Do I need to wipe my UnRaid flash drive and start over?

I have a micro pc I want to use strictly as backup. Going to put Urbackup on it. I already have a beast UnRaid server for my main operations.

I purchased a new starter license for the Micro PC. It only has a 256GB nvme disk and a 1 TB mechanical disk. I made the mistake of forgetting it would set/need the largest disk for parity. That was last night.

Today I read I could operate it with both disks as a storage pool and put in a flash drive for the array. I've done that, but after several reboots, the UnRaid Micro PC won't start. Red X at Parity missing; Red X Disk 1 even though I pointed it the flash drive. The pool is now set the two drives above, 256 and 1TB.

Since rebooting many times won't fix the problem, and I see no options within UnRaid to fix it, will wiping the UnRaid flash drive and re-creating it fix the problem?

If you are not interested in redundancy then you can run the main Unraid array with no parity drive and the full capacity of the data drives is available so that is one option. It has the advantage that each drive is an independent file system so if a drive fails only the contents of the failed drive are lost.

With the current Unraid release you can use only pools - there is no need to have the main array if you do not want it..

I would suggest you do:

• use the Tools->New config tool to reset the array (do not forget to hit the Apply button).

• Set the number of slots for the main array to 0. This must be done if you are not going to have any dtives in the main array.

• Create a new pool with 2 slots and assign drives to the pool.

• Start the array to commit the changes.

Note that by default multiple drive pools are set to provide redundancy and then with the drives you have only the size of the smallest drive is available. However as long as you are prepared to run without redundancy you can use BTRFS as the file system and run without redundancy a non-redundant profile to make all the space available.

Great, thank you. I am curious, what there a reason it was suggested in another post to add a flash drive for the array?

"I would assign both as pools, so that trim is supported, and assign an old flash drive as the required array device."

Also, the 256 gb drive is showing up with three entrees 1, 2, 3. What does the mean and it won't affect adding it to the pool will it?

Edited December 1, 2025Dec 1 by RaidPC
Added picture.

1 minute ago, RaidPC said:

Great, thank you. I am curious, what there a reason it was suggested in another post to add a flash drive for the array?

It was a requirement in earlier Unraid releases. The ability to use only pools and have no main array was new with Unraid 7 so probably the post was referring to a workaround for an older release.