Bought a new 1 TB SSD to replace my old 500 GB SSD being used as a cache drive. I shut down the pc installed the new drive and powered on resulting in being stuck at the Starting Samba section. Quickly searched and found the common problem was the nvidia-driver which I use and assumed this was the issue. I powered down cut the folder out of the plugins directory and pasted on a temp folder on a windows computer then returned the jump drive back to unraid. Powered on and after 20 minutes was still stuck on the Samba at boot. Removed the network cable and rebooted which to my astonishment actually let the system boot. The plug-ins page refused to perform an update getting stuck on checking user.scripts.plg ... and now had with the additional failed tab containing three plugins. It gave me the option to delete which I did since the check for updates was clearly broken, I had zero ability to likely update them so might as well purge them. Purged GPUStat, Nvidia-Driver and Tips.and.tweaks plugins. Once I deleted those plugins which failed, I figured another reboot was in order to get back to a clean state and re-add them back but again stuck at Samba.
The attached diagnostic file is after booting to safe mode and starting the array.
Edit: removed diagnostics zip file as it appears to be just unbearably slow all of a sudden.