i disabled simpleFeatures, and voila, the serials are showing up again...albeit reminding me of how much the standard GUI is in need of a brush-up...i wish *all* of the standard GUI features were part of simpleFeatures (i.e. seeing the serials of the drives).

 

adding the 2TB drive to slot 14 is more "work" than i anticipated, as it spent the past 5hrs clearing about 73% of it...and then there is still the parity calculation...have been on these updates for over a week now...puh!

 

will report back when i tried to re-order the physical slots of the drives, hopefully sometime tomorrow.

 

Update 2pm: after the clearing action hung *again* (at around 75% and loosing access to the WebUI at the same time), i had to force restart the emhttp process via telnet, only to find that the clearing process had to be started a third time...so i just spent two days on only this one task...kind of upsetting...let's hope that #3 is my lucky charm

 

Update 10:45pm: finally the clearing finished...now formatting, then *another* parity check...then, tomorrow, after a week of these shenanigans, i'll try the re-shuffle...phew!

Success! 

 

thanks to the help of the awesome unRaid community, and after a week of updates, upgrades and little frustrations, i just physically re-ordered the disks to my liking, rebooted the server, and lo-and-behold, the array came back as if nothing had happened!

 

another proof of Tom's amazing work and product...and the goodness and patience of all you fine folks!

 

i'll mark this as *Solved* now.