After years of running Unraid with little to no issues, I have recently seen an uptick in the  number and types of errors showing up. Most of the errors seemed to start showing up after I upgraded to 7.3.2, but given the errors I'm seeing I'm starting to suspect that some, or all, of my hardware is on its last legs. 

An incomplete timeline of how my issues have progressed:

1. Upgraded to 7.2.5 ran into issues with Dockers not starting and running (link to post). I understand this is/was an issue since 7.2.5 and my workaround of changing a character in the setup and reapplying has been working (I assume there is a more robust fix I should implement).

2. Cache pool showed as degraded. I gather this could be the case from unsafe shutdowns or other issues in the past and now get flagged in the current version. Based on forum posts for others seeing similar problems I ran a scrub and full smart tests. Seeing no obvious errors I ran a balance and then reset my cache pool. Cache pool is still showing as degraded, but also seems to be working ok. 

3. Upgraded to 7.3.2 from 7.2.5

4. Last week I noticed some random, unexplained data loss. I didn't see anything in the logs to explain what happened a docker issue (Plex, Sonarr, Radarr...) or just another hint of hardware failure. tower-diagnostics-20260827-0741.zip

5. The biggest red flag showed up yesterday when I discovered that disk 1 was showing as unmountable, the last parity check had 500+ errors, and it looked like my most recent monthly parity check had failed and was attempting to rerun with the unmountable disk. tower-diagnostics-20260903-2118.zip

   
   

I pulled diagnostics, stopped the parity check, stopped the array and performed a clean shutdown.  I am currently running a memtest to see if that turns up anything else. 

I am looking for help confirming that my hardware is indeed dying or insights into other issues. I've upgraded/replaced my drives, RAM, CPU and PSU over time but realized I am still running the mobo and sata cables from when I originally built my server in 2014, thus why I'm suspecting hardware failure. I'm guessing there are also aspects of my setup that are no longer best practice with all of the updates to Unraid in recent years. 

There are constant ATA errors with disk1, this is typically a power/connection issue. Replace both cables for that disk and post new diags after array start

Swapped power and sata cables on disk1.

New diagnosticstower-diagnostics-20260909-1824.zip

Looks like I'm still getting ATA bus errors and disk1 is showing as Unmountable. I also am getting repeated "interface fatal errors"

Those ICRC abort errors are usually a bad SAT cable; replace just that cable one more time to make sure that's not the problem.

Alright, let's try this again. Swapped out the sata cable and for now I'm no longer seeing the ICRC abort errors or the ATA bus errors. Disk 1 is still showing up as unmountable with wrong or no file system.

tower-diagnostics-20260912-0835.zip

Edited September 12Sep 12 by jmcskis

Check filesystem on disk1

Thanks @JorgeB . I was able to repair the file system on disk 1 and everything seems back to "normal".

Out of curiosity is there anything else in my diagnostic logs that I should be looking at, or anything that looks like I'll have other problems in the near future? I understand my current round or errors is generally due to bad power/sata cables, but I'm still nervous that these errors of other impending hardware failures?

Diagnostics post filesystem repair:

tower-diagnostics-20260913-1103.zip

Edited September 13Sep 13 by jmcskis
file attachement

Looks OK for now, the filesystem issues were likely caused by the connection-related issues.

Thanks. Good to know things are looking ok. However, I did run a manual parity check (non-correcting) after everything and it turned up a bunch of errors. I expect this is because of the previous ATA bus and ICRC abort errors and filesystem correction. As far as I can tell there's no impacts to data and no other errors showed up besides a brief power outage that kicked me over to my UPS. Since there didn't seem to be an other errors or issues, should I proceed with an error correcting parity check?

For reference, diagnostics immediately before running parity check: tower-diagnostics-20260917-1808_preparitycheck.zip

And diagnostics after parity check: tower-diagnostics-20260919-1600.zip

Edited September 19Sep 19 by jmcskis
file upload

9 hours ago, jmcskis said:

should I proceed with an error correcting parity check?

Yep, and if more sync errors are found post new diags