JonathanM

Definitely not. While some hardware may work, it's not a universal thing. Hotswap has to be supported by the HBA and the drive cage, so it's safer to power down when unplugging and plugging drives. The only quibble I have with your summary and the original is the last step, I'm not sure why it's there to be honest. Formatting would erase the pool, so don't do that unless you don't need the data on it. @JorgeB, could you check that to see if I misread something?

Firefox works fine as long as you NEVER EVER EVER resubmit. Always cancel. It will stay screwed up until you restart Unraid.

I think I remember some issue with browser sessions not closing properly, perhaps try using Putty on the desktop to SSH instead and see how it goes. If you really need console from the mobile phone, there are several ssh clients available, I've not tried any so don't have any specific recommendations.

We tried to tell you. If you stop the array and start it again, the drive will show as unmountable, and the dd command issued at the console will go at full speed, probably several hours at most to finish. If you want to do that, post back with a screenshot of the main array started and showing the drive assignments, and your proposed command line from the "alternate" section of the shrink array wiki page. That way we can double check that you are indeed going to clear the correct drive and not permanently erase one of your other drives, which would be very sad. Note that since the drive will already be unmounted when you restart the array you can omit the umount part and just do the dd line. https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/shrink-array#alternate-procedure-for-linux-proficient-users

How are you accessing the console you are using for mc?

I'm not aware of a quick method. The only thing I can think of would be file compare that looks at identical named files that don't binary match. Depending on the paths used in the mc session you could end up with quite a mess.

Only if a shutdown is forced when a file move is still in progress in the background.

Each boot USB stick needs a unique license. If you move a single USB stick to a different set of hardware you don't need a new license, it moves with the stick.

Do you have the page unlocked?

Please look in the support thread, if your question isn't answered already ask there.

Was that after a restart without touching the interface with Firefox at all?

Theoretically it should be a matter of just assigning the 2 nics a unique IP in the same subnet, then mapping the remote server using UD. However... I've never done this exact scenario, and something in the back of my mind is telling me you probably aren't going to improve transfer rates much if at all, due to a multitude of factors. Read and write speed, network card retry overhead due to lack of intelligent port management, etc. I'll be watching to see how it goes, hopefully I'm wrong and it speeds things up considerably.

Probably not software, likely PSU instability or heat related.

Which browser? Sometimes Firefox can put Unraid in a weird state if you hit submit instead of cancel when it pops up telling you to resend info.

If you are comfortable with the command line you can do what the script does manually, but that removes all the safety features that try to prevent you from erasing a drive you really didn't want to erase. The speed issue seems to go away if the drive is unmountable when the array starts, which means the script won't work as it looks for a mountable drive with the specifically named file / folder.

Why are you trying to compress already highly compressed and therefore relatively incompressible files? Or is a large percentage of your media in old formats with poor native compression?

No. That may change with future versions that don't require any disks in the parity array to start Unraid, but I'm just speculating on that.

Is the default format type still encrypted?

It's fine, That's the way you are supposed to set it up to do what you are asking.

It's not arbitrarily 2x the size, it's the sum of all disks and pools with that share root folder. If the root folder has the same name, it's contents will be displayed together with all the other same name root folders in the user share tree. That's a useful bit with user shares, you can have bulk storage and fast access files all displayed in the same tree, and move them as needed. The traditional use was to set a share to cache:yes, that terminology has been replaced with the current 6.12rc series, but the functionality was that new files added to the share would go to the fast cache pool, then overnight the mover would transfer them to the array, which has a much slower write speed. The file still appears in the same path, /mnt/user/sharename/filename regardless of whether the file exists on /mnt/disk1/sharename/filename or /mnt/pool/sharename/filename

Remove the empty folder and the calculation will go back to the single volume size. All root folders on all array drives and pools are part of the share, even if they are empty.

Soon™

The server won't get a DHCP address from the router if it's set to a static address, so it's real, and it's assigned, just not by the router.

That's not how DHCP works. You can set a static address in Unraid, and if the DHCP server in the router has any sense, it will see that you have a device with a fixed IP and not offer that address to another device. Most modern routers will do that, but it's not a guarantee. So no, you can't request a static IP, but you can set an IP in Unraid and hope the router honors it.

File system check looks fine to me, so that would indicate the deletion worked. That means the file entries in the table of contents for the drive were successfully removed. That does NOT mean the files are gone. Reformatting doesn't remove the actual file data either, it just resets the table of contents pretty much like deleting does. If you really want to make sure the data is gone, you need to write new data to the areas of the drive that actually contained the old data. That's not trivial, but you don't need to break the array to accomplish it either. There are multiple ways to do it, easiest from a beginner point of view would be to simply copy non sensitive content to the drive until it filled up. If you remove the drive, rebuild parity with the remaining drives, then add the drive back it will be overwritten with zeroes, which is just as effective as filling with random data with current drives. However, that means losing protection for the period of time while parity is rebuilding.