RobJ

Are you interested? There have been complaints from the very beginning about the wiki, and everyone *wants* the wiki to be better, but in the end almost no one actually has time to work on it. It reminds me of the trash can or tree branch that falls into the road. Most everyone slows and with difficulty gets around it, muttering that *someone* needs to move it off the road. It's a rare person that will actually stop and remove it though.

There's one other option, do a New Config when you are all done converting, and re-assign all drives to their original slots, then you can either rebuild parity (optionally without the empty drive), or mark it as already valid (but good to run a parity check anyway). The actual data will be on physically different drives, but the same disk numbers, so share configuration will still be correct. Your choice, but the quickest would be what you added by your edit.

When you have time to work on this, you may want to look into the Areca Controller thread. bjp999 and bubbaQ did quite a bit of work identifying the parameters and options needed. It would be hard to implement all of their work, but does seem worthwhile to add user-configurable fields for the options necessary to obtaining temps and SMART info, and whether they are available when spun down, maybe other things too. I'd love to see bjp999 working with you, as he had to do a lot of this kind of thing as the author of MyMain, the customizable Main screen face of UnMENU. As much as I liked UnMenu with its extras and versatility and customizability, there's no way but to consider it the past, and Dynamix the future. It served its generation, and served it well. It still has some life left, but is beginning to fade away. It would be great to see the best of UnMenu migrated to the new webGui.

Is this drive a lost cause or could it also be the SATA port its snapped into? It was a tough snap in so I am wondering if I damaged something maybe? The 'media error' with 'UNC' (UNCorrectable) indicates a bad sector, so the port would not matter. If sdh is the drive you are Preclearing, then you should probably Preclear it one more time, after this session completes, and make sure that Current Pending Sectors is zero on the final SMART report.

I think everyone likes the blue ball for a new drive. And for the User Shares state, we don't want a red ball for Cache-only shares, especially a red ball with X. Need a 4th color. A color blind user needing support could describe what he sees as the check ball (green with check), the X ball, (red with X), and the bang ball (yellow with '!') (or the exclamation ball). can't remember what discipline calls it the bang

I like them. I'm unsure about all of the 'offs' being undecorated squares though. Could there be red/green confusion, or are those never used in the same context? Could you link these with their meanings/purposes from Tom's first post - 3 Array States, 9 Array Disk States (5 and 4), 4 Cache Disk States, and 3 User Share States. I'd prefer separate columns for spin status and drive status, but it would require a little more coding, so I don't think we want that for v6.0 final. So I'm happy with the above, once their purposes are sorted out.

Some issues and thoughts - * A very nice idea, and a very good start for it! * It looks like you are keying on the Path in order to locate each drive after a reboot. Once I rebooted, most of the drives I 'installed' on the layout disappeared, only 3 were showing. The 3 that were still there happened to have the same SCSI path as the previous session. One drive had the same device symbol but a different path, and did not reappear. Both SCSI paths and device symbols can change with every boot. The ONLY thing you can rely on is the drive serial numbers. * After selecting slots for 5 of my drives, I could not get any more to stick. I'd select a slot for them, then click the Save Data button, and when the screen re-displayed, they would be gone, no matter how I tried it. Since I had recently turned off a number of columns, I turned the dates and manufacturer columns back on (for the Installed screen), and then found that the changes would stick. I haven't tested further yet, to see if it's a specific column that has to be on (like manufacturer), or a current column count issue. * I assume there will be ways to edit the install dates? They are rather useless right now. What might be useful to some of us is the Power_On_Hours, attribute 9 from the SMART report. * I too have drives in enclosures outside of the system case, so could use a mechanism for 2 layouts, but it's a low priority for now. I set up 2 columns, 10 rows each, and consider the right column to be inside the case, and the left column to be outside. I ignore the slot numbers, and mentally 'number' the drives from the bottom up, just leave various ones blank, and it works OK for me. * Many would probably like to see the array drive number with the drive. (That's a second column request, the first being power_on_hours. Neither are high priorities.) * The UnMENU MyMain screen had some similar capabilities. One thing I remember was a Notes field, and I expect you will be hearing from users wanting that, for each drive. I know there were a few other columns too, but don't remember them now.

Questions to consider - * Spin status (active/standby state) - this once was handled by temps showing or not, I prefer not using this method, as I believe we are moving toward always showing temps for those drives that support it. Then it was handled by a steady or blinking green ball. Now it's a green or grey ball. The question is, keep it roughly the way it is, with spin status mixed into drive status, or separate the spin status - add a second column with up and down arrows, large enough to click on to spin up or down (hover text could be "Standby - click to spin up" and "Active - click to spin down"). This option unfortunately means a little more coding (but little testing time) ... * If spin status stays mixed into ball color, how should it be represented, green/grey like the current? Or slow blink, or animation switching between filled and unfilled shapes? (Does the fact that the border stays drawn (filled/unfilled) remove the 1-bit problem, and the differing backgrounds problem? * I like Tom's comment about yellow-blink representing a rebuild in process, might be nice for any rebuild including parity. (subject to complaints about blinking though) * Sounds like everyone likes the new shapes (green=round, yellow=diamond, red=square, blue=? ? ?, grey=? ? ?), any further objections, especially from those who most need them? Are red and blue confused by certain color-blind people? * I thought I remembered seeing an orange ball, probably in a past release, and I *think* it was an array state. Am I wrong? Is that changed now? * User Share State colors - I agree with WeeboTech, I'd rather not see red for an informational color use, blue would be better. And since the share state color is informational only, perhaps there's something better than yellow? Grey?

The drive looks great! Enjoy it. (I'll bet you looked at those RAW numbers for the read and seek error rates? Don't! They mean nothing to us, only to the manufacturers, and they are typical of Seagates. What's important for the error rates is the VALUE, and both are perfect!)

I think Gary hadn't had his coffee yet! Easy way is to stop the array and unassign the parity drive. Period. Once you start the array, and make a single write to the array, the parity drive will no longer be valid.

Really sorry! I couldn't think of anything before, to help you (never thought of memory). Bad memory can cause the weirdest problems.

Tom released -rc3 with kernel 4.0.4, because of some important BTRFS fixes. And -rc4 is in testing...

I'll leave that up to you. You have already run another Preclear pass on it, as the 2 sectors showed up at the end of the second pass. I suspect you'll feel more confident after one more pass.

I think the disk is fine, just false positives. It's rather unusual to suddenly find them on a read pass, just after all sector media has been refreshed. But on subsequent testing, they were fine and put back online. The only thing I can think of is a possible power issue during the second post-read. Any power outages or lightning strikes around then?

Thank you!

Raw_Read_Error_Rate has bottomed out, far below its Threshold. If you can read the drive at all, salvage everything important off it ASAP. Because it's FAILING SMART, it should be an easy RMA, if that's possible, and in warranty. Just curious, what drive model is that? I've never seen an ATA error listing of 8, it's always the last 5 errors, not 8. Plus, it uses 252 for as-yet-unused values, somewhat unusual.

I don't think so, because it's the kernel that identifies and sets up the devices. Tom would not modify the kernel.

Now if gfjardim wants to add a badblocks option (with the -w option), plus a zeroing pass and a Preclear signature write, plus a possible test pass (check the Preclear signature and all zeroes on rest of drive), and grab before and after SMART reports, then you would have a built in Preclear!

The "approved partition note" indicates the entire drive has been zeroed. If you added a drive with the Preclear signature, but no zeroing, then all of parity would be destroyed, and you would have to rebuild parity. Formatting or not doesn't change that.

Throughout the history of the wiki, the demand (for info) has far outstripped the supply. Or put another way, there are far more users wanting information, than there are users willing to put it into the wiki. It's almost completely a community effort, but volunteers have been few and far between. If anyone reading this is interested in helping, please see Wiki editors needed.

Can I modify my request? I'd like to add to the diag zip file all the .cfg files from the /boot/config folder, plus super.dat and go. Perhaps later, you could add every cfg and log file, in their tree structure, from the /boot/config tree. No hurry, any time in the next week! (would love it before v6 goes final!)

You can delete it, as it's just ignored, superceded by the CacheDirs plugin. I have to say it's the first instance I'm aware of, but if one user has it there, then there may be an instruction somewhere suggesting putting it there, so there may be others with it there too. I'll add a note about removing it. From the little anecdotal evidence available so far, it seems like 1GB may be fine, but certainly 2GB would be 'finer'. Either way you go, let us know how well or poorly it works for you. Thanks for your feedback!

Yep, that's a corrupted Reiser file system. Whenever you start up, it's going to mount it normally, until you do the particular file I/O that touches the file system corruption, then it's going to remount it read-only. Please run Check Disk File systems on Disk 4.

You should probably check the syslog. If file system corruption is detected, the file system is changed to read only. You may want to check the file system on the destination drive you were copying to.

I completely concur. You had pending sectors drop on both the preread and the post read (which should never happen), and then not be cleared to zero on the zeroing phase! Something is really wrong with that drive. Another Preclear, even if perfect, would not restore my confidence in it. The only other thing I could suggest is to try the manufacturers test tool on the drive, more from curiosity than anything else.