PeteAron

I echo everything Energen said. APC or CyberPower are both good, and have usb connections - just double check the one you think you want to make sure. Get the largest wattage you can afford for the longest uptime, although all you really need is 10 min or so - long enough that the array wont shut down during a short outage and to have a long enough period of time to safely power down the array. IMO

OK. I have shut down the array waiting for the new drive. I will pull the failing drive and let the system rebuild it onto the new drive. it will take about a day and a half I think since it has to preclear the new drive first.

I don't have a disk to replace the failing disk - I bought a new disk and its on its way. I can wait until I get it and replace the failed disk with the new disk using parity to rebuild it, or I could remove the failing disk, finish the rsync copy using parity for the data, then complete the xfs conversion process for the disk. obviously the safest way is to rebuild the failed disk but since I'm only 300 gb away, would it make sense to remove the disk, finish the copy and then re-set the configuration and parity using the xfs replacement?

So, if you were in my position, what would you do? I have about 300 gb left to copy, but it is moving at less than 50 kb/sec, with errors growing. Would you stop the copy where it is, rebuild the failing disk with a new disk, then do the copy again? I think if I continue as is it will take another day or so at this speed. I'm not sure what the best course of action is.

@ Frank - yes that is what I thought was happening. @trurl - The disk in "Dashboard" has a yellow triangle next to it, and the popup shows 3xxxx reallocated sectors. In "Main" this disk shows 46xxx errors. No other disks show errors. the failing disk does not have a red X next to it.

When a read error occurs, am I writing the bad data from the disk with the read error, or the good data from parity? If the latter I should be ok. is parity being updated when I get a read error and write the data to a new disk? If so then I am already screwed aren't I?

trurl, I used rsync -avPX /mnt/disk10/ /mnt/disk11/ it looks like the array is copying to the xfs swap disk using the parity protection. it is nearly complete - 2.54 out of 2.73 TB have been copied, and I am up to 43000 errors on the failing disk. I have a new disk on the way - after this copy is complete, I will probably use the procedure to remove the failing disk.

Now up to 27,000 reallocated sectors....

I have a failing disk - it shows over 1000 reallocated sectors. So instead of doing the usual rebuild of the disk by replacing it, I was trying this method to copy the files to the new xfs disc. I had just completed a parity check with no errors, so I thought I would be ok. I began the disk copy last night following the published procedure. about 2/3 the way through, the copy rate dropped to about 5-30 kb/sec, and I am seeing 36000 or so errors on the unraid display for this copy. should I abort the copy, remove the failing disk, and rebuild it to a new replacement, and after that work on the xfs conversion? Or, should I just wait for the copy to complete? if I need to abort, how do I do that? I am using a direct console command to do this.

Joe, thanks for your help. I am not complaining and I am sensitive to the amount of flak you get from folks (some of us need to read Dale Carnegie's book IMO). The problem is that my ignorance gets in the way of implementing things outside of unmenu =). I was confused, as you say, by the plugin thread, and I have learned to stick with the basic unmenu plugins. Some of the behavior I've seen makes sense now that you've pointed out to me the single threaded nature of the process. I'll continue to be conservative with it. I should be able now to implement cache_dirs on my server. Thanks again.

Joe, Actually I was not referring to Unmenu - I have used that for a long time. I was referring to cache_dirs. This thread talks about an unmenu plugin: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=19790.msg195098#msg195098 this is where I was trying to making a new directory. WRT the multiple posts on installation, the cache_dirs wiki in your OP in this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4500.msg40570#msg40570 refers to this wiki, http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Improving_unRAID_Performance#Keep_directory_entries_cached I will give mkdir a shot and follow the instructions in the first thread I linked. Edit: that wiki seems to have been modified today - there were a few threads referenced on customizing cache_dirs after the two bullet points, now they are not there. the OP in this thread discusses a lot about how cache_dirs works but not how to actually install it. I can't find cache_dirs in the unmenu package manager; thus my confusion. Thank you. It is the command for MS-DOS, but not for linux/unix. The command for unMENU would be mkdir /boot/unmenu Apparently, you did not look here: http://code.google.com/p/unraid-unmenu/ or here http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5568.0 Both give the "mkdir" command. Which "wiki" page are you referring to. Since the wiki can be edited by anyone, it is impossible for me to know where you looked. It probably was not this one http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Add_Ons#UnMENU Joe L.

I apologize for asking a stupid question, but I cannot figure out how to install cache_dirs. I have been searching for hours. I was interested in the unmenu plugin, but I see I dont know how to create a directory - I thought "md" was the command. I take this as a sign that I am an idiot and i need to ask for help to do this. Could someone point me directly to install instructions? The wiki page refers to 5 separate threads. It is very confusing. thanks!