I've 70% enjoyed my experience with Unraid. It has allowed me to experience multiple copies of Linux distros that I would normally never be able to acquire for a multitude of reasons. It has allowed me to maintain a large library of FLACs that I have legitimately been collecting since SHNs were a thing (and tapes before that). It has helped with storing so many books, articles, research journals, and other documents, allowing me to spend countless hours organizing and cataloguing them, then reorganizing and recataloguing. It has also given me a harsh dose of reality as to why I didn't go into computer science of any kind. I'm in the humanities and I really enjoy the ambiguity of the humanities. Huge props to all y'all that do this work. I'm a small business owner, a happily married man, a kiddo, a mother-in-law in the basement, and a doggo. I don't have time to be monkeying around with Unraid and my lack of understanding of how to make it work nicely.

I know, I need to share my diagnostics and I need to be patient and learn the process. I want to be able to do that, I really do. But some days I just want to throw the whole thing in the river and just pay for my distros like every other sucker who hasn't the time or the where-with-all to do the thing. Some of this is out of my control, like the 5 drives that have either failed or had 10k+ errors over the past 2 weeks. Some of it is totally within my control, like my incessant tinkering without knowing, then trying to figure it out with random AI queries, google searches, and unraid forum stalks. And then some, I'm completely bewildered by, such as why the f*ck does my -arr programs suddenly need to be completely reconfigured when I've done absolutely nothing to trigger a change (I have app data backup and even that isn't putting things back, so I've done something wrong I guess).

I do wish that there was a service that would go into my tower, curse under its breath about my ineptitude, fix things, and then tell me which buttons not to press so that I can have a functioning system that doesn't just start laughing at me randomly.

Here's what I'm struggling with:

• My -arrs have all lost their setups, so their indexers and dl clients are no longer listed. This happened after a hard shutdown. This is the 3rd time it has happened.

• Notifiarr has decided that it doesn't want to work, giving a "Execution Error: Bad Parameter".

• I have worked to reconfig my setup so that I can remove the drives that are failed from the array, but the last attempt at a shutdown ended with a hard shutdown as it just didn't want to spin down the drives. Once it started back up, I couldn't remember which drives where which and now its setting up parity with 2 drives that have exhibited errors in the past and are doing so again.

• I had a RaspPi that was running pihole, but it died when someone decided that it needed to fall onto concrete in my basement (mother-in-law) and I'm now just getting it back in place. I got pihole, unbound, and tailscale on the Pi, it seems to be working as expected. However, now all of my docker containers say that updates are not available. I don't know if that is in anyway related, but I'm a bit gunshy at this point and am of the conspiracy theory that when something goes wrong with tech in the house, it's probably related to Unraid.

• I would like to get the drives to spin down and to decrease my power draw with my current equipment. I'm not sure where to begin with search terms which I know seems ridiculous to consider, but the rabbit holes that I've gone down have left me in some very interesting spaces.

• I've tried to run VMs for HAOS through Unraid, only for it to fail miserably and I end up buying a HA Green to not have to deal with the downtime. I've tried to run PiHole and Adguard through Unraid only for the same issues to occur and back I am to having a RaspPi. There are so many wonderful use cases for Unraid and Dockers, but fuck if I just can't figure out how to make it work nicely.

• Edit: and don't get me started on Nextcloud. I've followed SInvader's tutorial several times and I just can't get that damn thing to work right. So I'm stuck with GDrive until that gets resolved.

I don't have time to check the forums throughout the day which is another issue and I'm not proficient with discord, so my response time is usually delayed. What started as a hobby has become more than that for some reason. I appreciate y'all that do this and find joy/enjoyable frustration with the problem solving, but damn I'm getting too old and too crotchety to keep having to explain to the three women in my house that "no you can't watch Abbot Elem...errr, that Linux distro tonight and maybe not tomorrow either because unraid is having a moment".

Thanks for your consideration.

tower-diagnostics-20250616-2218.zip

Edited June 17, 20251 yr by kikimonster
Added more

Disk2 failed the SMART test, so it should be replaced, disk1 looks more like a power/connection issue, check/replace its cables and post new diags after array start.