Fencer

That's the plan. When I was building this I was unfortunately on an older compatibility list and the one I got was the only particular model of the Marvells still showing compatible at that time. Missed the blurb at the top of the page so my bad. I've gotten a bit better at navigating the forum and the guides since then. Rebuild should be done by the time I get home and it'll be time to add the cache drive and hope the thing doesn't cough up furballs until I can get a compatible replacement one.

Let's see, updates and info: Turns out Disk 5 is in fact on the Marvell controller and going over my drive notes from before, it and one other drive had reallocated sector counts. There was some kind of event that happened when they were in my old server and 3 of the 7 drives popped up with errors at the same moment. (reallocated sector counts in varying amounts and one had another one. The 3rd drive with the multiple error values didn't get reused but the two with the reallocated sector errors I did reuse after running a surface scan and multiple extended spart checks on and kept an eye on. The reallocated sector count for Drive 5 has held steady at 48 for over 6 months and remains so and the other has held steady at 72 for the same amount of time. Per instructions in the Storage Management manual, I stopped the array, unmounted Disk 5, restarted the array, let it see the missing disk and then stopped it, re-added disk 5 and it's now going through a rebuild. So far no errors at about 10% rebuild so hopefully it will rebuild successfully and be good for the moment. It's going to take a month or two to scrape together a few nickels and buy another controller card and new drives to eventually replace disks 5 and 6. Am I on the right track here? One thing I had read about that controller was that it would possibly need to be reflashed to use but it came right up and didn't have raid enabled. I believe you are correct in the controller being the reason it dropped off. I need to learn more about this stuff going forward...

It didn't come back up and all 91 million errors came up off the drive. I'll open it up shortly and see which disk it is and what controller it's connected to. I thought 6-7 were connected to the other controller but I'll double check that and the cables. Attached is the diags after the power cycle: powertower-diagnostics-20220503-1715.zip

OK, Parity run still has a few hours to go but this is the zip with the diags that I just ran. If there's a particular one I should be posting or a different format please let me know powertower-diagnostics-20220503-0006.zip

Whew... Finally got all my files copied over to my array and added the parity disk to it this morning. I checked it after about 13 hours and it showed 92 million (!) errors and the temperature reading for disk 5 has mysteriously disappeared (see attached pic). The number of errors hasn't increased in several hours and it seems to be chugging along but this is highly concerning. Disks 6 and 7 are attached to one of the (formerly) approved Marvell controllers and I would have thought if something was going to error out that it would be one of those. No SMART issues are reported on any of the disks as of the time I started the parity build. Thoughts on this? Should I rerun the parity, restart the system? Kind of lost here at the moment.

So 24-36 hours, sounds like about what I expected, cool. Then all that's left is to add in the cache drive and I should be set for now. Looking good!

Ah, dumb user errors... Managed to accidentally move about 4TB of data off an external drive instead of copy off of it so now I'm stuck waiting for it to copy back. Yay me!! Tomorrow's the day to set up the cache and parity drives. I'm guessing it'll take a day or two to do the parity on a 48TB array? My normal use is to add about 5-50 gigs of new data a week so my plan is to add new files to the Unraid server during daily use and once a week or two to back those folders up to the two main externals I have for them using Teracopy in Windows as I can set it to only copy new files and add the checksum verification to start with. I know there's a Linux-based tool (forgot the name at the moment) that will accomplish the same and when I have time I'll find and fiddle with that when I have time. I only plan to have the externals hooked up when I'm backing up new stuff, other than that they'll sit in a drawer. My shares are set up to where all the changes will be on 2 of them so that doesn't seem too cumbersome to deal with. Looking forward to having this thing fully functioning so I can give it a good test run before I purchase a license and learning how to set up a smooth media server for all the video, audio and comic book goodness sitting on it!

Thank you very much for your insights! I'm off to bed and will be reading up a bit more on Krusader's usage for moving files to different disks when I get up. This stuff will still take another 7-8 hours to finish copying, lol. I'll know better for next time. Looking forward to getting this monster box out from under my desk and into it's proper place soon...

My guess is what you mentioned about Krusader pre-allocating the folders before copying the data over. I kind of suspected that when I went into the folder in Windows and all the folders were already there. I followed the Spaceinvader One tutorial on Krusader and it had me delete the original path and add paths 1_unraid_shares and 2_unraid_unassigned. I'll have to go dig a bit read up on how to move folders to disks rather than shares in it.

Averaging 160-185MB/s is definitely faster than I had expected, so that's a plus and with a fan blowing on my external, temps are all a nice 37-42 degrees C. Disks 2-3 stopped right at 3TB apiece and it's currently writing to disk 4. Seems like the only ornery one that didn't follow the allocation method is the first (bigger) disk. At it's current pace, it should hit 3TB on disk 4, then 5 and part of 6 in the next 10 hours.

That sounds like a plan. I was looking for tools or directions on how to move folders to different disks but all the posts I found were from years ago and I don't know if they work on 6.9. I'm definitely open to moving them disk to disk. If you could point me in a direction I'll be happy to check it out. The first 5TB of folders all went to the first drive and I expected that. I then added the movie folder about 10 genres at a time. The movies folder is broken down like: /movies/movie genre/movie series (if it has one)/movie title/files. The TV Shows folder was added afterwards about 15 series at a time and has a similar structure /TV Shows/series name/season/episode with a few of them probably going another folder in for something or another. I'm seeing that the second half of the movies folder transfers have some files on disk 2 but it doesn't look like it started splitting them until it hit 90%. Then when I added to the TV Shows share a number of them went on disk 1 as well, bringing it up to 11.2TB used and 760 megs free. It seems to have completely ignored the high water allocation altogether, as I thought it would hit about 6TB on drive 1 and start filling the other drives before coming back to drive 1. Only thing I can think of is that having a setting in the split level setting other than auto overrode the allocation method?

Next update, fun fun!! Turns out that Fit thumb drive stopped being read altogether and the replacement they sent is humming along nicely in the system now. Krusader is doing an awesome job of quickly moving my files from my external drives to the array (screwed up on the split level thing though, asked for assistance in the appropriate forum thread.) Once they're all transferred and I have my first drive not at 90+% full I'll be adding in the parity and cache drives. So far it's looking good and I'm liking it better than my previous Freenas setup. I'll drop a line in here later as to progress. Hopefully I'll get to parity, etc. by Sunday!

Hi, got my system up and it's looking promising. I did seem to make one pretty good blunder though. For my first few shares (comics and movies, both that go several folders deep) I had set the Allocation Method to High Water and the split level to Automatically split only the first 5 directories. Problem I have is that the way I did it, my 12TB disk filled up and now has 760 megs of free space left while 3 of the 6TB drives haven't even been touched. I'm guessing that it's because the split level overrode that 50% threshold thing that High Water is supposed to do? My system has 2x 12TB drives and 7 6TB ones and the array has 1x 12TB disk and 7 6TB ones. I'm using Krusader to add the 30-odd terabytes of data from my mounted usb drives and speed is better than expected. Once I have the files moved to the array, I'll be adding parity with the 2nd 12TB disk and adding in the 1TB nvme drive in the system as my cache drive. I reset the allocation method on those two folders to "automatically split only the top level directories" and am looking to delete 4 folders in the movie share (about 3.5TB) and then reupload them with the new split level and excluding the first drive. Would this achieve what I'm looking for? I really don't like the idea of running a disk at over 90% right from the start. If I'm reading things correctly, I need to get these files spread out over another disk or 3 before adding the parity drive. Thoughts on whether I'm on the right track or way off?

Huh, just my luck. It'll make a nice music drive for my Prius anyway, lol. UPDATE: Amazon has agreed to refund me for the 3 6TB Maxdigitaldata drives that have SMART errors (Rebranded Seagate Constellation drives) so I'm looking at purchasing 2 10Tb drives instead of 3 6tb ones. I can get 2 of the Seagate Exos x14 10Tb ones for about the same price. Thoughts on this? It'll only give me 4TB more space now but it'll allow me to add 10Tb drives going forward as I build this out over the next year or two. Side note, the reseller's label covers the breather hole on every one of these drives. I wonder if that had anything to do with the drive failures. I finally created a pool with the working 4 drives to play around with and get a feel for Unraid while I get the bad drive and possibly unusable controller situation figured out. It's fun and should be interesting to figure out how I want to arrange these levels and things.

yeah, I've heard that several people have used them. Is yours the usb 3.1 Plus version?