Sandwich

Ok, so when I get the SATA card and can connect everything back up, what should I do and not do? How do I recover as much data as possible?

Ok, thanks for taking the time to analyze things. What would happen if I replaced disk 4 with disk 5? The parity would then be emulating disk 4, and 5 would hopefully be available regularly, right?

Attached. cube-diagnostics-20211011-1144.zip

I don't have any free SATA ports at the moment. Should I wait until the SATA card arrives, or is it okay to, say, plug in Disk 5 instead of the cache drive temporarily?

I've been in a long process of moving my data storage from Drobo to unRAID (you can see most of the saga in my other topics; there aren't many). Until recently, I had the following: 8Tb WDC_WD80EFAX-68KNBN0 (parity) 6Tb WDC_WD60EFAX-68JH4N0 (data; I planned to also have this be parity when all was finished) 2Tb WD2003FZEX (data) The 6Tb and the 2Tb had all my data, and parity was valid. At that point, I also had 3x 3Tb WD drives and 1x 3Tb Seagate drive still operational in the Drobo, with all the data on them as well (that's where it all came from). Things were working well, but I wanted dual parity drives, and I wanted to make use of all my 3Tb drives from the Drobo. However, I only had 6 SATA ports on my motherboard, so I bought what I thought was a good SATA expansion card, with 8 ports. I plugged all my Drobo drives into that card, and began the preclear process on them. When preclear was done, I added them to the array, but one drive consistently seemed to get kicked out of the array... I would add it, but it would appear in Unassigned Devices when I started the array. Figuring this issue was due to drive failure rather than some sort of issue with the SATA expansion card, I didn't think much of it. All seemed well with the remining 3, however, so I used unBalance to scatter (in move mode, argh!) my data from the 6Tb drive to all the other ones. That seemed to work well, but then more problems began to appear. One drive (disk 5 in the array) seemed to intermittently error out. The data that had been moved to it was still available due to the parity drive most of the time, but at one point I noticed that a lot of files and folders were missing from the array, and they were all items that had been on that drive. Not sure why parity wasn't "picking up the slack" in that case. At this point was when I posted the earlier diagnostics (in this thread), and was told that the "drives attached to [my SATA card] are continually resetting, probably severely impacting performance." So that's when I shut everything down, and connected as many drives as I could directly to the motherboard. I had also added a 1Tb SSD as a cache drive at an earlier point, so I then had what you see in the attached diagnostics: 8Tb WDC_WD80EFAX-68KNBN0 (parity) 6Tb WDC_WD60EFAX-68JH4N0 (data, but largely empty) 2Tb WD2003FZEX (data) 3Tb WDC_WD30EZRX-00D8PB0 (data) 3Tb ST3000VN007 (data, but see below) 1Tb Samsung SSD 860 EVO (cache) One thing to note is that the drive that was intermittently erroring out (Disk 5) is physically disconnected for now as I ran out of ports. Now, another drive, the Seagate, has begun to report hundreds of thousands of read errors (currently 261,818), but without getting kicked from the array. The data on there is family photos going back about 2 decades, but it's also all backed up on Google Photos, so it's (ironically for family photos) not unrecoverable. I'm currently waiting for another SATA card to arrive, hopefully this week. Then I'll be able to plug back in Disk 5, and hopefully it will be intact and working properly with a proper SATA card. My questions for all you wizards out there are: Am I doing things "right", or is there anything else I should be doing now? Exactly what should I do once the replacement SATA card arrives? Is there a way to check if it's well-behaved before plugging drives into it? Is there any way to "rebuild" the data that is on the missing Disk 5 from parity, so that it's "actually" stored on one of the other disks that isn't missing? Thanks for any help! cube-diagnostics-20211010-0843.zip

China. That said, given the very reasonable price, I'm willing to risk it. Thanks!! I'll try to report back when I test it out.

Well, I can easily ensure that it only ever has HDDs connected to it, and since those max out at what, 150MBps under ideal conditions? 150*6 = 900MBps, so an ~850MBps limit probably wouldn't ever be reached or noticed... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That said, that AliExpress card looks fine by me; how confident can we be that it's actually what it says it is? My MB is a GA-Z97MX-Gaming 5, with no PCIe slots occupied other than the 1x slot currently taken by the apparently-crap SATA card I already bought lol.

אמזון שולחים הרבה מוצרים לארץ בחינם אם זה מעל $65. בנוסף, לא צריך לשלם מס ייבוא על חבילות שערכם (כולל עלות המשלוח) מתחת ל- $75. בהצלחה אחי!

Ok, so let me see if I have this straight. The chipsets listed have proven to work well with unRAID, but they still can be "abused" or "taken advantage of" by use of a port multiplier (Q1: would the port multiplier adversely affect ALL ports on such a card, or just the "extra" ones? Q2: If the latter, is there a way to tell which ports are which?). So I should look for a card where the number of SATA ports matches the number of connections natively supported by the chipset (Q3: What's this stuff about physical vs electrical?). Since I ideally want a 6+ port card, would this be a wise purchase? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08L78QHSJ

Ok, so how do I tell the difference between a "port multiplier" and whatever it is that should actually work well with unRAID? $70 later and I didn't even know there was a difference. EDIT: My MB has 6 SATA ports, but my case (Fractal Design's Node 804) has room for 12 SATA drives, so I'd ideally want a card that has at least 6 SATA ports. Where I live though, Amazon offers free shipping on orders over $65, but my country applies import tax on items over $75 (incl. shipping), so.... 🤷‍♂️

This card has a "JMicron JMB5xx chip"; should it work well? I was told in another thread that it's best not to use "port multipliers"...?

"Port multipliers"? Is that the same as SATA expansion cards? I got this off Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083WF95Q1?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_product_details My MB only has like 6 SATA ports natively, so I need extra ports somehow... Ahh, awesome, thanks!

I've been emptying out my largest data drive (6Tb), moving its contents over to other data drives, in preparation for making it a second parity disk. In unBalance, there were two top-level directories listed on the drive: /Public and /system. The /system/docker/docker.img file was the only file under /system that I could see. I moved both directories to other drives, letting unBalance decide which drives to use. It seemed to go fine, and in Settings -> Docker, the drive-agnostic path should still be the same: /mnt/user/system/docker/docker.img Nevertheless, Docker hasn't been able to successfully start since the move. Any ideas? Diagnostics attached. cube-diagnostics-20210926-2115.zip

This. ^^^ I'm a professional web developer, and I know for a fact that no matter the site, forcing a minimum width is unnecessary. Let things flow and scale, my dudes. I often open the unRAID interface on one of my side monitors, which are pivoted 24", so effectively 1200x1920. I have to zoom out to 90% in the browser to get the full width of the interface to show. :-/