For about a year now I've had an unRaid system running off of an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe.  Older motherboard but has been pretty solid as far as I could tell for my unRAID setup.  Within the last 3-4 months or so I've had weird issues where parity checks would find several parity issues but on subsequent checks would still show errors on different sectors.

 

I ram a MEMtest for 48 hours and found NOTHING wrong with the RAM. 

 

I replaced the power supply with one off of the preferred list (Corsair)

 

The problem persisted.  Last week I wanted to replace a 500G drive with a brand new Hitachi 2TB one.  After two pre-clears I couldn't get the drive to clear.  It was showing errors during the read back phase to check for all zeros.  I was running 5 drives off of the motherboard sata ports (The mobo has 8 which is nice!) and figured that was the problem so I installed a relatively new 3ware 9650SE card and tried again.  Speeds during pre-clear jumped about 40% but same problem.  Still failed.

 

A few months back we retired a database server that had an Asus P5BV-C mobo with quality memory.  I dug the machine out, installed the free version of unRAID on a flash stick and ran a MEMTest on it.  After 40 hours all tests passed so I started the pre-clear on the previously failed Hitachi 2TB.  38 hours later the Hitachi PASSED!  I ran it again.  PASSED again.

 

Motherboard SATA ports on that old motherboard were flaking out...

 

Now I'm Just waiting on a new Supermicro board to re-build the server using the newer hardware. 

 

The big test will be putting it all back together and running that first parity check!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After migrating all of the hard drives to the new motherboard and a new Supermicro AOC card, I have finally achieved two parity checks in a row with 0 parity errors.  After the hardware migration I received 3 parity errors and they were fixed.  Two more parity checks came up with 0. 

 

Finally!  For anyone making a serious jump into uNRAID.  Do youself a favour and just get some decent hardware off of the approved list.

Thanks for the update.

 

I totally agree about the better class of hardware.

Even an enthusiast or hobbyist grade of server, "hours on" plus heat take their toll over time.

An extra $50-$100 upfront in the cost of the server can pay for itself in aggravation later.

 

I'll admidt I am also guilty myself of using recycled workstation parts for home servers.

Usually those are test servers only...