Hello,

 

Pretty much a newbie here, been happily running the RC's for 6 months. Yesterday, 8/2, I started a parity check in preparation for upgrade to R5. Checked after an hour and saw that my parity drive had red-balled. It was late, I shut the server down, Iknow,  should have copied the Syslog. In morning I rebooted server and found that Parity Disk was unassigned... shut server down. After work I rebooted server, changed the parity disk from unassigned to the appropriate disk and found that the disk was listed as new. I've attached the latest Syslog but, am assuming the data is not relevant. Should I start the array and allow a Parity-Sync? For drives, I have 3 3TB WD red's .

 

Thanks for any suggestions,

Jim B

SysLog9-3.zip

Two more bits of information:

 

1) Running 5.0-rc12a

 

2) Ran a Long SELF Test, on the red balled drive, completed without error.

 

I'm wondering if I can start parity sync and why this may have occurred, is there a chance that the drive is OK?

 

Post SMART report.

As most people will tell you.. The red ball means a write failure occurred.

 

If you know why (cable was unplugged, hot-swap ejected), then you are safe to rebuild it content of the drive (stop the array, unassign the drive, start array, stop array, reassign drive, start array and let it rebuild).

 

If you don't know why the drive red-balled, assume it's bad.

 

No matter what, if your array has ben running with that drive red-balled, unraid won't trust it, so you'll have to rebuild parity regardless. A SMART report would also help the community tell you if the drive is OK.

 

If you are unsure about the status of the drive, remove it from the array, preclear it, and see what comes back. If it pre-clears ok, I'd say's it's OK, but that's just me, many guys here would say otherwise and tell you to RMA it. My attitude is that the pre-clear will either cook it or prove it's OK. If the pre-clear kills it, RMA it.

 

Either way, remember, your array is NOT protected while this drive is red balled.

 

Good luck!

 

 

 

I'm attaching the results of The SMART report, thanks for your suggestions and for taking a look.

smart.txt

Looks like a bunch of errors to me... Someone with more SMART experience wanna chime in?

I only see the UMDA errors on the report. If I remember correctly I believe this could indicate a problem with communication to the drive meaning either that there is interference on that particular Sata cable or that the cable itself is bad or not seated correctly.  I would replace the cable if a spare one was around or at least reroute it in the case (to relieve the interference) and reseat both ends....  I would definitely preclear the drive too just to be sure of its condition...

Thanks for the advice and information

I've replaced the cables, will preclear and then add it back into the array, see if it passes through parity check.

 

Really appreciate the help