JP

Just to balance data across the drives. I think the school of thought some time ago was that having something like 50% - 60% of data drives filled was sort of the sweet spot. If a drive got somewhere around 75% filled, then you needed to add more drive space. Evenly distributing that data out could help with that. BUT now that you mention it, I think I read somewhere recently that is no longer the case. Drives being unbalanced isn't really the end of the world. So, I guess I shouldn't worry about it.

I'm new to unbalanced and I could be missing something, but I'm not seeing it. That is, I would have thought there was an option to basically select a number of drives and then have the app disperse the data evenly amongst those drives. What I'm seeing instead is that this is a very manual process where you need to specifically point at what data you want to go where...right? I'm not trying to "dink" the app, just trying to understand. Also, I'm assuming this doesn't exist so I thought I would ask to be sure. It sure would be nice to have an option to select multiple folders at once (like a SHIFT - LEFT CLICK option) instead of manually having to click each and every folder you want to have moved. Again, maybe I'm missing something.

I just wanted to thank @JorgeB as well as the Unraid developers for how much easier they made this format change compared to other guides. I struggled with some of the earlier guides, but "emptying disks" and leveraging Mover to help automate this process really helped. Now all my drives are XFS and I think everything is working fine again (at least from what I can tell). Thanks again.

Thanks everyone. I'm sensing that amongst even the two of you (experts), this sort of diversity is not something to put a great deal of emphasis on. It seems as though if you have personal preference, it can outweigh the need for any need for diversity (outside of the exception Itimpi mentioned, which isn't my case). Thanks again. I'll buy what I like.

Understood. But in my case this isn't what is happening. I bought one of these drives 4 years ago. Another 2 years ago. Now looking to buy another now. Basically, that is one risk I don't have. I think originally this school of thought surfaced because if there was a conflict between Unraid and a specific drive, your problem was only segregated to a small subset of drive(s) on the array instead of it being all of the array. Again, I understand the logic in that, but when I've successfully used the same drive for 4 years now, it feels like that risk has been lowered at least some, but again, not certain about that and is why I'm asking. I've also not kept up with the new builds people put together nowadays. Do they care about this type of thing or are they just buying all the same drives? Back when I first built my Unraid server (can't even remember how long ago that was, 15 years?, crazy), this school of thought seemed pretty significant, so I made a point to have a huge diversity amongst my drives. No two drives were the same. Again, just wondering if this is something people are really concerned at all about now. Not sure myself.

I know many years ago there was a "school of thought" that you should mix up your data drive manufacturers and not lean on the same hdd for every data drive. I somewhat understood the logic, but I'm wondering if that "school of thought" has possibly dwindled down at all? The reason I'm asking is because over the years I've become very fond of a Seagate NAS drive (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084ZV8YW8?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1&th=1) with a 5-year warranty on them. They seem fast, I haven't had one fail yet, and they run cool. You can certainly pay less for another drive, but I feel this is sort of an area where you get what you pay for. So, as I need to replace drives now and upgrade size, does this "school of thought" still exist and I should deviate away from this drive or is there really no harm done nowadays in piling up on one drive?

I've tried to wrap my head around doing this a couple times now and I never seem to get a full understanding enough to be confident to move forward. I just upgraded UNRAID to 7.2.2 and I got the banner letting me know how urgent it is to upgrade the format on my RESERFS drives to something like XFS. So, I really need to force myself to do it now. I think the good news is, Unraid appears to now have something built-in that appears to make this conversion easier (or at least I think so). The MIGRATION GUIDE it points to seems a little more straight forward than the directions I was attempting to understand in the past. My first question is, "Can I follow this migration guide given the limited amount of space I have on my Unraid Server? Here is a screenshot of the space I have available: I do have an extra 4TB drive available. Should I maybe switch it out with the 2TB drive first to give me more space? The migration guide is as follows. If I do have enough space and can follow these steps, can I really not do step 3 and just leave the files where they are once I've completed the format change on all 3 drives? Thank you for any help. tower-diagnostics-20251212-1327.zip

Thank you. I've added those steps to the instructions. Is it possible to comment on the rest of the instructions? I know there might be different ways of accomplishing this, but I'm most interested in, "Will this work?" As always, thank you for your help. Converting REISERFS to XFS (5).pdf

Of course. Thank you. tower-diagnostics-20250625-1519.zip

Weird. Same thing happened to me, but I hit the "Try again" button and it downloaded ok. Maybe something with the parentheses in the name is causing a problem. I should have cleaned that up.

Sorry, I do have a cache. All dockers and one VM are on the cache. They'll all be disabled for this entire process.

I've been reading quite a bit on this forum to try and understand how to do this conversion. Much of it is over my head, but I think I've gotten the gist and the steps I need to walk through to get this done. Could someone please take a look at the attached and see if I have any glaring mistakes and whether this process will work or not? I recognize that there might be other ways to do this, but I'm mostly interested in whether this will work or not since it is something that makes some sense to me. Thanks in advance for any guidance. Converting REISERFS to XFS (4) (2).pdf

I've got to get this done. I've put it off because I really need a "REISERFS to XFS for Dummies" to get me through this. I almost never touch my unraid server. It just works and that's a testimony to those who developed it. Anyway, I saw a summary of this process in this thread and one thing is throwing me. We copy data from the REISERFS drive to the new XFS Drive, but we do it while the array is still enabled. I'm confused how Unraid doesn't see those files as duplicates and the Dockers sort of attempt to try and use both. I guess I should just stick to the instructions and just do it, but I thought I would ask.

Let me start by apologizing since I know this question is going to be obvious to plenty of people on here. But thankfully, I have UNRAID to thank for either my laziness or my inability to know the answer to this question. UNRAID has just worked for me for so long that I not only don't have to think about it, but end up forgetting everything I did to set it up. So, thank you UNRAID for giving me one less thing to think about in my life. I have a simple setup with a six drive array and one 500 GB cache drive. The cache drive has about six dockers on it and that is about all I use it for. I did tinker with VMs at one time, but don't use them. It only uses about 70 GBs of space. The cache drive is 5 years old now and I'm starting to get nervous it might fail. Early on this wasn't a big deal since I could easily setup everything again. Now, it would take more work than I would like to admit (refer to laziness above). I did try to do some research in this space to see if an obvious answer exists, but was met with more things that I didn't understand because UNRAID has continued to advance even though I haven't. Ultimately, my question is, what would be the easiest way to safeguard against my cache drive failing? Is it possible to write an image of it onto the array? Is there something that possibly automates this every day / week? Is maybe the only solution to run duplicate cache drives? Again, when it comes to "easiest" I suspect there is an obvious answer here, but I'm not sure what it is. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Solved my own issue here and I should have thought this through better. The issue stemmed from the new router selecting an IP Address range that wasn't the same as the previous router. Once I selected the same range everything started working as it did.

At the end of the day I think the culprit here was my router. I can't really say for sure since the issue does present itself once in a blue moon now, but much improved over what it was. I ended up getting a budget router from TP-Link and found it to be awfully good. Range was exceptional and I liked how the interface worked, but once I saw all the press around potential vulnerabilities and the connections with China I decided to return it. I didn't dive enough into it to understand whether the vulnerabilities were something significant or not, but moreover felt a little uneasy about what I was contributing to. Anyway, then I went down the Asus road since that is what I've typically used for routers. Their budget routers didn't perform all that well for me so I ended up with a higher-end model (RT-AX88U Pro) and it has proven pretty good. Still sort of surprising how well the value router from TP-Link performed against it, but oh well. Thanks again for the help.

Ah, I figured part of it out at least. It was because the new router had a gateway that wasn't aligned with what the old router had. Once I mad them the same the dockers and plugins could get out to see whether they needed updates or not. Now I just need to figure out why some of my Dockers aren't letting the indexers work.

I upgraded my router to an Asus RT-AX88U Pro. I rebooted my Unraid server and I can get to the GUI just fine. However, when I went to CHECK FOR UPDATES on all my Dockers it says the version information is NOT AVAILABLE. Then when I attempt to use the dockers, they all seem to be struggling to get information. Any idea what might be causing this with a new router?

I've been using this version of Plex for ages. I upgraded my router to the Asus RT-AX88U Pro and it has worked well for everything, but PLEX and some indexers not able to get out for some other dockers. But just with Plex...I did PORT FORWARD 32400 with the router and it still does not allow me to access Plex from a PC or going to the WEBUI from Unraid's Dashboard of dockers. Plex itself comes up, but it wont' allow access back to the server. It gives me a message like, "You do not have access to this server" or "Unraid server is currently unavailable." What's odd is that my Roku devices continue to access PLEX and the server data just fine. Has anyone ever seen something like this before? Thanks. UPDATE: Something really isn't right. I just went to make sure I was using the latest version of this docker and "Checked for updates." All the dockers came back with NOT AVAILABLE under VERSION. This is odd.

I did with the exception of one wired switch (I only have two) that is in my office that is used for multiple PCs in the office. None of those office PCs exhibited any issues with the replacement router, but again, they are all wired. But for good measure I should power down everything as you said. I'll give a try and see if the behavior is any different.

I had a power outage recently and although I have a UPS, the battery was not good (unbeknownst to me) and it resulted in my server having an unclean shutdown. Since that time I've had intermittent issues and I'm attempting to troubleshoot where the problem might lie. The issue might reside outside of Unraid, but I can't say for sure yet. I won't bore you with all that I've tried, but I am seeing one odd behavior I can't put my finger on and I wanted to see if possibly others have seen this as well. That is, what is your experience navigating the Unraid GUI from your mobile phone? The reason I ask is it seemed that my router might have suffered some kind of damage from the power outage because it was not letting certain data in/out from the server to the internet. I moved to an old router I have and this resolved the issue, BUT I'm still seeing from multiple iPhones that when attempting to access the Unraid GUI, the commands don't always go through. Basically, I'll click on DASHBOARD and nothing will happen or it will time out. Or I'll click on SETTINGS and the same thing happens. And it doesn't always happen. It is intermittent. Sometimes that command takes and sometimes it doesn't. This is with using both Chrome and Safari. But again, from a PC, everything is snappy. Has anyone possibly had a similar experience on their mobile device (specifically, iPhone I guess)? Thanks.

Yea, this is pretty confusing. Some my docker apps started flaking too. For whatever reason the indexers were intermittently failing. A test connection would work and then it wouldn't. This led me to believe it might be something with the router even though it is relatively new and nothing has been changed in the settings for months. I had an older model router around and switched it out, rebooted the server, and all the dockers came back to life and everything appeared to be working well. However, then I tried accessing the Unraid GUI again and same problem. Some time it comes up and sometimes it times out. I'm starting to think maybe the power outage damaged more than just one item. The router is certainly suspect right now so I'll likely get a new one. I'm also going to switch out the USB on the tower as you recommended and see if that changes anything. We'll see.

Do the docker applications that leverage the same ip address (via a browser) as Unraid's GUI also go through the flash drive? I'm noticing the same issue with docker applications via a web browser. I always thought the flash drive was used on startup, but then everything from there was then loaded into memory because repeatedly accessing the flash drive for data wasn't a good thing since they can easily go bad with repetitive use. Basically, once the server booted up, the flash drive was no longer used and everything was accessed via RAM. Was I wrong about that?

Oh man, it has been so long. I guess I won't worry about getting an optimal thumb drive just yet. I do have a 32GB USC 3.0 laying around I can use as a test. And you are suggesting just downloading the trial unraid software on this additional USB drive to test the GUI access from it....correct? Will the trial software allow me to start the array? Thanks for the help.

Recently, I had two significant power failures and unbeknownst to me my battery in my UPS was in poor standing. As a result I had two unclean shutdowns. I replaced the battery in the UPS, tested it (worked fine), and then did a parity check on my unraid server. The parity check went through just fine with no errors and the speed at which it completed the parity check was almost identical to previous parity checks. However, for whatever reason, after all this, the GUI does not always come up when attempting to access it. It will time out. This is via the wired and wireless network and via different web browsers. Nothing at all has changed on my network and everything else appears to be working fine. Before this accessing the GUI was very snappy. I know this might be trying to find a needle in a haystack, but I thought I would see if anyone has seen something like this before? I'm also sensing some delays when attempting to access media from the server, but haven't had enough time with it yet to say it is anything routine. tower-diagnostics-20240807-0950.zip