My array has been having a lot of issues since having a failed disk which I copied the files off when they were emulated and removed it from the array without replacing it using new config option.

 

I'm honestly not sure what could be the cause of the issues, files seem to be accessible (obviously can't check every file but the ones i checked randomly were fine).  I copied ~12,000 really important documents, images etc. off the array to another computer on my network with no issues. 

 

Most issues seem to be with writing files to the array.  For example, when downloading with sabnzbd files will download fine for about 15-30 seconds at 100MBps then the speed will drop to under 1MBps and stay there.  The behavior is the same in qbittorrent.  If I change my download share to use the cache drive files will download as normal.

I started a parity check and the maximum speed it achieved after running for an hour was 1MBps avg

I also cannot power down or reboot the server from the GUI or SSH.

I'm honestly at a loss with where to start with diagnosing this.  I've attached my diagnostics to this post and any help would be greatly appreciated as I have a lot of data at stake.

 

tower-diagnostics-20250305-0059.zip

Start a parity check and post new diags after it's been running for a few minutes.

thanks for the reply Ive attached the new diagnostics

 

but I think I may discovered the drive that is causing the issues.  I ran disk speed and disk 3 had an average speed of around 5MBps avg across the test.  

 

Im not entirely sure what this means though, if the drive was failing wouldn't I have been getting errors from it? where should I go from here?

tower-diagnostics-20250305-0146.zip

1 hour ago, creesy said:

Im not entirely sure what this means though, if the drive was failing wouldn't I have been getting errors from it?

Not always, and that does look like a bad drive.

Hi, looking at your disk 3 in the diagnostics, the drive ( Seagate Barracuda) is an SMR drive, which has a big impact on performance. SMR drives maximize storage density by overlapping data tracks but that make them slower for sustained writes. Because when writing they often need to rewrite adjacent tracks, leading to random slowdowns. This makes them particularly bad in high write scenarios like large file copies, torrents, and NZB downloads, where frequent writes can cause speeds to drop drastically. This would explain why your downloads start fast and then slow to a crawl if writing to the array and not cache.
Smart shows drive has been running for about five and a half years, which is quite old for a hard drive. There are no reallocated or pending sectors, so there’s no immediate sign of total failure, but the performance issues you’re seeing suggest the drive is degrading. The read and seek error rates are quite high, meaning the drive may be struggling to read data efficiently, but these aren’t necessarily critical smart errors. The load cycle count is also extremely high at 92,765 cycles, meaning the drive’s heads have been parked and unparked a huge number of times, which contributes to mechanical wear. Overall, it just seems like an aging drive that is starting to show its age