Bad drives or something else?

[pinion]

Diag attached

Recently I had my parity 1 and disk 2 red ball saying there were read errors. Since then I've bought 5 disks to replace them. All of them being refurbs so I was expecting some to be bad anyway but I was going to deal with Amazon and take the hassle to save money. But 4 of the 5 nearly immediately reported read errors when trying to rebuild and red balled themselves. 

 

Last night I finally got the server configured with disks that didn't red ball immediately but this morning I look and disks 7 and 15 are throwing thousands of read errors. They didn't red ball though. Maybe because I'm in safe mode? Maybe I shouldn't be doing a data rebuild in safe mode?

 

Can someone look at my diags and help me? I'd really appreciate it. 

unraid-diagnostics-20230427-0701.zip

[JorgeB]

Disks are dropping offline, suggesting a power/connection issue.

[pinion]

Should I go ahead and kill this rebuild and open it up and double check connections and try again? I can also remove several drives not in use which should help power draw and look into getting a PSU since I think the one I have is quite old and might be on its last legs.

[pinion]

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

Disks are dropping offline, suggesting a power/connection issue.

Also could you tell me where you saw this? I'm interested in learning more about finding this stuff but there is a ton in the diagnostics. Is it in the syslog or something? I'd also like to be able to read SMART reports. Probably need to start googling.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, pinion said:

my parity 1 and disk 2 red ball saying there were read errors. Since then I've bought 5 disks to replace them. All of them being refurbs so I was expecting some to be bad

Why would you put questionable disks into a server that already had no redundancy? You can't replace any other disks until these are rebuilt.

[Frank1940]

1 hour ago, pinion said:

I can also remove several drives not in use which should help power draw

IF you do this, double and triple check that all SATA cables are firmly seated-- both power and data.  The SATA connectors are notorious for becoming slightly unseated whenever their cables are disturbed!  These unseated connectors then can have intermittent connection when the drives vibrate when the disk are spun up. 

[pinion]

5 minutes ago, trurl said:

Why would you put questionable disks into a server that already had no redundancy? You can't replace any other disks until these are rebuilt.

You're asking why I'm stupid? I don't know just am. Also I have dual parity so I still have redundancy. Just no more if another disk fails.

[trurl]

2 minutes ago, pinion said:

Also I have dual parity so I still have redundancy. Just no more if another disk fails.

You have 2 disabled/invalid disks, so no redundancy.

 

Another way to look at it is you only have one good parity disk, so not really dual parity anymore. You have a disabled/invalid data disk to go with that one good parity.

[pinion]

3 minutes ago, trurl said:

You have 2 disabled/invalid disks, so no redundancy.

 

Another way to look at it is you only have one good parity disk, so not really dual parity anymore. You have a disabled/invalid data disk to go with that one good parity.

You're right. I said it a different way that is incorrect. I have no more redundancy. What I meant by "no more if another disk fails" is if I lose another drive I am screwed. What would you do in my situation? I feel like you're just kind of beating me up here.

[JorgeB]

2 hours ago, pinion said:

Should I go ahead and kill this rebuild

Since the array has no redundancy any additional errors on a different disk will corrupt the disks being rebuilt, so yes, you should always cancel and see if you can fix it then try again.

[pinion]

45 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Since the array has no redundancy any additional errors on a different disk will corrupt the disks being rebuilt, so yes, you should always cancel and see if you can fix it then try again.

Ok thank you. In the process of that now. Do you know if it is actually doing anything while in safe mode? It appears to be doing a parity sync and has thousands of writes to drive 2 and the Parity but it also says that drive 2 is Unmountable and it wants me to format it. I don't know if I should let this parity sync finish and then deal with that disk 2 or not. Thank you very much for the help.

[JorgeB]

Safe mode is unrelated to array operations, post new diags.

[pinion]

10 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Safe mode is unrelated to array operations, post new diags.

unraid-diagnostics-20230427-1148.zip

 

Here it is thank you

[JorgeB]

You need to check filesystem on disk2, array must be stopped, so if the rebuild is in the beginning cancel, check disk and rebuild, if it's been going on for some time you can wait until the rebuild finishes then check filesystem, no other issues disk issues in the log so far.

[pinion]

Thank you. The disk is showing up as normal now other than being rebuilt and the parity sync is running. Hopefully this gets me back to good and I'll come back and mark solved.

[pinion]

I'm about 9 hours away from it finishing and everything is looking good. I think the answer to my topic is "something else" so I'm going to mark the post about power issues as the answer.