Thanks to the help from moderators/users on this forum, I have finally successfully built parity. I have a few questions and was hoping for some guidance/input.

1) it took nearly (2) full days for a large array of (17) drives with the largest/parity drive being 18TB. I assume this is normal, but wondering if my scheduled (monthly) will take that long)

2) at certain times of day, my check would pause for 6 mins every few hours on the hour. At first, I thought this was due to parity drive overheating settings, which I changed, but do not beleive that was the case. I think this may be due to using increments. I turned this off in parity check tuning for both manual and scheduled parity checks, but did so during the check. I was thinking maybe the settings apply only to the start of the check and hoping this won;t happen on my first scheduled check. Is this the issue? I can provide screenshot of these settings or welcome advice on how to set that up

3) I had a couple read issues/errors with (2) of my smaller 8TB drives:

[MEDIA-SERVER] Parity Sync/Data Rebuild finished (416 errors)

Elapsed Time 2 day, 18 min, 3 sec, Runtime 1 day, 20 hr, 11 min, 19 sec, Increments 12, Average Speed 113.2 MB/s

Does this mean I should replace these drives? Playing files off these drives works, but I am not sure what this indicates. I can attache logs/diagnostics as well. I have not rebooted since

 

Any help/information is appreciated.

Thanks

 

Edited April 10, 20251 yr by wdpaynter
Additional Info

53 minutes ago, wdpaynter said:

it took nearly (2) full days for a large array of (17) drives with the largest/parity drive being 18TB.

That looks about right, things that will impact the duration, are total parity size, amount of different disk capacities, the more you have, the slower it will be, any controller bottlenecks.

 

For the other two please post the diagnostics

1 hour ago, wdpaynter said:

I was thinking maybe the settings apply only to the start of the check and hoping this won;t happen on my first scheduled check

Assuming you are talking about the plugin’s settings they take effect as soon as you hit apply.

 

the total time for a parity check is primarily determined by the size of the largest drive and as you have found they can take a long time with the large size of modern drives.    That was the impetus behind developing the Parity Check Tuning plugin where you trade total elapsed time for minimising disruption during your servers prime time.

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

That looks about right, things that will impact the duration, are total parity size, amount of different disk capacities, the more you have, the slower it will be, any controller bottlenecks.

 

For the other two please post the diagnostics

Ok, no problem. Attaching diagnostics

31 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Assuming you are talking about the plugin’s settings they take effect as soon as you hit apply.

 

OK, wonder why it continued pausing after I changed the settings. Here are my settings if you can help guide to what will stop it from pausing. I didn;t notice any performance hit while parity check was running. I only use the server for Plex. None of my friends or family commented either. Maybe I got lucky

Here are diagnostics too, sorry

media-server-diagnostics-20250410-1408.zip

Looking at your logs you were getting pauses because Mover was running and you have the plugin settings set to pause while this is the case.   This is normally desirable as array operations and mover badly affect each others performance so you do not want them running in parallel.   You then get a resume when the plugin detects that Mover is no longer running.   On that basis the behaviour you were seeing was expected.
 

You do seem to have mover scheduled to run more frequently than the default of once a day in the middle of the night?

 

BTW:  Do you have notifications enabled at the system level?   I suspect not as otherwise you would have received them from the plug-in when it paused or resumed because of mover.

 

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

Looking at your logs you were getting pauses because Mover was running and you have the plugin settings set to pause while this is the case.   This is normally desirable as array operations and mover badly affect each others performance so you do not want them running in parallel.   You then get a resume when the plugin detects that Mover is no longer running.   On that basis the behaviour you were seeing was expected.

 

OK, then I will leave it be. Thanks!

 

You do seem to have mover scheduled to run more frequently than the default of once a day in the middle of the night?

I have it hourly. I think I thought if I didn;t it would not instantly add it to Plex until each night. I am now assuming that is not the case?

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

 

BTW:  Do you have notifications enabled at the system level?   I suspect not as otherwise you would have received them from the plug-in when it paused or resumed because of mover.

I do have notifications enabled and see now that it was notifying me that Mover had started and stopped when Parity check was pausing/resuming. I just didn't understand and thought they both were stopping because of my increment settings. I guess the hours where it wasn;t stopping meant there was nothing for Mover to move. I am learning! Thanks!!

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

 

I really appreciate your's and everyone's help!!

28 minutes ago, wdpaynter said:

have it hourly. I think I thought if I didn;t it would not instantly add it to Plex until each night. I am now assuming that is not the case?

No.   As far as Unraid is concerned a User Share includes all pools as well as the configured array drives (if any) so a file is available immediately and it is transparent at the User Share level as to which drive or pool it currently resides on.   

I just changed it to nightly. Thank you again for your help!

 

I have one more question. Let's say I want to replace the (2) 8TB drives with a 18TB drive. How do I do so? I actually have 20TB of free space currently. Can I just remove those two drives and the content will be replaced from parity? Sorry, I am still trying to wrap my head around

You would need to replace on the drives normally, then shrink the array:

https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/shrink-array/

4 hours ago, JorgeB said:

You would need to replace on the drives normally, then shrink the array:

https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/shrink-array/

Ok, thanks. I'll give that a read