I attempted to replace a parity drive with a new 10tb SAS drive. Found out the hard way that the crappy perc h700 raid card in my shitty dell 500 series server does not see but 1.1gb. I am afraid I will loose data if I upgrade the firmware. The original Parity sync was only supposed to be 18 hours. It has been like this all day. I have searched high and low to find an answer. Any advice would be awesome.

 

Edited September 12, 20232 yr by juhendri

Attach diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread.

datawhore-diagnostics-20230912-1936.zip

RAID controllers are not recommended with Unraid for many reasons.

 

Don't understand what you mean by 1.1GB though. Is that a typo? Your previous parity must have been at least 4TB since you have data disks that large. Or are you talking about speed?

 

Is anything writing to your server while you are trying to build parity?

I forgot to mention that it is syncing 2 drives at the same time. A parity drive and a data drive.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/102010-recommended-controllers-for-unraid/

On 1/29/2021 at 7:57 AM, JorgeB said:

RAID controllers are not recommended for Unraid, this includes all LSI MegaRAID models, doesn't mean they cannot be used but there could be various issues because of that, like no SMART info and/or temps being displayed, disks not being recognized by Unraid if the controller is replaced with a different model, and in some cases the partitions can become invalid, requiring rebuilding all the disks.

 

3 minutes ago, juhendri said:

I forgot to mention that it is syncing 2 drives at the same time. A parity drive and a data drive.

I can see that in the diagnostics. Shouldn't matter if things are working well since they are done in parallel.

 

4 minutes ago, trurl said:

Is anything writing to your server?

 

The raid controller only showed 1.1gb in size when I tried to format the 10tb SAS drive.

Nothing is writing to the disks.

Both parity drives are 4tb and then the 6 that follow them.

Then I have 5 other disks hooked up in ways you all would gasp at.

All due to lack of money.

4 minutes ago, juhendri said:

The raid controller only showed 1.1gb in size when I tried to format the 10tb SAS drive.

Why are you trying to format anything? Format is never part of rebuild, whether rebuilding parity or rebuilding a data disk.

Not format. I meant to say convert to a virtual drive with raid 0. Either way the raid card would not convert it nor see its full size.

I am still stuck today. The parity sync has not finished.

post new diagnostics

I turned a few things ( sabnzbd, sonarr, radarr ) on temporarily to see if I could get the parity to finally finish.

No luck.

I have been doing some reading on the h700 perc card. I see I could update the firmware. The only problem is I don't have a working OS to use for the installer/upgrade of the firmware. Also, If I do the firmware upgrade where does it get installed? My set up is super simple. I really don't even need the cache drive so I am planning on doing something different with that, just don't know yet.

datawhore-diagnostics-20230914-0826.zip

There's a known issue with those Dell controllers and parity getting stuck, AFAIK there's no solution other than using a different controller, also please note that RAID controllers are not recommended with Unraid.

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

There's a known issue with those Dell controllers and parity getting stuck, AFAIK there's no solution other than using a different controller, also please note that RAID controllers are not recommended with Unraid.

Understood. I was under the impression it does work better with the LSi models compared to dell. I plan to build a 2 part in the future. a server case with PC set up inside and parity on local disks and then a jbod for storage. Is that a bad plan?

RAID controllers in general are not recommend, but LSI Megaraid usually work, with its limitations, but if possible really recommend getting an LSI HBA instead, one of these:

 

 

 

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

RAID controllers in general are not recommend, but LSI Megaraid usually work, with its limitations, but if possible really recommend getting an LSI HBA instead, one of these:

 

 

 

I have 2 of those hooked up with stat cables coming out of the back of the server. lol That is my jank set up.

1 hour ago, juhendri said:

2 of those

That thread has examples of 10's of different controllers. "those" tells us nothing.

19 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

That thread has examples of 10's of different controllers. "those" tells us nothing.

Sorry, I did not realize it was another thread until I just clicked on it. I have 8 internal drives on a back plane that goes to the perc card. Then I have 4 external drives connected via SATA cables through the back of the server into 2 different cards similar to the one below.