Disk error after a month of usage - what shall I do?

[mirhec]

I'm very pleased with Unraid itself, but I have huge problems with my HDDs. First I used my old Synology NAS disks which were over 7 years old. One after the other was marked as defect and I replaced them with new disks. Today I got another disk error from Unraid, but this disk I installed mid January. So I'm afraid that there's something wrong with my Unraid installation / my hardware. Here's my Unraid diagnose file, can someone see any problems with it? Is the disk 2 really defect or can / should I reset this error?

 

Btw. the disk 2 is mainly used for Time Machine Backups. Are there any known issues with Time Machine Backups regarding the liftime of HDDs?

server-diagnostics-20240227-1135.zip

[JorgeB]

Disk was already disabled at boot, so we can't see what happened, post new diags after array start to see if the emulated disk is mounting.

[mirhec]

Thanks for your reply, I started the array and created a new diagnose file:

server-diagnostics-20240227-1335.zip

[JorgeB]

Emulated disk is mounting, assuming contents look correct you can rebuild on top, it may be a good idea to check/replace cables before doing it to rule that out, if it happens again save the diags before rebooting:

 

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management#rebuilding-a-drive-onto-itself

[itimpi]

41 minutes ago, mirhec said:

One after the other was marked as defect and I replaced them with new disks.

What exactly do you mean by this?    A disk can be disabled (marked with a red ‘x’) if a write to it fails for some reason.  Far more often than not this is not a problem with the disk itself but an external factor such as the cabling or power.

 

the best test of a disks health tends to be the Extended SNART test - of that passes error free the disk is normally OK.

[mirhec]

Hmm seems that I misunderstood the `disabled device` message. I thought this would mean that the device is defect, so I replaced those disabled disks with new ones. I will rebuild it and check the cables and see if the problems are gone. Thanks for your help!

[JonathanM]

7 hours ago, mirhec said:

I thought this would mean that the device is defect,

It can mean that, but it's more likely to be a connection issue. Any time Unraid wants to write data to a disk and the data doesn't successfully get written, the disk is disabled. Why the write failed isn't known by Unraid, you need to investigate whether the disk is still fit for use, the SMART report is the first place to look. If the disk will successfully complete an extended test it's probably OK to continue use.