Hi all,
Apologies for what is going to be a long post and possibly in the wrong area.
First let me say, now that I have 1 stable server I am loving Unraid, and it has awoken a demon in me 🤣
I am fairly new to Unraid and have made some mistakes getting to this point, I have 1 server up and running which is solid (I call it Raptor) and a 2nd server that I am trying to setup (I call it Dragon), but without those mistakes I wouldn't be where I am today which is being happy enough to want to run a 2nd server 🤪 which will be used by myself as a "File Backup, Game Install Backup, Windows Backup" and my brother to backup his YouTube files etc so they are stored in multiple places, will probably use NextCloud or something.
The first mistakes I made was buying cheap USB Pen Drives (Samsung, Sandisk) which I have, as will be explained had nothing but problems with.
The first drive I went with was a "Sandisk Cruzer Fit" as from what I could find these were "Recommended", I bought 4 of them by mistake but worked out in the end that I would need nearly all of them!
The first one died whilst writing the Unraid image this sucked but happens with electronics, the 2nd died 3 hours in to use (WTF) the 3rd worked fine for 3 days, so I purchased a "Pro Key" and installed it, everything was ok for a couple of weeks or so, honestly it was so long ago now I cannot remember how long it was.
Then hey presto that drive started showing errors, this as well as losing the WebUI every 3 days got me so annoyed with Unraid that I actually stopped running Unraid and switched to Truenas on the Dell R720 and Netapp Disk Shelf which ran perfectly other than annoying permission issues (why does it have to be complicated).
I then after a while really wanted to try Unraid again so much that I purchased a Supermicro CSE846 Chassis with 2x 6TB HDD's & 22x 3TB HDD's, Motherboard and then made another mistake in buying the Samsung Bar Plus (recommended) for this server as well as a 2nd Pro Key to do a full start from fresh
Once I had the Supermicro server setup, I copied all my data over from the Dell server and let the Supermicro server to run for a while with limited users accessing it.
After a while I noticed that I was running in to issues with slow downs on the WebUI, losing access to the shares, App's randomly stopping and the server shutting down for no what seemed like no reason.
Each time I then rebooted the server and noticed it would only boot 50% of the times or so and was giving me error messages about USB and a few other things, which when I looked around on the net, the only thing I could find was that the Pen Drive was failing and needed to be replaced 😒.
I found a thread but cannot find it now, where the ATP Nanodura Pen Drive was recommended because it is designed for "Industrial Usage" so I purchased 2 of them, 1 to use and 1 for a backup just incase, as given my luck up to that point with these things I was buying a 2nd!
I used the "Flash Backup" tool and switched to the Nanodura and 🥳🥳it worked and was booting with no issues!
The Supermicro Server (Raptor) is running perfectly and (touches wood) not given me any issues in relation to the USB Pen Drive, no crashes, no lost WebUI etc etc.
So I purchased another ATP Nanodura Pen Drive, so I still have 1 spare and created the Unraid Pen Drive and installed it in the Dell Server.
I have tried to replace the "Trial Key" with the unused "Pro Key" but it's telling me "Error: {"message":"Request failed with status code 403","data":{"error":"Cannot transfer GUID because you've already transferred 2 times in the past year. Please contact support for assistance."}}".
I have tried looking for the "Support" section on the Unraid website but I can only see "Paid Support", have I got to buy another key or wait for an unknown number of months/years, before I can use the "Replace Key" function?
Sorry for the long post but I am not really wanting to buy a 3rd key!!