Hello. So sometime ago, I decided I wanted my 8th drive to be a backup drive so I took it off the array. I used to have my shares set to "fill up" so my 8th drive was still empty.  Recently, I've converted to the trash guide system with all my media to one share set to "high water", but was copying over files to that share through windows (which took forever...) until I figured out about moving between shares (not disks) through krusader would be instantaneous. 

My current problem now is that after moving files between shares through windows, it seemed to have filled the "not installed" 8th drive with the high water.  I thought this was odd, but I was fine with just having the final drive part of the array now, so I turned off the array and was going to just add the drive back, but it stated it was going to get wiped when it was added to the array.

My current guess at what's happening is that the 8th drive was being emulated by my parity drives this entire time I had it "not installed" and it got filled up through the changing to the "high water" setting.  My only issue is that I remember having a drive emulated before when I had a failure and it saying "emulated" on my shares tab.  Can anybody help confirm/deny my suspicions?

I've attached a picture of the shares tab and also the diagnostics.  Thanks to anybody who read all of this.

tower-diagnostics-20240117-1418.zip

Since you didn't New Config and rebuild parity without disk8, it is still part of the array and has been emulated by the rest of the array ever since you removed it. And the emulated disk currently contains over 5TB of data. You will have to rebuild disk8 if you want to keep that data.

 

Since you have dual parity with only 1 missing disk, you still have redundancy.

 

The Shares page has never said anything about emulation.  Mouse-over the red X next to Disk 8.

 

21 minutes ago, Justinwin said:

add the drive back, but it stated it was going to get wiped when it was added to the array.

 

If you try to ADD the disk to a new slot, it will let you since you have dual parity. And it will clear the disk so parity remains valid.

 

If you instead assign the disk to the disk 8 slot, it will be overwritten with the contents of the emulated disk. In other words, rebuilt.

25 minutes ago, Justinwin said:

to be a backup drive

25 minutes ago, Justinwin said:

fine with just having the final drive part of the array now

 

So what are you doing about backup?

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Since you didn't New Config and rebuild parity without disk8, it is still part of the array and has been emulated by the rest of the array ever since you removed it.

Ok, I'll remember to do that if I ever take out a drive again.

 

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The Shares page has never said anything about emulation.  Mouse-over the red X next to Disk 8.

Ah, that's where I've seen it before! Thanks for the reminder.

 

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So what are you doing about backup?

I've gotten another drive since I took the 8th drive off.  Just never bothered to change my setup since then because I still had space leftover.

Thanks for confirming and helping me out.  I'll make sure to remember all these details.