I've recently noticed an issue that I can't seem to figure out. I noticed the issue starting after I tried to preclear a Western Digital 14TB Elements external drive. I was trying to preclear it via USB 3.0 still in its enclosure, to verify it is good before shucking it. The preclear kept freezing or crashing. I killed the binhex preclear docker container, figured something might be up with the drive, or it didn't like me doing it over USB. So I figured I would do an extended test from a windows machine. But since that happened, I have been experiencing random freezing on unraid in general.

It only happens from network connected services. If I ssh in to the command line, commands will occasionally freeze up on me, then return everything 5 to 10 seconds later. This happens frequently from every 30 seconds to a minute it seems like. The unraid gui would also freeze up occasionally. Then I had a family member tell me that plex was freezing up on them. (I've only been able to catch plex freezing/buffering one time in my testing during this). But if I connect a keyboard and monitor directly to the unraid machine, the command line never freezes up. So it seems that the machine is fine, but there is something wrong with the networking.

I was trying to get chatgpt to troubleshoot it with me, and I thought had it narrowed down to the onboard NIC. I ordered a USB 3.0 NIC to see if I could run off of that and see if the freezing still happened. It did. I switched to eth1 on the USB nic, same IP, freezing still happens.

So now I'm at a loss as to what could be wrong. It seemed to happen when I tried pre-clearing that USB drive, however that could have been a coincidence. I can't imagine why the issue would keep happening after stopping pre-clear. I've stopped the array and rebooted multiple times. Tested for freezing while docker was down, VMs down, array down, freezing happens regardless of what state unrade is in. if the machine is up, I experience these freezes. The most consistent way I can see it is by running commands repeatedly from the command line and waiting for it to freeze up. The gui and plex are not as reliable to produce the freeze.

Any other thoughts or questions before I go nuclear and replace the mobo?

Edit: neither dmesg or syslong seem to show anything when these freezes happen.

Edit: forgot to mention, 12 core intel cpu, and it is idle when I'm doing this testing. I have 65GB RAM and like 50GB of that is free. So not a resource issue from what I can tell.

Edited October 11, 2025Oct 11 by paqman

I don't know why I always figure this stuff out right AFTER posting in the forum about it. I've been troubleshooting this for 2 days, and only just now realized that it may not be unraid at all, but my wifi network having issues. So I tested from my Mac mini that was hard wired to the network, and I could not replicate the issue. Then I put my usb NIC in the laptop where I was experiencing the issues, and could not replicate the issue. Took the NIC out and went back on wifi, issues came back. That pretty much seals the deal, I think it's my local wifi network that is causing these issues. Only thing I haven't done yet is reboot my wifi routers. I have family over and they're all using the wifi right now lol. Anyway, thought I'd report in, this is a non issue folks.