August 2, 201312 yr My unRAID (5.0rc11) VM on ESXi has been happily running for over half a year now. Today I decided to shut down the host to do some hardware upgrades. Status of unRAID was perfectly fine before shutdown, no errors of any kind in the statistics or syslog, everything green. As soon as I stopped the array in preparation for shutdown, disk 6 red balled. As far as I remember nothing of import was in the syslog, but of course I forgot to save it before shutting the VM down... After checking the cabling, I powered the host and VM back up. The disk is recognized without problems (sdb), but remains of course red balled. The only other oddity is that no temperature is shown on the main screen, despite smartctl having no trouble accessing that information. Syslog and smartctrl report are attached, everything looks OK to me. As this is my first unRAID incident, I'm a bit hesitant to move forward. Should I just remove the disk, add it back again and start a regular recovery? This seems wasteful to me, as there wasn't any write access to the disk for weeks, and the last parity check in July was fine as well. How can a drive even red ball on array shutdown, is there any form of write access (metadata update) at that time? Regards, Tobias syslog.txt smartctl-sdb.txt
August 2, 201312 yr yes, disks are written to as they are un-mounted. Basically, a write to the drive failed. It is why is now shows as "red" (disabled) It could have been an intermittent cable, or drive tray, or power splitter, etc. There is a chance there is now file-system corruption on the physical disk, but it is fine when simulated by parity. Only certain way to get the disk back is to re-construct from parity back onto itself.
August 2, 201312 yr Author OK, decided to take the plunge and rebuild the disk then. Rebuild speed was slugging along at 3-4MB/s... Massively repeated mpt2sas entries in syslog pointed to hundreds of bus resets within minutes. Finally replaced the SFF8087 cables running to the M1015, and the rebuild is moving at a decent 120MB/s now. Guess one of the cables was faulty, probably also the reason why the disk red balled in the first place. Regards, Tobias
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