JonathanM

Parity has no concept of files or format, it just tracks bit changes. As long as you don't remove drives, or operate on the drives without the array started, parity will be maintained. Format is just another part of the binary patterns that make up the data on the disk. Yep. All the other stuff is just about making sure nothing gets written to the drive after you cleaned it off and before you format it. As long as you are positive there is nothing you need on the drive, you can format it. BTW, it's much slower to delete the data from the source ReiserFS drive than it is to just copy it to the destination XFS and format it after you are sure the copy is complete and accurate, but I understand why you want to do it that way.

The core is stable, there are some display details and minor things being worked on. I'm running beta on 3 out of 4 of my machines.

If you are using the 6.9 beta series, you could set up your 2 archive drives in a second cache pool using BTRFS RAID1.

This, sort of. How could the notifications be worded so that you understood that the specific drive was still disabled, when at that moment in time you believed everything to be OK? Should the disabled drive notice be spammed? Too many notifications can cause people to ignore them, thinking "ok, ok, I got it" when they really don't "got it". I'm trying to find a way for Unraid to help people understand the urgency of the issue without overdoing it.

As long as you have notifications set up, and immediately act at the first sign of issues, then I'll agree. Too many people get complacent after setting up their array, and allow errors to pile up until data loss is inevitable. We see this quite regularly, where someone comes to the forum with their first post asking for help recovering their array, and it turns out they've been running with a disabled drive for months because nothing seemed wrong to them, because all their data has been available this whole time, until suddenly it's not. You experienced it yourself, where you were convinced the array was fine even though you still had a disabled drive. Perhaps you could recommend a change in how this is handled, since the experience is fresh?

Yes, if your hardware fully supports hot swap you can add and remove devices to be used with the Unassigned Devices plugin, for data transfer or backup. Just don't disturb any array devices in the process.🤣

Exactly. Now is a good time to hammer home the point that the failure of ANY drive in the array jeopardizes the recovery of other drives. So, you are risking the entire content of your 18TB drive by keeping that old 300GB Maxtor around. I'm not saying it is or isn't going to fail imminently, just that you must trust all drives in the array to be 100% healthy to rebuild a failed drive. Adding 300GB of capacity to 18TB of space hardly seems worth the risk.

So it locks as soon as you attempt to collect diagnostics, regardless of whether it was running properly when you started to collect them?

What was asked for was the intact diagnostic zip file as downloaded, not snippets and various things.

The drive will stay disabled until it is rebuilt. I believe you are mis-interpreting the messages, but it's understandable why, it's misleading. The last green message is referring to whether or not the read error column has a non-zero value, and those columns (read / write errors) are set back to zero when the array is started, regardless of whether or not there is a disabled drive slot.

Instead of using Unassigned Devices, you can assign your two SSD's as independent cache drives, each with a different name and path.

The 6.9 beta includes native support for multiple cache pools, which is the preferred way going forward.

Search google Radeon RX 580 site:unraid.net

I don't think it makes a difference. @binhex would know for sure. Working port forwarding is required for proper torrent protocol support.

You can't force a port forward when your provider doesn't support it.

I don't recommend having that much unused space, as each spinning drive adds a failure point, more power consumption and heat, and wasted powered up hours. As a rule of thumb I only add drives when the unused space is smaller than my largest drive.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/76501-google-is-better-than-the-internal-search-function/ Pretty sure Unraid tech support uses google to search the forums. The forum search function has been broken for years.

https://wiki.unraid.net/The_parity_swap_procedure

Can you try between different endpoints, not just unraid? It would be helpful to know if you get full speed on any link.

🙂 Relying on an external service for viewing my local media just seems wrong to me. Especially with the latest snafu. https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-server-web-client-displays-content-not-mine-prior-to-login/650199

I'd recommend using the last 4 digits of the serial number for the drive, since the serial number is how Unraid keeps track of assignments.

Possibly, but probably not. Unraid will still write to the emulated drive just like it's there, which means ANY activity to that data slot is out of sync. The safest way forward is a rebuild. Unraid only disables (red ball) a drive when a write fails. That means, there was SOMETHING written to that slot. Now, it's also possible that when a read for that drive was issued, since the read failed, Unraid immediately reconstructs what SHOULD have been read from the rest of the disks, and attempts to write it back to the drive, which also failed because the drive was sitting on your desk. However... since Unraid tried to write something and failed, the only way to know for sure if there are differences between the offline physical drive and the emulated data slot would be to do a binary compare. That would take an excruciatingly long time to complete, and you will be unprotected from another failure while that's in progress. If you really want to blindly trust what's on the drive, you can do that, but you will still need to do a parity check to be sure the contents are in sync so a different drive failure doesn't result in corruption. Yes, but Unraid has no knowledge of the possible differences, and can't make assumptions. Like I said, if you do the procedure to reinstate the drive as is, you will need to do a parity check anyway.

Need more information. Preclear is used either as a drive testing tool, or to prepare a drive to be added to an array with already valid parity in a new slot. Format writes a blank filesystem to a drive. Neither concept has anything to do with pausing a parity check.

Do you have any status emails from unraid? Diagnostics or syslog?