might be desirable, but at the very least users should be using a VPN solution for accessing the Unraid GUI from the internet.

I am afraid so. Have you checked whether the drive is within its warranty period? Failing the SMART extended test is sufficient reason for a RMA request. You do not want any drive in the array which cannot have every sector read reliably as that means if another disk develops problems you will not be able to rebuild it without data corruption and/or data loss.

If you have 2 identical drives set up as cache then I would expect them to get equal amounts of reads/writes. What makes you think one gets more than the other? Unraid does not have any concept of a ‘Primary’ drive in a cache pool. Having said that, since Unraid recognises drives by their serial number and not by where they are connected you could always swap them over in the physical machine without making any changes at the UnRAID level. I doubt it would help though.

If the SMART extended test fails then the drive is on the way out and should be replaced ASAP. Looking at the SMART report you have 210 Pending Sectors showing which are ones that cannot be read reliably - on a good drive this would be 0. The short test only tests a few sectors on the disk, so is not a good indication that the drive is healthy.

It could be that the USB drive is dropping offline for some reason. How do you have it plugged in? have you tried making a ssh connection to the server when the problem occurs? If you can then that might help with investigating what has happened.

It is highly likely the boot order has been changed from your description. Getting into the Bios depends on you pressing at System start whatever key your motherboard specifies for getting into the BIOS. Common options are F2, DEL, ESC. Which one it is should be specified in the motherboard manual.