Ok I’ll try to keep this short, but I’m super nervous about this so hopefully I don’t ramble.. tl;dr at bottom.

 

I’ve been slowly running out of space lately and have no more places to connect new drives so I finally decided I just need to start swapping drives out for bigger ones. So I bought a few 12TB drives to swap out some of my 4-8 TB ones, and I finally quit procrastinating and started that process today.

 

So first of course I had to do the two parity drives, and currently the first one is about 23% done after 12 hours or so. Sometime in the last 30 minutes or so though, the green circle in my browser tab changed to a yellow triangle, so I took a look to see what was wrong, and of course, right now is when one of my data drives decided to die on me…

 

I’m not sure exactly what I should do now.. and I had a few questions I’m hoping people can help me with.

 

First is, can the second parity drive still build properly even though a drive is missing? I can’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t, but something about building a second parity drive off of the first one while still giving your system additional protection feels counterintuitive to me. Also, is it possible at all that the drive failing in the middle of the rebuild could have caused it to have errors? Am I going to wait for 2 days biting my fingernails only to find out that the parity rebuild failed?

 

Second question I guess is just what should I do? Should I just let the parity drive finish and hope to God no other data drives break before then? I have the parity drive that I just replaced still attached to the system, should I attempt to rebuild the data drive onto that while the other is going too? Is that a bad idea to run more than one at the same time? I guess I’d have to stop this one and restart anyways though if I did that.. and that’s probably not worth it.

Since the drive is still emulated though, I could try to move the data to a different drive? Or maybe to a backup hard drive or something? I’m not sure exactly how that helps me if another drive dies, but maybe it’s a good idea? I don’t want to put extra strain on the drives reading and writing a ton of stuff if it’s not worth it though, so I just can’t decide..

 

What do you guys think? What’s my best bet or safest practice in a situation like this?

 

Ugh I joked that this would happen too but I didn’t actually think it would.. Thank you for any help or info!

 

tl;dr: Data drive died while rebuilding my second parity drive. Terrified another drive will die before it finishes and I’m not sure what to do.

Start by posting your diagnositcs for one of the resident experts.  You likely have a cabling or disk issue as it shouldn't take 12 hours to write 23% of a 12 TB drive.

Attach Diagnostics ZIP to your NEXT post in this thread.

 

and calm down 

9 hours ago, Gragorg said:

Start by posting your diagnositcs for one of the resident experts.  You likely have a cabling or disk issue as it shouldn't take 12 hours to write 23% of a 12 TB drive.

 

9 hours ago, trurl said:

Attach Diagnostics ZIP to your NEXT post in this thread.

 

and calm down 

Thanks for the replies! I am working on getting my diagnostics now. For some reason it’s acting strange in that when I click download it starts going through looking pretty normal, and then it starts scrolling past something that looks suspiciously like it’s going through every single one of my files? Which just keeps going and going until the web page crashes and tells me it’s out of memory, and then when I refresh I have to start the process over again haha.. So I’m not sure what that’s about, maybe it has to do with one of my plugins? I’m working on it though!

 

I will say though that sometime in the last couple hours, after it passed the 50% or so point where I don’t think there are any more files to be read, it has sped up significantly. It is no longer reading from all the drives like it was before. Now it is only reading from the other parity drive and going at closer to 175MB/s. It’s telling me I have about 8 hours left. Maybe one of my data drives is really slow and was bottlenecking everything?

 

Thanks again for the help!

4 minutes ago, FoxBytes said:

Maybe one of my data drives is really slow and was bottlenecking everything?

Maybe a bad connection to one of your data drives was slowing things down, and when that drive was finally kicked out of the array, things could go back to normal speed.