Hi All,
A few questions - Back story below if of any use but it is mainly a rant so can be skipped:-
1. If you have an array with say 2 failed drives, a parity and disk. If you take the parity and disk out of the array, fixed the disk with an XFS Repair CLI - Can you add that disk back into the array before adding and rebuilding parity drive - key being without losing the disk data? Or does a new disk in an array have to be a blank disk - So basically if your fs is XFS can you simply add the drive to an array and resync parity while keeping all your files on the disk intact?
2. Do you always have to go through a rebuild when you get a red x? Even if the drive is fine and the issue is intermittent power drops or lose cables while writing.
3. With UD can you write to a NTFS drive, or even an XFS drive, using Krusader or in a windows VM without issue?
4. If a drive is showing a green ball but with write errors, if the parity has also failed, is that drive lost - So next reboot it will show the red cross of death and I've lost the data. Or at best I can recover the data but need to add a drive to the array and copy everything over again, growing older and older in the process...
Many Thanks
Back Story
I'm new to Unraid, less than 2 weeks, and have never posted in forums - Other than tinkering with a few Pi's I've always been a windows fan boy. I've been running a 'server' for near a decade for Plex and have recently got into dockers on WSL and into linux in general. I also had a synology NAS which recently failed on it's 2 RAID 1's after giving it a clean and not inserting the PCIE SATA adapter in right.
I decided to take the plunge and go for Unraid. I tore down my gaming pc to temporarily build in and set up 6 drives (2x16TB, 4x18TB Exos X series) with 2 NVME 2TB WD Blue's as cache drives. I assigned an 18TB as parity leaving 5 drives for data and everything was going great. I even said to myself this is awesome, why didn't I do this years ago instead of dealing with windows updates, crashes, windows 11 pop ups, poor performance, etc.
So as the jinx gods laughed upon me I took down my windows 10 'server', gave it a big clean. Ripped out the 9 drives consisting of 4 WD 2TB reds, a 6TB red, a 8TB seagate green and 2 exos 16s. I then added 9 Exos 18/16 drives, 6 in the array built earlier and 3 as unassigned devices to be added later. There were also 2 1TB 2.5 QVO that were UD's to be added later.
Then onto the boot - firstly nothing was showing on the screen so I did the usual debug of ripping things out until I get a boot and then add one thing in at a time until it doesn't. Turned out to be the GPU (1070 Giga Aero) which after some bios tweaks of using internal GPU only I was into unraid. All drives showed as they did on the other computer and GPU was showing (nvidia plugin). Great!
I then went to add the GPU to the plex docker and noticed the docker I had didn't have a GPU option. I pulled down another docker and stupidly pegged the config folder to that of the other plex docker. I thought, oops I best shut down as it had frozen, which I did by clicking the shut down button and it worked. But on reboot I got a red X on drive 1. I panicked and got onto google looking how to recover. I then was trying to access data from it to make a copy when another drive showed missing and then it started going nuts so I quickly shut down.
I thought for a second and my best guess from struggling to boot was the 550w PSU wasn't enough for the 10900K, 3200 4 channel 16GB sticks, 9 x 140mm noctua fans, 2 nvmes, 2 2.5 SSDs, GTX 1070, 9 18/16 Exos HDD, 2.5gbps PCIE NIC, 2 SAS port HBA to 8 SATA and a 4 way DVB tv tuner. So i threw in my gaming computers 850w and booted up. There was still a red x on disk 1 so I cleared one of the 18TB's I was planning on using as parity 2 and, after removing disk 1 added the other drive to the array to rebuild. It failed after a few minutes. So I removed that and added the original one again. That failed too after a few minutes. I turned off and thought maybe the HBA had too many drives and hooked the new 18tb to the boards SATA. After 28 painful+depressing hours it rebuilt and all data was available. All PSU's are Seasonic Focus Platinums by the way, you should never cheap out on a PSU!
I enabled plex quickly last night as fam and friends are missing it with it being down all weekend - the docker was the old version, the new one wasn't there. I tried it out, all working well and much faster than vmware even without the GPU added yet.
Got up this morning all still working well. During my panicked 28 hours I had a look what was on disk 1 and I could see it was a few docker containers and the 'system' file share. I wanted these on the NVME that I was going to backup with a script. Everytime I hit the move button they wouldn't move though - No google answers on this other than disabling docker and VM, which still didn't work. It turned out that setting to 'Only' on Cache after it has already saved data to a disk will not move it back to the SSD. Same with data on the Cache that I set to disk only. When I changed to prefer and add the cache to the disk shares, hit move and... - waaaayyyy - it all started moving to where it should. A bit before hitting the move I had started a preclear on the previous disk 1 drive.
My heart sunk again as I noticed after about 5 minutes the read/write numbers were no longer moving. I found the log button on the top of the screen and there was a lot of red errors writing to disk 0 (assumed parity). And then bang... another red x on parity this time. I was thinking ahhh another 28 hours of waiting now but at least its working and then I noticed the pop up saying 2 drives have failed (it was an orange one for 2 drives [inc. parity], a red one for the parity). Disk 3 was showing 650 odd errors and the numbers were no longer changing. I've been trying to copy data from that drive to another UD drive both using Krusader and a windows VM I set up. Nothing is letting me copy the whole folders, or even sub folders. I was going to try using rsync tonight when I get home as trying to do this on my phone is just frustrating (I have wireguard set up) especially after a week of 4-5 hour sleeps thanks to this little project.
So yeah - Unraid seemed awesome but at the moment I'm glad I'm still on the trial as my poor little ticker can't cope with this constant data loss risk. Yes I should have backed up twice but I wanted to get this up and running and most was done remotely through my phone so it was easier to set preclear to the drive I had just transferred the data from than lose half a day of the server doing nothing.
I have to admit I'm close to just installing windows again and going back to the devil I know but the power of unraid compels me!
Thanks