albrittbrat91

Just to give some updates on this -All four drives that I got from Server Part Deals went bad. Pulling them all out of the NAS and using a USB dock on my windows machine, running SMART diagnostics, two drives just wouldn't register/show up at all, and the other two had tons of bad sectors and other SMART report errors, so I returned all those drives, still pending refund because they are still in transit -Unraid somehow kept the array up and running despite the main page clearly saying that 2 drives had failed in the 1 parity disk setup, and I was able to copy a lot of our data off of the NAS, but we definitely lost data. It took me 3 days of babysitting getting our clould backed up data off of backblaze becuause of our slow internet and their obnoxiously aggressive auto-logout behavior that cancels any in-progress downloads (I know they recommend command line, but I couldn't figure it out). After all that time and effort and getting duplicacy on Windows to decrypt the archive....it hadn't run in 3 years because our license expired and it didn't auto-renew, or email me, or anything. It's ultimately on me for not checking, but that super, duper sucks. So we definitely lost data...how much data and what specific data I don't think we'll ever actually know, but I know that at least some crucial financial data got lost. -I ordered four different drives and went with Newegg since they could get them to me the soonest, even though it was $50 more per drive vs Amazon (but 3-5 weeks faster delivery). The drives from newegg showed up in a partially destroyed box with no foam, no padding between the drives, just four drives in ESD bags with a little bit of the paper filler stuff in the box. Despite this, all four drives passed the unraid pre-check process and are currently being 'built' into a new config array -The first set of 4 drives also showed no problems until ~10 days into being part of the array, so I'm not holding my breath on the new ones working until it's been at least a month or two. Once the parity builds (I set it up with 2x parity drives this time), I plan on starting to copy data back to the array from my windows machine and we'll just have to go from there. Definitely a lot of lessons learned in this process. 3-2-1 backup is the golden rule for a reason, going forward we're going to have 2 parity drives in our array, we are going to build a whole second NAS to be a hot spare that will also have two parity drives in it, and I am going to set calendar reminders to check that our backups are actually running to backblaze every month going forward. Is there any easy, straight-forward way to setup two unraid servers to sync with each other?

Okay, after several hours of troubleshooting, I believe it is that the pci-e addin card that I have has gone bad. I disassembled my NAS, put it on a table, re-connected everything data-wise how it was in the case, and switched in a different known-good power supply with much more wattage overhead than the original one. I got the same terrible beeping noises and unraid just wouldn't boot, sat there displaying 500 server error for over 15 minutes with the hard drive beeping and clicking away. I then unplugged disk 2 from data and power, and booted it again, now disk 3 starts making those noises, though not quite as badly, and unraid does eventually get past the 500 server error page after ~10 minutes. I then unplugged disk 3, booted it again, and now disk 4 starts making those noises, same behavior as disk 3. What's the common denominator? They're all plugged into the addin card. I unplugged all of the sata data connectors from the 4 hard drives plugged into the addin card, viola, no terrible hard drive noises, the drives plugged only into power all spin up without issue, unraid boots in ~1 minute as it should, just obviously reporting most of the array drives missing. So I have a replacement (different) pci-e addin card on the way from Amazon and should be here Sunday. I really hope that swapping that out fixes all these weird issues. I also really, really hope that the addin card didn't somehow permanently damage disk 2 by making it sit there and beep and click for probably cumulatively close to 2 hours over this whole process of trying to figure out what's going on. Anyway, I will report back Sunday/Monday if the mail actually runs on time. Fingers crossed. Thanks for the help!

I am really starting to panic and lose my mind now. I tried to use the unraid web GUI to move files from the failed disk 2 to disk 3, this ran most of the way and then threw up a bunch of warnings and errors on some random audio files. Going back to the main page, the drives now report more errors on them, mostly on disk 3. I rebooted the system using the reboot from the web UI, and now disk 3 (I think) is making the same aweful noises that disk 2 was making, and unraid took like 10 minutes to boot this time. It might be worth noting that after unplugging disk 2, unraid automatically re-assigned disk 3 to be SDB, which is what disk 2 was before that caused the initial failure (but that drive works fine in my windows machine) and then reported the replacement brand new pre-checked drive as failed as well...I'm losing my mind here. Unraid has no way to automatically rebuild the array with a drive missing, you have to do new config and that loses all the data. So I was trying to move the data off of it first, and now I have more errors. What do I do from here? If I move the hard drives over to a different hardware platform (different motherboard, CPU, RAM, power supply), will unraid work and remember the array from the current hardware? Prior to all this today I was thinking there was a hardware problem, but at this point I'm really thinking it makes more sense for it to be a software problem, because it has now affected three separate hard drives, two of which are brand new, none of which I am convinced are actually 'bad' drives, and they ALL are the SDB assigned drive. Is there a way to manually assign hard drives to different letters in unraid to test this theory? Can you look into this? PLEASE HELP!?!?!tower-diagnostics-20251118-1543.zip

Thanks for the reply. I would still really appreciate an answer to my questions in my original post though. "With the expanded capacity of the overall array, I can just live with having one less drive in my array for now, but I don't know how to re-build the array without that drive and can't immediately find anything on this in the documentation. Is it possible to just tell the array to rebuild with the remaining 5 drives onto the available space on those drives?" ie go from 60TB array of 6 drives to 48TB array of 5 drives since only ~30TB is in use

I will try to be civil in my response here, but please understand I am very frustrated and worried about my data. I wish I had pulled diagnostics at every stage of this process, but I did not. As I said in my post, I had the 'bad' drive unplugged because plugging it in causes the machine to take 4 minutes to boot to the normal 1 minute, and the 'bad' drive makes terrible sounds while it sits there waiting. During this period the unraid web gui just displays 500 server error. Attached are updated diagnostics with the 'bad' drive plugged in, as well as the audio of the drive noises while it sits there 'booting'. The export diagnostics also took a long time, hanging at the SDB drive where it continued making much louder bad noises. You also didn't answer any of my questions...even if the diagnostics say the new drive is 'bad', my post explains why I don't know that I believe that to be the case because of the weird behavior and the old drive that it reported bad in that slot is in fact totally fine and now in use in my windows machine. tower-diagnostics-20251116-0810.zip unraid bad.aac

Hardware before any changes: mini-itx mobo with 4 sata ports and a pcie card that adds 4 additional sata ports, 3x 12TB drives, 3x 4TB drives, 2x 500GB SSDs for redundant cache The saga: unraid reports SDB (a 12TB drive) as not working, array unprotected I ordered a replacement drive + 3 more new 12 TB drives to swap out all of my old 4TB drives For the first replacement, I replaced the 'bad' 12TB drive, I used the unassigned devices plugin to run the full pre-check on the new drive as the documentation suggested, this took ~3.5 days, then I rebuilt the array to the new, tested good drive, all good. I let everything stay like this for ~3 days just to ensure everything was working as normal and to catch up on some file transfers that had been pending In the meantime of this waiting period, out of curiosity, I took the 'bad' 12TB drive and stuck it into my normal windows computer, reformatted it, and have been using it as a video editing scratch disk for ~2 weeks as of writing this, so I don't think there's anything wrong with the original culprit 'bad' drive I then proceeded to follow the documentation for swapping out the 3x 4TB drives with 3x 12TB new drives, all of which went smoothly and I was left with a functional 60TB array Fast forward around 10 days, and now unraid is reporting that SDB is bad again, the same slot, but with the new drive that I ran the full precheck on Troubleshooting steps taken so far: I changed out the SATA cable, unraid reports it's still bad. I unplugged one of my SSD cache drives and moved its' power connector and SATA cable over to the SDB 'bad' drive, unraid reports it's still bad. The hard drive makes a weird pinging noise and it takes unraid a very long time to get to where I can access the web gui in this state. Unsure of what else to do, I unplugged SDB completely and re-connected the SSD cache drive, and started the array because I need to be able to use my NAS but am unsure of what to do from here. With the expanded capacity of the overall array, I can just live with having one less drive in my array for now, but I don't know how to re-build the array without that drive and can't immediately find anything on this in the documentation. Is it possible to just tell the array to rebuild with the remaining 5 drives onto the available space on those drives? What should I do next on the hardware troubleshooting side of things? I'm really lost at this point and worried about data loss. I have some spare old computer hardware I could probably cobble together to see if there's something wrong with the non-hard-drive hardware of the system, but I'm not sure how unraid handles swapping everything around like that. I've read that it 'should just work' but it seems like a very large risk to take if it doesn't just work. Please help!tower-diagnostics-20251115-1100.zip

So my NAS is currently approaching being full. It has 8 total available SATA ports (4 on mobo, 4 on pcie card that occupies the only pcie slot on the mobo) and they are all currently populated with: 3x 12TB drives (1 is parity), 3x 4TB drives, and 2x 512GB SSDs (redundant cache pool) The end goal is to replace the 3x 4TB drives with 3x 24TB drives, but I know that the parity drive must be at least matched in size with the largest hard drive in the array, so one of the 24TB drives will need to become the new parity drive. So my questions boil down to: What is the best order of operations for getting from A to B, and what does that look like every step of the way? There are no drives in the array that don't have data on them, so would it be best to disconnect the current parity drive and replace it with a 24TB drive, and then <tell it to use the new drive as parity (not sure how)>? And then from there how do I migrate the other drives without losing data or having to manually transfer them by buying a SATA to USB dock or similar? 1.) 12TB parity -> 24TB parity, build new parity (don't know how to do this) 2.) 4TB data -> 24TB data, rebuild from parity (don't know how to do this) 3.) 4TB data -> 24TB data, rebuild from parity (^) 4.) 4TB data -> 12TB old parity, rebuild from parity (wipe it first? can unraid handle that for me? how?) Or does it make more sense to first temporarily replace one of the SSDs from the cache with the new 24TB parity drive and let it switch over that way? Does it matter what SATA port each drive is plugged into? I know Windows is really dumb and picky about that. Just seems like there are a lot of paths forward, and I'm not sure what makes the most sense, and I'm very paranoid about losing any of my data in the process. Thanks!

I appreciate the responses. The data in the cache pool is waiting to be written to Shared only, sure, that makes sense. 'it doesn't have the pool name, reapply the share settings' - no clue what this means. I updated to 7.1.4 and rebooted, and then hit move, and now the mover is running correctly, so that is the solution as far as I can tell. Thanks for the help!!!

Thanks for the response. I believe diagnostics are attached. Cache/Cache2 pool is supposed to auto move all of its' contents at 2am every day to all of the other non-default shares (the ones I created anyway) - Bryan, Saralyn, Shared, and Cloud Backuptower-diagnostics-20250707-0759.zip

I have read through the support topics I could find here and on Reddit. This is a common issue it seems, and the common solutions are not working for me. I do not have the mover tuning plugin(s), never have (I tried installing one to see if it would fix the issue, it didn't, and I removed it). I have triple checked that all of my share names match the share.cfg file names on the flash drive. I double checked that useCache is enabled on all of the shares in the .cfg files. I turned on mover logging and it just says started and then finished immediately. I have tried rebooting the server several times in this process as well. Despite my best efforts, my cache drive is still sitting at 97.7% full and won't accept new files, nor will the mover clear the cache disks no matter how many times I try. Any other suggestions?

Thank you Squid, setting the IP to static solved all the issues I was seeing!

I had to shut down my Unraid NAS over this past weekend and ever since I turned it back on I have been having tons of issues with it for seemingly no reason. What happened: Plex says server is unreachable, go to docker, it's running, try to update it, says update available but nothing happens when try to update, just results in all docker buttons not working, nothing happens when trying to do anything. Next I rebooted the NAS again and tried to update the OS through Tools->Update OS, just sits there at the .plg screen and never does anything, go to google, find a link to the amazon web services link to the file on the support page, try putting that into install plugins, gives network error. Also I suddenly can't access the WebGUI while on VPN (Nord) anymore as of this week randomly. Just a whole lot of issues all the sudden, please help! -Can't update OS -Can't update Dockers -Plex can't find server even when docker is running without any errors -Can't access WebGUI while on VPN -Can get to WebGUI, start drives, access files through local machine as normal Diagnostics attached. tower-diagnostics-20230518-0108.zip