Hi,
 

I just recently started the setup of my home server with unraid and I'm very new to all of this, coming from Synology.

 

When I first set up my unraid instance, I used 4x brand new 2TB drives (1 parity and 3 usable drives), once the migration done from my old Synology, I then moved 2 of my already used 3TB drives into my unraid machine.

 

My goal is to use the 2 old 3TB drives as parity drives and 4 new 2TB drives as usable space, so to do that here is what I did:

1. I connected the 2 old 3TB drives
2. Assigned 1 of these to the parity (so I have the 2TB parity in place + one of the 3TB)
3. Started the array to perform a parity-sync
4. Stopped the array
5. Unassigned the 2TB parity drive
6. Assigned the 2TB parity drive to a normal array drive I can use
7. Start the array to clear the 2TB drive and add it to the usable space
8. Stopped the array
9. Assigned the 2nd 3TB drive to the parity
10. Started the array to perform a parity-sync

 

This last step never succeeded, I did it 3 times and I get the same error all the time where it says "Parity disk in error state (disk dsbl)" and shows 1024 errors.

 

 

 

Am I doing that wrong or is my disk faulty?

 

You can find the diagnostic zip in attachment.

 

Thank you very much in advance for helping me!

adhara-diagnostics-20230730-2042.zip

Connection problem with parity. Check cables including power

I tried that already, I changed the SATA cable, changed the SATA port on which it is connected, entirely disconnected and reconnected it.

Does it work with a single 3TB parity drive?  If so, swap it out with the other 3TB drive.  Does the 2nd drive work?  When you see for sure they both work fine as individual parity drives, add the second one.  Also be sure you are giving enough time for the single drive to be (re)built, if the 1st one doesn't finish, I don't believe a second, which is essentially a mirror) will correctly build.

 

Side note: majority of users only use a single parity drive.

The first of the two 3TB drive is correctly working and synced as a parity drive.

I just switched both drives and I'll start the parity sync again, I'll let you know how things went tomorrow (it takes 7 hours to sync/rebuild the parity).

 

If that drive still has issues, I will probably just use a single parity drive which is fine for my use case, it's just that I had those 2 disks laying around so I thought I could better use them as 2 parity drives but it's not critical.

 

Thank you both for your help.

4 hours ago, trurl said:

including power

 

All connectors, power and SATA, must sit squarely on the connection, with no tension in the cables. Don't bundle data cables. No more than 4 drives per PSU cable.

 

Do you have any power splitters?

All cables are seating correctly.

I'm using an HBA with a SATA octopus cable.

I do need to use a power splitter because I have a BeQuiet 300W TFX PSU with only 3 SATA connectors.

 

But I do think the disk is faulty cause I swapped it with the one that has no issues (swapped physical place, sata and power cable) and it's failing again while the other is syncing without issues.

 

To be 100% sure I would need to test with another drive to see if my setup can handle 6 spinning drives at once but I don't have any left so I'll just end up using a single parity drive.

 

To be noted that these drives are 10 years old and have been used 24/7 in my previous NAS, it's not impossible this drive is actually faulty 

Edited July 31, 20232 yr by atu