tj80

Hi, My UnRAID box (6.4.0 currently) has been running nicely for many years now, including saving me from one failed WD Green 2TB data drive. However, some of the drives (the parity disk in particular) are getting pretty old and I wonder what the consensus is on whether to pre-emptively replace drives or just wait until they fail? None of my drives have any SMART warnings or other issues I know of (no funny noises, high temperatures, etc), they auto spin down so haven't been running continuously, and see very light use in a domestic environment - but in terms of power on hours some are getting pretty old. Yes I have backups, but still don't want to lose anything! I'm not so concerned about losing one drive obviously, more that the intensive workload recalculating parity after a single failure might kill off a second drive at the worst possible time. Power-On Time: Parity - 2TB Hitachi Deskstar, 7y 9m Data 1 - 2TB WD Green, 6y 7m Data 2 - 2TB Seagate Barracuda, 3y 7m Data 3 - 250GB HP Enterprise SATA, 5y 8m Data 4 - 500GB Seagate Momentus (2.5"), 1y 8m Cache - 256GB Crucial M4 SSD, 2y 6m Most are well past the "infant mortality" timeframe so are clearly good solid drives - so should I just keep them running until they fail or think about replacing early? One option I thought about was to replace the old 2TB parity disk with a new one, then use the old drive to replace the 250GB Data 3 - but I don't actually need any more space yet! What would you do? Many thanks, Tim

Magic, many thanks - that solved it for me too. Cheers, Tim

Hi, I recently added a new data disk to my 6.4 installation, giving a total of 4 data disks and 1 cache drive (plus a single parity disk). I just noticed that only the newly added disk will show any SMART attributes - all the other disks just report "Can not read capabilities". They definitely all used to report fine, and I remember being able to see the SMART attributes for all 6 drives (including the new one) recently as I checked the power-on time for the new drive after I installed it. Can anyone suggest why the 5 old drives have stopped reporting but the new one is still OK? Many thanks, Tim

Oddly, I just tried this again on the off-chance and it's working fine. Server has been running for 2 weeks and nothing has changed in that time. Very peculiar! Cheers, Tim

Hi, Anything look unusual in the diagnostics dump? Many thanks, Tim

Makes sense! Thanks, have disabled mover logging, rebooted and attached the diagnostics zip following an attempt to check for plugin updates. Many thanks, Tim nas-diagnostics-20171002-1112.zip

That's what I thought! The tick box was definitely checked, but here's an example from the log of a filename and path which isn't sensitive, but I have others which include the names of customers I work for etc: Sep 27 03:40:02 NAS root: >f+++++++++ Media/Documents/Paperport/Work/Pay Slips/2017/September.pdf

Hi, The last entry in syslog is this - there's no entry after it indicating an error, timeout, etc. Sep 28 10:42:25 NAS emhttp: cmd: /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/dynamix.plugin.manager/scripts/plugin checkall Apologies for not posting the entire diagnostics zip, it includes filenames etc from my data drives which are sensitive and I do not want to post on a public forum. Thanks, Tim

Hi, My unraid server has been running fine for almost 5 years now, starting on 4.7 and now upgraded to 6.3.5. It's been running 6.3.5 fine for a while, but yesterday I shut the machine down to move it to a different spot in the office. It refused to fully boot - I could SSH into the console as user root but none of the shares were available over the network, the GUI wasn't accessible and I couldn't get to any of the share or data drives from the SSH terminal either. 3 or 4 reboots yielded the same result. I tried the following, after which the system booted fine (I'm not sure what "fixed" it): - Unplugged and reinserted the boot USB drive - Plugged the boot USB drive into a Windows PC and ran a checkdisk (no errors found) - Reseated data, cache and parity drives - Reseated network cables - Moved the server 4 feet back to the shelf it used to live on! It finally booted and is mostly working fine. However I've noticed the following oddities: - Dynamix System Temp plugin which was previously working fine was in errored state. - Checking plugins for updates hung on the first plugin - which was the errored system temp plugin. - I removed the system temp plugin, but checking for updates still hangs on the first one! Now it's preclear_disk rather than the system temp plugin. I'm concerned that something isn't quite right, and given that it refused to fully start up wonder if the USB flash drive has had a funny turn. Any ideas much appreciated! Many thanks, Tim

Hi, I have a minor problem in that I cannot seem to get rid of disk shares! I only use User shares, but disk shares are visible on the network and accessible even though "Use disk shares" is set to "No" in the settings. This is on 6.1.9 Basic - I think I did used to have disk shares enabled on my old unraid 4.7 server, which I upgraded to 6 - perhaps that's why the shares are still visible? Many thanks, Tim

Thanks for your replies. I have enough space on the existing data drives for the VMs so I'm thinking the easiest thing would be to temporarily copy them off the cache drive, remove it as cache, preclear and add as data, add the new SSD cache then finally copy the VMs back. The current cache drive is btrfs while the existing data drives (which came over when I upgraded from 4.7) are reiserfs. Should I format the new data drive as reiserfs as well? Thanks, Tim

Hi, I'm after some advice as to the best way of replacing my current cache/VM storage drive and reusing the old drive as an additional data drive. I'm currently running 6.1.9 Basic with the following config: - 1 x 2tb HDDs parity - 2 x 2tb HDDs data - 1 x 250gb HDD cache & VM storage I want to convert the existing 250gb cache drive to an additional data drive, and use a new 256gb SSD as cache and VM storage so that it looks like this: - 1 x 2tb HDDs parity - 2 x 2tb HDDs data - 1 x 250gb HDD data - 1 x 256gb SSD cache & VM storage Please could someone advise the best way of achieving this? I thought about simply disabling the cache drive and then manually copying the VM files to the new SSD, then setting it up as a new cache drive. I could then reformat the old cache drive and set it as a new data drive. Should I preclear it first? Is there a better way? Many thanks in advance. Tim

Spot on, many thanks. Preclear and reformat has sorted it.

Hi, I upgraded from 4.7 to 6 today - much, much more straightforward than I had originally feared! Now I have also bought a licence I have tried to add a cache drive. Unfortunately, although it appears to be all set up there is no improvement at all in write speeds and, tellingly, the write count for the cache drive remains firmly at 0 even after writing a large test file. The drive has been previously used and is showing up as being in vfat format - not sure if this is ok or if it should be reiserfs or btfs? I cannot find a way of reformatting it at all! The array starts, it shows as a cache drive and "Use cache drive" is set to Yes in Global Share Settings. What am I missing? Many thanks, Tim

Hi, Sorry for posting a question about version 4.7 here but there doesn't seem to be anywhere else to post. My UnRAID system has been happily working away perfectly for the past 4+ years but I just looked at the console by chance and noticed that I have a failed disk. Annoyingly I got no email alerts as it looks like GMail have recently (and silently!) changed their security and now blocks my UnRAID box! I wondered what the "unauthorised login attempt blocked" emails were - anyway, I've fixed that problem on Gmail and now need to fix the UnRAID box. You'll have to forgive the stupid questions as I've forgotten almost everything I learned about UnRAID simply because it's been running faultlessly for so long. I can't even remember the root login so I can only access the console on port 8080 (the "unRAID Main" console on port 80 asks for a login and I can't remember what it is!). I have 1 parity disk and 2 data disks, the console is showing "DISK_DSBL" on the second data disk. I will try shutting the box down and reseating the disk in case it's a connection problem, but the machine is an HP Microserver which sits out of the way behind the sofa and is unlikely to have been knocked, etc. Also the drives sit in a cradle with direct connections to a backplane - no SATA cable. A few questions: If I simply stop the array, shut down the box, replace the second data drive and restart will it rebuild the failed second data disk onto the new drive? Do I need to preclear the new disk or anything? I vaguely remember some issues with Western Digital EARS drives needing aligning or similar. Is there any issue with the current WD drives (e.g. WD20EZRX)? How can I reset the root password? I think I read that 4.7 can only use 2tb disks max - is that correct? I would have liked to have put a larger drive in as parity to give me more options for increasing capacity in the future but don't want to mess around upgrading UnRAID versions while I have a failed drive. Many thanks in advance, Tim

Hi, Just to follow up, thanks for your advice everything seems fine now. Did a correcting parity check which fixed the 2 previously reported errors, then a non-correcting check which returned zero errors. Cheers, Tim

Many thanks. I kicked off another check last night, so when I get home I'll double check it's still showing zero errors against the disks themselves and then run a correcting parity check. Cheers, Tim

Thanks, all. Unfortunately I don't have checksums for my data and only have separate backups for things I don't have originals for - photos, documents, etc, whereas most of the data by size is music and films for which I have the original media. Have just checked and I'm showing 2 sync errors (207 days ago... - time to run another check!), but zero errors against all three disks in the console - by the sounds of it I should be OK to assume it's an error on the parity and the best thing to do would therefore be a parity correction? I'm using unmenu, so I assume the button to press is "Check and correct parity"? Thanks, Tim

Hi, I've been running UnRAID 4.7 on an HP Microserver for the past 2 years and it's been running brilliantly. I have 3 x 2tb disks and every so often I run a read only parity check. This has reported a couple of parity errors - I'm at work at the moment so can't check the exact number, but I think it's something like 4. Question is, how do I know if the errors are with the data disk(s) or the parity disk? Is it possible to find out which files are showing the parity mismatch so I can check them? Any suggestions as to what I should do? I haven't tried a parity sync in case the parity drive is wrong and the data disks were correct! Many thanks in advance. Tim.