February 11, 201214 yr I've had an unRaid server with beta 5.0 beta 13 running for several months now and I've just encountered my first problem with a hard drive in the array and I'm hoping someone could suggest how best to respond to my situation. My arrary consists of the following: Parity drive - 1.5TB Six (6) Data Drives - 1.5TB Four (3) Data Dives - 1TB The sixth 1.5TB drive in the array began showing gobs of errors and I need to replace it, not having done it before I'm still pretty clear on how to but here's my "problem" Drives available to me for replacement are two (2) 2TB drives and a 1TB. Ideally I'd like to replace the wonky drive with one of the 2TB drives but I know the parity drive needs to be at least as big as the largest drive in the array so a straight replacement/upgrade doesn't seem the correct route to go - even if my next step after doing so would be to put the second 2TB drive in place of the parity drive. I could replace the parity drive first with one of the 2Tb drives but changing a parity drive while there's problem drive in the array doesn't seem to be a smart thing to do. I could replace the the parity and the defective drive at the same time but that's even less intuitive a thing to do it seems to me. Or I could replace the troublesome 1.5TB with the 1TB and downgrade temporarily then the parity drive with a 2TB drive then do the 1TB drive I just put in with the 2Tb drive which would work but holy cow that seems a rather round about and lengthy path to get to there Any thoughts how how best to proceed would be greatly appreciated.
February 11, 201214 yr I think you are stuck with trying to find a 1.5TB drive to replace the failing one with. Any other way introduces room for a second lost drive. I believe there is a way to "shrink" (in unraid's eyes) the 2TB drive to 1.5TB, then when you have a 2TB parity you can "expand" the other drive via HPA (but now sure how). Hopefully one of the guru's on here can tell you how to "shrink" the drive.
February 11, 201214 yr There is a mode that will allow you to replace the parity with the larger drive and rebuild the failed drive on the old parity drive. I can't speak on how well it works on the beta. It worked great on 4.7 though. You didn't mention how the errors started. Have you ruled out lose connections, memory and power supply?
February 11, 201214 yr Author Don't really know how or why the errors started ... I use the unRaid web gui as my homepage on my main computer so any time I'm on it I can see the status of the server. This morning when I logged on I couldn't access the page and after about two hours of waiting with no change I went to the server console and rebooted it. When it came backup I initially couldn't access the page again but after I short while I could and found a parity check underway and a pile of errors. I hadn't considered power supply or memory errors since the errors only appeared on the one drive and that seemed unlikely (feel free to correct me if that's not the case) and while loose connections could certainly be the cause I hadn't considered them since I hadn't gone near the server in a good month or longer, but I'll look at that to make sure.
February 11, 201214 yr Author Actually, your questions caused me to give this some thought and now I'm wondering: I looked at the status again and while I see errors on the drive it also has a nice green dot next to it like all the others. Being some what new to this am I making an assumption that may not be correct? Do errors indicate impending problems with the drive or is that an erroneous assumption on my part?
February 12, 201214 yr Do errors indicate impending problems with the drive or is that an erroneous assumption on my part? Depends on what was going on before the errors started. Cables come lose when sticking your hand in the case. If you added a drive and the power supply is just making it, a parity check might be pushing it beyond it's ability. your post didn't provide much background. Your probably right about the drive. Post the requested smart report for the drive in question along with the syslog. That will tell us more. Here is a good link with basic troubleshooting http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting
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