I downloaded unraid to test and compare against alternatives and haven't been able to get any array devices formatted. I'm running a trial version of unraid on Proxmox 9.1.6 VM by passing through the USB drive for unraid and an LSI 9300-16i 16-Port 12Gb/s SAS Controller HBA Card in IT Mode. i have 6 WD Ultrastar DC HC310 hard drives. unraid sees the card and hard drives fine. i don't have any plugins installed and encountered this error the first time i setup the array and tried to format the disks. i've never gotten any drive formatted.

i followed the directions in this YT video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B8J7VERBJY), including the color settings :-). i created the array with 2 parity disks and added the other 4 drives for data. when i formatted them, the process runs in a couple of seconds and immediately shows up as "Unmountable: wrong or no file system". i have tried removing the array and repeating the steps with identical results. i tried those same steps using ZFS vs. XFS with identical results. since there's nothing on the disks (they were also brand new and unused), i'm happy to do things that are otherwise destructive since i have nothing to lose. Parity calculations take about 8.5 hrs, for reference. i don't think that i have a preference which file system to use, so would love thoughts / suggestions on this as well.

i've attached diagnostics here. i have a grand total of about 45 min working in / around unraid, so i appreciate your patience with me and super explicit directions for what you'd like me to try / do. thanks in advance for all of the help!

unraid-diagnostics-20260314-1347.zip

Unraid is trying to use an existing partition that is too small

Mar 11 22:16:34 unraid root: size 4091 of data subvolume is too small, minimum 4096 blocks

Try this:

Tools - New Config - Keep All - Apply

Then on main, click on each data disk and then "ERASE", then start the array and reformat them.

you're a wizard! drives are formatted and parity is recalculating. thank you so much!

🍺 money on the way