I got an error saying my parity disk is disabled. I'm not sure why and I'd like some help. This is the newest disk in the array. They're all WD red, this one is 6tb and the rest are 3tb. I restarted the server to see if that solved anything which it did not. I was able to run a SMART test on the drive after the restart though as i wasn't able to before. 

 

Looking at some other people with this problem, it was pointing towards a bad sata cable or similar. I am using an LSI 9211-8i running in "IT Mode" which i think this drive is connected to but at least one other drive is connected to it as well as my board (S1200KPR ooooold) only has 4 sata ports. The 6th drive is my cache which is an intel SSD.

 

Everyone seems to ask for diagnostics reports so here they are. One is before the restart and the other is after. Not sure if that matters. You can see the time stamps -2348 is after restart.

zefyserver-diagnostics-20231113-2348.zip zefyserver-diagnostics-20231113-2321.zip

The diagnostics from before the reboot showed that the parity disk dropped offline and therefore no SMART information available.    Since you say you have checked the sata cabling you might also want to also check the power cabling (note that Power splitters can sometimes cause problems).   

 

The diagnostics from after the reboot show the drive back online, and no obvious errors in its SMART reports.

the manual was talking about running a long smart test to see if the drive has problems which I'm doing now.  It also mentioned CRC errors which I'm not sure what that means or how to check it.

 

I'll recheck the connections after the smart test is done, whether it's good or bad. I do have a power splitter in there that i think is molex. so it could be bad/cheap. Before the restart, the drive showed that it had 72 errors in the "array devices" menu... Is it possible to see what those are/were? Is it in the diag report? I don't know what i'm looking at.

extended smart test finished without issue as far as i can tell. attached that report and another diagnostic report... Cables all look fine, card is working with the other drive...

 

I'm not sure what my next steps are. is there a way to turn the parity drive back on? Swap some cables? I'm assuming if the extended smart test was able to run for whatever 10 hours it should imply that the cables are good yes?

zefyserver-diagnostics-20231114-1400.zip zefyserver-smart-20231114-0107.zip

1 hour ago, Zefy said:

I'm assuming if the extended smart test was able to run for whatever 10 hours it should imply that the cables are good yes?

Actually it tells you nothing about the cables as the test is completely internal to the drive.

 

the process for re-enabling the drive is covered here in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page. The Unraid OS->Manual section in particular covers most features of the current Unraid release.

 

thanks. I'll do that tomorrow. Just to double check, there is no way to fix this without rebuilding the drive? Like if i were to just swap cables to new ones or something it wouldn't just start working because unraid has disabled the disk, right? 

9 hours ago, Zefy said:

Like if i were to just swap cables to new ones or something it wouldn't just start working because unraid has disabled the disk, right? 

Correct.

it's back up and running and made the parity disk without any errors so I think it's all good. I'll keep a closer eye on it for the next little while. I also realized that my array is basically full. I have about 6% remaining which i didn't really think about because it's still 700gb. Could this be part of the cause for the parity disk errors? I have also been deleting things recently. 

 

Either way, i have a spare 6tb disk that I can add to the array. If i add that, is there some kind of redistribution that occurs to make the rest of the array more balanced in space remaining? I realize that disks being very full can be bad. I can start a new topic if that's important for clarity on the forums for searching.

 

Thanks everyone for the help!