I have a 9 disk array and one disk is giving me problems. I think it's a broken port on my SATA expansion card. It might be the disk itself, even though it passes all the smart tests.
To give a little history. I swapped my Unraid system from an Intel 2500k system to a Ryzen 1700 system. Had to get a new PCIe SATA expansion card. When I rebooted the system, everything was fine apart from disk 7 which was listed as missing with a blue warning beside it. I powered down and checked the cables and when I rebooted the disk was listed again but with an orange light beside it saying it was running in emulated mode. (It's only a 1TB drive)
I thought it would be ok to just let it rebuild the drive using parity sync. When I checked it the next day, it was hung. No response from the server at all. Had to power it off. I blamed the fact that I didn't have the latest Unraid version and that maybe there was some problems with Ryzen. So I updated to 6.7.2 and the server hasn't crashed since then which is good. I tried to do a parity sync again but had to stop it after a few days. The time to completion just kept getting longer and longer. It was barely going at 1 MB/sec.
So, since I happened to have 3 TB free space on the array, I said I would shrink the array. First I was went to use Unbalance to move the contents of the drive. It told me to use Docker safe Permissions. Which I did, but, it got stuck at the faulty disk for hours. I closed it and tried the Unbalance tool again. This time it didn't give any warnings, so I ran it. Left it for a few hours, when I came back it hadn't even moved 100MB of a 25GB file. So I stopped it again.
And that's where I am right now. My question is, well a few
The parity sync was only 50% completed when I stopped it, is the data on the drive gone now? That the only way to get the data back is rebuild the drive from parity?
I take it that if I don't copy the data on the drive first, there is no way to remove the drive and shrink the array without losing that data?
I have a powered USB 3 hard drive, 1TB. Could I use that as temporary solution to rebuild disk 7? Then I can move it's contents and shrink the array.