Zefy

it's back up and running and made the parity disk without any errors so I think it's all good. I'll keep a closer eye on it for the next little while. I also realized that my array is basically full. I have about 6% remaining which i didn't really think about because it's still 700gb. Could this be part of the cause for the parity disk errors? I have also been deleting things recently. Either way, i have a spare 6tb disk that I can add to the array. If i add that, is there some kind of redistribution that occurs to make the rest of the array more balanced in space remaining? I realize that disks being very full can be bad. I can start a new topic if that's important for clarity on the forums for searching. Thanks everyone for the help!

thanks. I'll do that tomorrow. Just to double check, there is no way to fix this without rebuilding the drive? Like if i were to just swap cables to new ones or something it wouldn't just start working because unraid has disabled the disk, right?

extended smart test finished without issue as far as i can tell. attached that report and another diagnostic report... Cables all look fine, card is working with the other drive... I'm not sure what my next steps are. is there a way to turn the parity drive back on? Swap some cables? I'm assuming if the extended smart test was able to run for whatever 10 hours it should imply that the cables are good yes? zefyserver-diagnostics-20231114-1400.zip zefyserver-smart-20231114-0107.zip

the manual was talking about running a long smart test to see if the drive has problems which I'm doing now. It also mentioned CRC errors which I'm not sure what that means or how to check it. I'll recheck the connections after the smart test is done, whether it's good or bad. I do have a power splitter in there that i think is molex. so it could be bad/cheap. Before the restart, the drive showed that it had 72 errors in the "array devices" menu... Is it possible to see what those are/were? Is it in the diag report? I don't know what i'm looking at.

I got an error saying my parity disk is disabled. I'm not sure why and I'd like some help. This is the newest disk in the array. They're all WD red, this one is 6tb and the rest are 3tb. I restarted the server to see if that solved anything which it did not. I was able to run a SMART test on the drive after the restart though as i wasn't able to before. Looking at some other people with this problem, it was pointing towards a bad sata cable or similar. I am using an LSI 9211-8i running in "IT Mode" which i think this drive is connected to but at least one other drive is connected to it as well as my board (S1200KPR ooooold) only has 4 sata ports. The 6th drive is my cache which is an intel SSD. Everyone seems to ask for diagnostics reports so here they are. One is before the restart and the other is after. Not sure if that matters. You can see the time stamps -2348 is after restart. zefyserver-diagnostics-20231113-2348.zip zefyserver-diagnostics-20231113-2321.zip

So I loaded up unraid and gave it a kick. Getting the parity drive going was very time consuming but it seems that is normal. My biggest issue so far is write speeds. At the start it was saturating the 1gbit ethernet (haven't figured out link aggregation yet) but after about 1min it dropped down to ~30mb/s. After some googling i learned about the "turbo write" mode and clicked it on and it went up to about 80mb/s. Research told me this was due to how unraid does the parity calculations and that is the cause of the slow write speeds. I would like to max out my connection if I can. I have a cache drive but it's not yet connected. I broke the sata power connector from mucking about in the node 304 case too much so I am getting a replacement today. Would cache drive increase the write performance or is there some other hardware issue? For reference, my pool is 4x3tb wd reds, parity is a 6tb red, and my cache (not yet connected) is an 512gb intel 540 series SSD. Otherwise my experience has been quite nice. The dashboard is far more functional/user friendly compared to my freenas setup. Seeing vitals is far easier. There was a lot of stuff on the freenas that i had no idea how to check so i just made the assumption that they were working. Loaded up tons of apps already and currently figuring out how to get torrents sorted out so i don't need to leave my main computer on. Thanks everyone for the help!

Not really. I could pull the USB and the drives from the current nas to give it a try. Comparing the two, unraid and truenas, the main draw to unraid is the ability to easily expand without matching drive sizes. I would like to use what i have until they die and then upsize as i go. My main concern was just using the hardware i have and also seeing how the support is. i'll probably start transferring stuff over and just giving the trial a go with the full system. I can always start fresh again with truenas if there is something wildly incompatible with my system or me. Probably a better idea than upgrading from my current truenas which i think is version 8. 😂

yeah i was debating doing that. It's a choice between upgrading my current setup to run the latest truenas (which i don't think i have to format my drives for) or moving everything off the nas and rebuilding it with unraid. Most of it is already stored elsewhere but it's still a bit of an undertaking.

I have an old freenas system that i built in 2013 that I would like to start using again. I never had any major problems with it but it was an overall unpleasant experience to do anything with. The community there was also very lackluster. This will be used pretty much exclusively as file storage. Intel DBS1200KPR Intel G860 16gb kingston ECC memory - KVR1333D3E9SK2/16gb currently 3x 3tb WD reds. My case supports 6drives. I have one more 3tb WD red. Was going to get a pair of 8-10tb drive to use as a parity drive along with filling the server and I have an intel sata SSD (480gb, new) that I was going to use as a cache. Of note is that mobo only has 4 sata ports on it and i plan to use 7 with the cache. I have an LSI 9211-8i 8-port PCI-E card that is running "IT mode". Apparently this works with freenas but I never got around to using it and I'm unsure if it will work with unraid. I was also debating buying a used xeon cpu or something to spice it up a bit but maybe not needed for just file storage. The old system was able to max out the gigabit connection but I was never able to figure out how to enable link aggregation (it has 2x 1 gigE connections). It was also super slow when scrubbing through folders (ie, opening a folder with lots of files). I believe this was an issue with cifs... the iscsi share i had was much faster at this. Either way, i would like to know if this hardware is suitable for a NAS? I will likely upgrade components later on but i really just want to get this thing going again.