ratmice

Gotcha, thanks for taking time to help me out. So, I will unassign parity 2 regardless of whether I do a regular restart and sync, or start in maintenance and sync. Well, unassigning parity2 and adding the new disk as parity1 leads to an invalid configuration, so I guess I just assign the new disk, tick the maintenance mode box, and restart the array?

Sorry, I'm a bit confused. I've never really used maintenance mode. I can have the array offline, but how do you keep parity2 intact if it's removed for the sync. There seems to be something I'm missing, maybe it's the distinction between the disk used to store parity information (parity2 disk) vs the actual information (parity2). Sorry for the endless questions, but I don't want to do something stupid because my understanding is incorrect. Thanks for your patience.

So, circling back to my server issues. I am ready to add in the new the parity disk, but am a little worried about the Parity 2 disk (SMART errors) currently in the server. Is the best course of action to just allocate the new disk to parity, rebuild, and see what happens? I'm a bit afraid that the Parity 2 disk will be pulled out of service due to the errors. As I understand it the 2 parity disks are independent of each other so that even if that happens, I can just deallocate the Parity 2 and not have any issues with the new parity disk, or the array, aside from only having protection from one disk failure. Or, is there some other procedure I should follow to keep things efficient and safe? As always, I really appreciate the help here, as I can just think myself into circles due to incomplete knowledge. p.s. the other factor here is that I will be away from home for the next couple of months, so will not be able to physically lay hands on the server to do any more disk switching, etc... Perfect timing!

the test fails almost immediately with a read error 🤬 I guess I need to get the new disk added as parity and get another new replacement. Odd for the 2 parity disks to crap out almost simultaneously.

So, quick recap, Had a parity disk go belly up last week, then the flash drive died. Got the flash replaced and a new parity drive came today. Now, of course, I am seeing a bunch of pending sectors on the currently installed parity 2 disk. My question is what is the most efficient, and safest, way to get things back to normal. I assume I just need to pre clear the new disk, add it to the array as parity 1, and start a sync to calculate parity on the new disk as well as to see if the pending sectors on the parity 2 disk go away? What am I missing? Or, maybe do an extended SMART test, on parity 2, while the pre-clear is happening ?

Yeah, I followed the changing flash drive guide. Unfortunately, The flash drive was totally toast, so I couldn't copy it and my latest flash backup was too old to trust. However, I did have all the disk assignments, so recreating the array was trivial. Everything, array related, seems good at the moment. The thing I am struggling with now is getting Plex back in order, no easy feat, I will tell you, as I am switching docker containers, and it is not happy with the previous app data.

Yesterday, I had a parity disk die unceremoniously. Today, I woke up to a corrupt flash drive. I am about to replace it. Unfortunately, I cannot get any diagnostics, right now, as it is dead. 2 quick questions for those smarter than I, 1. any pitfalls to look out for when replacing the flash drive (I did read the docs about it) and, 2. could this have had any impact on yesterday's dead parity disk situation.

Thanks for making this clear

@trurl and @JorgeB thank you both for your help with this issue, now if only I had a spare drive.

No show, must be dead ☠️. Since there is now only 1 parity disk, do I need to rebuild parity to account for the missing second disk, or will the array still be protected, but only from one data disk going down? Sorry, not 100% sure how the disk parity is calculated. Also, do I need to reassign the Parity 2 disk to the single parity slot?

I shutdown the server, checked all cables/connections. The user shares did reappear (thanks), but the #1 parity disk is not showing up in the array. Here are the new diagnostics, after reboot. tower-diagnostics-20250429-1335.zip

I hate to reply to my own post, but digging around I, I get this : as the output to ls -lah /mnt. I assume that this is where the User shares have gone. Can I just: to repair that part, of the issue? Sorry for the noob questions, I am just not very Linux technically inclined.

So, this morning woke up to a disabled parity disk (1 of 2), user shares not showing up and I'm not sure where to begin, to safely figure out what's going on, and how to rectify the situation. All disk shares are accessible and seem to be working properly. tower-diagnostics-20250429-1037.zip

Thanks for this, I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why only Chrome was not able to connect.