demanding-chief3698

That is a very interesting point. The PSU is pretty beefy at 850w (it is a brand name); however, there are 5 disks on one cable from the PSU. Does that sound like a lot of load?

I am really interested you problem. I have had intermittant drive disabled trouble since I started by server. I have a cheap used HBA and I suspect it to be the problem. If you find this is the problem and a better HBA is the solution, please let me know.

I appreciate the responses. I am going to do the following to get Disk 2 back online: shutdown the array, removed the disabled drive, start up the array to make sure the drive was removed. shutdown the array again, add a new drive with a different sata cable clear the new drive assign the new drive to Drive 2 slot start array. Did I get anything wrong? I am building another unraid server. Assuming I can get disk 2 back online, I will transfer the important files to the new server. Next, I will take this original server down, put in new, more expensive, SAS to SATA cables and see what happens.

Disk 2 is on a single power cable with 4 other drives: 1 through 5.

Extended SMART on Disk 2 indicate no errors.

They are both on a single power cable serving 5 drives - drives 1 through 5.

I have a 7-disk array with a mixture of drives ranging from 2TB to 10TBs for a total of 26TB. I have a history of drives becoming disabled/emulated. During a recent parity check, drive 2 did this. It shows 2048 errors and the parity check was stopped. I canceled the parity check. I ran an extended SMART test on drive 2 and it shows no errors. In the past, JorgeB has been able to diagnose that at least one drive had a bad sata/power connection. He was able to ID the exact drive. I suspect that is the case with this recent problem. Diagnostis attached. I plan to do the following to recover: 1. shutdown the array, 2. removed the disabled drive, 3. start up the array to make sure the drive was removed. 4. shutdown the array again, 5. add the drive back with a different sata cable Does that sound correct? My big issue is the INSTABILITY of my array. Why does this keep happening? I am very careful not to disturb the server once it is up and running well but it still breaks with a disabled disk every few weeks. I know that UNRAID is stable so it is frustrating to keep seeing this. I have a relatively cheap 8i HBA card (about $35) and relatively cheap SAS to sata connectors. I bought new connecters that cost about 3x the old ones. Do you think it is worth replacing the current cables as the first step in making the build stable? I understand that UNRAID uses the serial number of the drive to assign them in an array so placement of the sas cables should not be critical. Did I get that right? If replacing the SAS to sata cables with more expensive cables does not work, my next step would be to replace the 8i HBA card. I am willing to spend a hundred bucks or so if it would mean a stable build. Any recommendations on such a PCI-e card would be most appreciated. plexnas-diagnostics-20250104-1111.zip

I have a 7-disk array with a mixture of drives ranging from 2TB to 10TBs for a total of 26TB. I have a history of drives becoming disabled/emulated. During a recent parity check, drive 2 did this. It shows 2048 errors and the parity check was stopped. I canceled the parity check. I ran an extended SMART test on drive 2 and it shows no errors. In the past, JorgeB has been able to diagnose that at least one drive had a bad sata/power connection. He was able to ID the exact drive. I suspect that is the case with this recent problem. Diagnostis attached. I plan to do the following to recover: 1. shutdown the array, 2. removed the disabled drive, 3. start up the array to make sure the drive was removed. 4. shutdown the array again, 5. add the drive back with a different sata cable Does that sound correct? My big issue is the INSTABILITY of my array. Why does this keep happening? I am very careful not to disturb the server once it is up and running well but it still breaks with a disabled disk every few weeks. I know that UNRAID is stable so it is frustrating to keep seeing this. I have a relatively cheap 8i HBA card (about $35) and relatively cheap SAS to sata connectors. I bought new connecters that cost about 3x the old ones. Do you think it is worth replacing the current cables as the first step in making the build stable? I understand that UNRAID uses the serial number of the drive to assign them in an array so placement of the sas cables should not be critical. Did I get that right? If replacing the SAS to sata cables with more expensive cables does not work, my next step would be to replace the 8i HBA card. I am willing to spend a hundred bucks or so if it would mean a stable build. Any recommendations on such a PCI-e card would be most appreciated. plexnas-diagnostics-20250104-1111.zip

After seeing a great video on the subject case I decided to buy one and build my ideal Unraid server using what I have learned from my first server and from the good people on this forum. You can see the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E94QRkZfIDM&t=708s If you can live with 12 spinning drives, 2 nvdme drives and 2 ssd, I think it’s a winner for not a ton of money and will not eat a lot space. I am going to use 6 of the 8 sata ports on the motherboard and a 6 sata port m.2 solution that I bought for the spinning drives in the array. Two of the motherboard sata will be used for 2 ssd and 2 of the m.2 slots will be for the 2 m.2 ssds. The JMCD-12s4 has a backplane that takes 12 drives (either SAS or sata). There are 3 minSAS connectors on the back of the backplane. I have bought 3 – 12TB HGST sata drives with (a 5-year guarantee) that were shucked from a server. Eventually, I will buy and install a total of 12 spinners for a 132TB array. My main question concerns hooking up these drives to my ATX motherboard. I think I need three (MiniSAS SF8643 to 4 sata cables) all with REVERSE breakout for this to work. The single SF8643 connector on each cable goes to one of the 3 SAS connectors on the backplane and the sata connectors go to the sata ports on the motherboard and m.2 adaptor. Is that right? All the shucked drives I have purchased have the pin 3 power issue which I ran into with my first build; however, I have recently read that it is NOT an issue with these sata drives in this backplane. In any event, if it is an issue I will seal off the pin 3 with tape. Just for your information, the chassis is a relatively compact cube but still can take a full ATX motherboard. I think a lot of thought went into its design. I had to wait for almost 2 months to get it from Alibaba but the shipping was only about $20. I could have gotten it a lot sooner if I was willing to spend 5x that amount. It seems to be very well built and the folks in China will sell you a spare backplane if that is a worry. Another question. It came with NO fans but places for Three-120mm input and five-92mm exhaust fans. Any advice on good quality, quiet fans? I am not afraid to splurge here to keep it quiet. Any other general advice on this build would be most welcome and appreciated.

JorgeB, many thanks! Your ability to point to the exact disk with the connection problems was the key to getting this fixed. I ran the parity check with corrections and it corrected over 293,000,000 errors. It was my fault that I let it go so far without stopping the previous rebuild/parity check. That will not happen again but it does show the ability of Unraid to fix itself. I have marked this issue aa SOLVED. You provide an outstanding service for my Unraid server which is why I am spending $250 on another license for another server I am building. The issue regarding why the disk sata connection problem has pulled down my server twice is very disconcerting. As I mentioned before I have a used HBA card with 8 SAS to sata cables. I suspect the cables. I will buy more expensive, more robust (and hopefully), more reliable cables to try and fix this. Again, many thanks!!

Hello, yes indeed - it has been a bain of my system. When I do something with my system it seems to happen repeatedly - that is a SATA connection problem where I am told on this forum by a Moderater to "replace the power/connection cables" on a particular drive. Apparently, the Moderator can tell which connection is bad from the diagnostics. I replace the sata cable and the system comes back but I am left to wonder WHY. I have been very careful to keep connectors in place but it still happens. I wornder whether it is my SAS to Sata PCI card that is problematic. It is a used card. Did you ever get a solution? Do you have any thoughts on the most reliable sata connections. It seems to be a common problem.

Thank you JorgeB, I guess I will continue to ask your advice and console when I have these issues. Please see questions below: Should I run a parity check (with correction) since there were so many errors during the last check? Is there anything else I should do before I run the parity check?

Many thanks JorgeB, because of your help, I think this is very close to being Marked as Solved Could you please tell me where in the diagnostics you found that disk 2 had a bad connection? Is there a text string I should search for? Being able to find this will hopefully keep me from bugging you for help. I ran the filesystem repair on disk 5 with the -L option and the array started without errors. Should I run a parity check (with correction) since there were so many errors during the last check? Is there anything else I should do before I run the parity check? Does Unraid somehow automatically record pre-existing checksums? If so how can I access them? If not, how can I get these checksums to record somewhere after I get all my files working again? The latest diagnostics are attached. plexnas-diagnostics-20241212-1203.zip

JorgeB, many thanks. Next time that happens, I will cancel the rebuild as soon as errors pop up. Thank you for this advice. After replacing the cable on disk 2, the system booted, and all the shares came back. Can you please tell me where in the diagnostic you were able to see the power/connection problem with disk 2? After the reboot disk 5 is indicated to be Unmountable: Unsupported or no file system. I guess I should run the filesystem status check on this drive and allow it to make changes. Is that correct? Assuming I can get the array back up with all the drives, I am pretty sure I have some corrupted files. Is there a plugin, app or methodology that will allow me to identify the corrupted files? Again, thank you for your help. Diagnostic attached. plexnas-diagnostics-20241212-1052.zip

A few days ago one of the 2TB disks in my array was set to disabled. It appeared to be emulated using my 10TB parity disk. I am confused as to why this happened. I know that sata cables are the usual suspects but why was it good for so long (months)? I am using two HBA cards for the SAS to sata connection. The full tower is pretty full of stuff and I am asking if I should shut it down, take it apart, reseat the cards, and replace the sata cables on the disks showing error. I understand that Unraid uses the serial numbers of the drives for assignment in the array so mixing or swapping the sata cables should not be an issue. Do you think this is advisable or worth doing? I tried to recover from the disabled disk state by removing it and putting another 10TB drive in its place to do a rebuild. Within a short period, errors started appearing on two and then three of the array disks during the rebuild. The rebuild was completed after about 22 hours with about 500,000,000 errors in the parity check. At this point, ALL of the array disks are showing NORMAL OPERATION (Green circle). All the disks in the array are active and indicate a healthy SMART status. However, they still show the errors and a significant amount of my media files will not play. Also, the SHARES tab indicates: There are no exportable user shares. I am not sure how to proceed at this point. Clearly, there is some data loss. If I could somehow determine which media files are corrupted, I would delete and replace them. If you could please give me a step-by-step approach on how to go forward I will do it. Thank you very much for any help you can provide. I just love this system but I want to get it to be stable. If that means buying more or different hardware I am certainly willing to do so. If I remember correctly those HBA cards were about $40 apiece and definitely not worth the hassle if they are causing my problems. Diagnostic attached. plexnas-diagnostics-20241211-1601.zip

Got it...

The data is only media files that I can replace. I just want to get the drive mounted so I have exportable shares.

No backups

Dear UNRAID Forum Moderators, Getting UNRAID going has been my passion for some months. I think it is an outstanding OS and I just love it. I really want to understand it and not make the silly errors of a neophyte. I was trying to be super-careful using instructions from JorgeB. I did the following: stopped the array unassigned disk 3 by clicking "no device" went to actions in the Unassigned Disk plugin and saw the 2TB disk 3 listed as unassigned with an orange MOUNT button I hit the orange MOUNT button and went back to the array and started it disk 3 again comes up as unmountable... I turned off the array and went back to the unassigned disk app which indicated that disk 3 was MOUNTED since the orange button now says UNMOUNT Next: stopped the array set disk 3 to no device started the array: it showed no device in that slot stopped array assigned the unassigned disk 3 to the slot: drive 3 came up with a blue dot indicating a new disk started array: drive 3 came up with the standard message "unmountabe ..." A major difference is now drive 3 is showing an orange triangle saying contents are emulated. It does NOT say disabled. Then I did NOTHING but within a few minutes I got an email notice from UNRAID that the disk was rebuilding. Some hours later the rebuild was complete. The disk has a green dot but (as both of you told me) is still shown as unmountable... I tried to be very careful but clearly, I screwed up. Could you please tell me where I went off the rails? Should I have WAITED after hitting MOUNT on the UD plug-in? Did I miss something or some action in the UD plug-in? What should I do now to get this drive mounted? Please be very specific because I have demonstrated that without specific instruction, I can and will fail to do things correctly. The latest diags attached. Notes: all my shares now have green dot but I am still told that: There are no exportable disk shares. I assume that is because of the unmounted disk 3 but I am not sure. Is there anything I have to do after I get disk 3 mounted to make the shares exportable? Many thanks for all your help and expertise, Mike plexnas-diagnostics-20240925-1746.zip

I just got a message that disk 3 is being reconstructed and is available for normal operations.

JorgeB, I just did the following: stopped the array set disk 3 to no device started the array: it showed no device in that slot stopped array assigned the unassigned disk 3 to the slot: drive 3 came up with a blue dot indicating a new disk started array: drive 3 came up with the standard message "unmountabe ..." A major difference is now drive 3 is showing an orange triangle saying contents are emulated. It does NOT say disabled.

JorgeB, I just did the following: stopped the array unassigned disk 3 by clicking "no device" went to actions in the Unassigned Disk plugin and saw the 2TB disk 3 listed as unassigned with an orange MOUNT button I hit the button and went back to the array and started it disk 3 again comes up as unmountable... I turned off the array and went back to the unassigned disk app which indicated that disk 3 was MOUNTED and the orange button now says UNMOUNT I can see all the files on disk 3 in the unassigned disk app latest diags file attached plexnas-diagnostics-20240925-1140.zip

JorgeB, many thanks for hanging in there with me. Please forgive me for being thick; I do not want to make any more stupid mistakes. From what you said I plan to do the following: stop the array unassign disk 3 by clicking "no device" go to actions in the unassigned disk plugin and try to mount it if it shows up on unassigned drives Is the above sequence of actions correct? Again, many thanks, Mike

I did not do it. I was asking if I could. The disk is still disabled and indicates it is unmountable. The last xfs status output is a few posts back. I do not think it finished. current diags below: plexnas-diagnostics-20240925-0810.zip

JorgeB, I found the following advice online as one way to get a disabled/emulated drive going again. See below: "Stop the array, unassign the disk, start the array in maintenance mode, stop it again, and reassign the drive to the same slot. The idea is to start the array temporarily with the drive “missing” so it changes from “disabled” to “emulated” status, then to stop it and “replace” the drive to get it back to “active” status." My array shares are back and seem to be complete. There is a note that none of the shares are exportable. I assume because of the disabled drive. Do you think the above approach is advisable? Thank you for all your help. My array has come a long way back toward normal.