Hello everyone,

I have an issue with my parity drive. UnRAID disabled the drive after it registered 1,250 errors.

Screenshots

I did not manage to download the diagnostics as I thought the drive was dead and needed replacing.

Syslog showed read-write errors.

Syslog

I tried to retrieve SMART data from UnRAID, but the file contained hardly any information.

SMART from Unraid

koaly-tower-smart-20260526-1046.zip

However, after connecting the drive to a PC, formatting it to NTFS, and running chkdsk and checking for bad sectors in AOMEI Partition Assistant, I found no errors.

The SMART data received from HDD Sentinel also shows that the drive is in perfect condition.

SMART and Chkdsk

The drive has been working as a parity drive for about two months since it was new, and it has a four-year warranty. I have a label to send it for repair, but now I am concerned because it appears to be working fine outside of Unraid.

The question is whether the drive is defective or whether this is a Unraid bug?

Please advise

Please post the diagnostics.

Here it is, but at the time of saving it I already removed the failed drive from the server

10 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Please post the diagnostics.

koaly-tower-diagnostics-20260528-0915.zip

10 minutes ago, koaly said:

Here it is, but at the time of saving it I already removed the failed drive from the server

Just because a drive is disabled in Unraid it does not necessarily mean there is a drive problem. It just means that a write failed, and this is frequently caused by external issues such as cabling or power rather than problems with the drive itself. The best easy test of a drives health is to run the extended SMART test on It. If it succeeds the drive is probably fine, whereas a failure indicates it should be replaced.

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

Just because a drive is disabled in Unraid it does not necessarily mean there is a drive problem. It just means that a write failed, and this is frequently caused by external issues such as cabling or power rather than problems with the drive itself. The best easy test of a drives health is to run the extended SMART test on It. If it succeeds the drive is probably fine, whereas a failure indicates it should be replaced.

Thank you for your reply. There was no problem caused by an external factor. I did not detach or replace any cables, and the power supply continued to work well. The server ran for more than a day before the read/write problem occurred.

Unraid did not recognise the drive, even after I stopped the array. Therefore, an extended SMART test was not possible within UnRAID.

As I understood your explanation, it is not possible to find out why UnRAID could not read from or write to the parity drive. It should be considered an unknown and non-repeatable bug. Since I have no issues with the drive on other systems, I will put it back as the parity drive.

20 minutes ago, koaly said:

Unraid did not recognise the drive, even after I stopped the array. Therefore, an extended SMART test was not possible within UnRAID.

Just because you did not do anything on the server does not mean an external factor could not happen. In particular cables can work slightly loose due to factors like vibration or thermal stresses.

Have you tried doing a power cycle on the server. That has quite frequently been known to bring back online a drive that dropped offline for some reason. If the drive is still not seen after doing that then it probably has failed.

Syslog-previous in the diags covers the event

May 25 23:22:07 koaly-tower kernel: ata27: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 3E0)

May 25 23:22:07 koaly-tower kernel: ata27.00: disable device

Disk dropped offline; this is almost always a power/connection problem.