joersch Posted October 1, 2022 Share Posted October 1, 2022 Hi! I set up my Unraid server (NUC7I5 with 32 GB and USB 3.1 4-bay SATA). It works fine apart from one annoying issue: I have one disk that is not recognized correctly at boot-up (serial/code is zeroes), so I have to rebuild parity after every reboot (in case of a software update (upgraded to 6.11.0 today)). See attached image. After rebuild the disk works just fine. Has anyone experienced such issue before and has an explanation? cheers Jörg Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted October 1, 2022 Share Posted October 1, 2022 One of many reasons USB not recommended for array or pool disks Quote Link to comment
joersch Posted October 5, 2022 Author Share Posted October 5, 2022 On 10/1/2022 at 8:03 PM, trurl said: One of many reasons USB not recommended for array or pool disks But how can it be, that the other disc that is running in the same usb case is working fine? So I assume some disk related issue... Quote Link to comment
Solution JonathanM Posted October 5, 2022 Solution Share Posted October 5, 2022 47 minutes ago, joersch said: But how can it be, that the other disc that is running in the same usb case is working fine? So I assume some disk related issue... USB enclosures sometimes alter ID's in unpredictable ways, for instance yours may be reporting for the first slot that responds, and subsequent drives aren't. Some USB cages are better than others, but all suffer from bandwidth issues for parity. The only external hard drive cages that work comparable to internal SATA connections with Unraid is either ESATA with one port per drive, or SAS which allows multiple drives for a single cable. USB suffers from poor connection stability under heavy load, which can cause Unraid to disable drives somewhat randomly. You should be able to successfully use Unraid with USB connected array drives if you forego parity protection and just use data drives and single volume pools, any attempt to use parity with multiple USB data drives is going to be a frustrating experience compared to HBA sata internal connections. Quote Link to comment
joersch Posted October 9, 2022 Author Share Posted October 9, 2022 On 10/5/2022 at 10:03 PM, JonathanM said: USB enclosures sometimes alter ID's in unpredictable ways, for instance yours may be reporting for the first slot that responds, and subsequent drives aren't. Some USB cages are better than others, but all suffer from bandwidth issues for parity. Ok. I did not know that. So maybe it was not the best decision to go for a NUC and external case (power consumption optimization in mind)... Funny enough: today I rebooted because of the "Version: 6.11.1" update. I wanted to take screenshots again but this was the first time the drives where recognized correctly since installation! This gives mit a little hope... Anyways: the restarts do not happen so often, and even when the drive is not identified correctly it runs just fine after manually assigning it. Just the parity check afterwards is quite annoying. My parity drive is in the same enclosure and I did not have any issues up till now... Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted October 9, 2022 Share Posted October 9, 2022 If you insist on using USB, don't use parity. USB disconnects will make the array out-of-sync and require frequent rebuilds. Without parity nothing is in sync anyway. Quote Link to comment
joersch Posted October 17, 2022 Author Share Posted October 17, 2022 On 10/9/2022 at 2:02 PM, trurl said: If you insist on using USB, don't use parity. USB disconnects will make the array out-of-sync and require frequent rebuilds. Without parity nothing is in sync anyway. For now it is pretty stable. I only have this issue when I have to reboot the server. This does not happen very often, so I can live with that for now. Quote Link to comment
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