Encountering my first non-parity drive failure and would appreciate some guidance on best practices what to expect.

One of my data drive on its way out. It's still spinning and serving it's data, but writes to the disk start a steady stream of reallocated sector errors. For now, I've excluded the drive from all shares.

Relevant info:

• Unraid 6.12.14

• Bare metal, 2 x 12TB parity drives and 5 x 12TB data drives, LSI 9201-8i HBA + Adaptec 82885t SAS expander.

• Array contains decades of family photos, replaceable videos and audio, and backups (Unraid itself + personal devices)

• Replaceable media is served through Emby

• Runs the full *arr suite including torrent/usenet downloaders

What I'm curious about is:

1. What's the risk level of data loss during rebuild? Should I first move any family photos to healthy drives?

2. Will all data (specifically Emby's media) remain available throughout the data drive rebuild?

3. If yes, how risky is it to keep Emby running throughout?

4. Similarly, should I temporarily stop the download containers during rebuild? Download share is configured to write to a pool first.

Attach Diagnostics ZIP to your NEXT post in this thread.

4 minutes ago, ramgoat said:

Array contains decades of family photos

You must always have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable. Parity is not a substitute for backup.

On 2/8/2026 at 3:07 PM, trurl said:

You must always have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable. Parity is not a substitute for backup.

Agreed - I don't intend it to be. I'm still looking for a backup solution that works for me, and until then Unraid was a big improvement compared to the 6-year old Barracuda drive they were on before :)

Appreciate your response, but no further help is needed here. I ended up just going for it and stopped write-heavy containers (e.g., qBittorrent) until the rebuild is complete. So far so good.