Spyderturbo007 Posted August 17, 2015 Share Posted August 17, 2015 I had a power outage yesterday and when I brought up my unRAID server, I noticed that drive 2 shows errors. The Parity check ran finding 0 errors. My assumption is that I should just go ahead and replace the drive? I'm currently addressing the issue with Drive 4 not having any free space. Link to comment
JonathanM Posted August 17, 2015 Share Posted August 17, 2015 Syslog and smart report for the drive in question would be helpful. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 18, 2015 Author Share Posted August 18, 2015 I'm thinking the drive is cooked, provided I did the SMART test correctly. I navigated to the unMENU page, then Disk Management and then chose the disk with the errors. I hit the Spin Up button followed by the Short SMART Test button. I waited the 2 minutes it said it would take and then hit the SMART History Report button. The output is attached. Syslog.txt SMART.txt Link to comment
JonathanM Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 I'm thinking the drive is cooked, provided I did the SMART test correctly.Yep. Replace ASAP. Hope your other drives are healthy. You should thoroughly test the new drive before trusting it, the preclear script is good for that. A rebuild candidate doesn't need the clearing part, but the testing part is valuable. After the rebuild is done, do a non-correcting parity check to make sure the rebuild went well. If you don't have good backups of important stuff, now is the time to do it, while the array is still up. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 18, 2015 Author Share Posted August 18, 2015 I can probably copy off the data onto one of the extra drives in my workstation and the remaining 1.8TB I have on the server itself. I'm assuming that would be the best course of action right now? Is there a way to replace the failed drive with one that's larger than my parity drive? I have two 6TB HDDs at home, but my current parity drive is only 3TB. I did some searching and it appears as though you can do what's called a swap-disable, but apparently that's only an option if your drive is "red balled", which mine is not. Link to comment
itimpi Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Is there a way to replace the failed drive with one that's larger than my parity drive? I have two 6TB HDDs at home, but my current parity drive is only 3TB. I did some searching and it appears as though you can do what's called a swap-disable, but apparently that's only an option if your drive is "red balled", which mine is not. You can simulate a red-ball by stopping the array; unassigning the drive; starting the array. The array will now start as unprotected with a 'missing' drive which is equivalent to a red-ball. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 18, 2015 Author Share Posted August 18, 2015 Since I'm copying the data off the failing drive right now, is there an easier way to swap in the 6TB parity drive? Link to comment
itimpi Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Since I'm copying the data off the failing drive right now, is there an easier way to swap in the 6TB parity drive? not if you also have a failed drive and want to keep its contents. If all drives had been fine then it would have been possible to simply do a parity build to the new parity drive but with one already playing up this is unlikely to be successful. EDIT: It occurred to me that once you have copied all the files off the failed drive you have no contents left to keep so could do 'tools->New Config' and assign the drives as you want them to end up (including the new parity drive) and then do a parity build. A good idea to take a screen shot of current assignments before doing this as an reminder of current settings. You will be unprotected until the parity build completes but that is the state you are in at the moment with the failed drive and it avoids the complexity of carrying out the swap-disable process. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 18, 2015 Author Share Posted August 18, 2015 Could you be a little more specific with the New -> Config process? Or perhaps there is an article that I could read on the procedure? I just don't want to screw anything up. Also, is there a way to copy things faster than the standard copy paste? I'm getting a transfer of about 9MB/s and thought maybe there was a way to speed that data transfer up a little. Thanks! Link to comment
itimpi Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Could you be a little more specific with the New -> Config process? Or perhaps there is an article that I could read on the procedure? I just don't want to screw anything up. Do not think there are any articles on this. The New Config option clears all the current drive assignments ready for you to assign the drives again (rather like when you originally set up the array). If a drive already contains a valid unRAID file system when the drive is assigned this will be recognised and the data retained when the array is started after doing the assignments. Note that this is different to adding a drive to an existing parity protected array which clears down a drive. Also, is there a way to copy things faster than the standard copy paste? I'm getting a transfer of about 9MB/s and thought maybe there was a way to speed that data transfer up a little. That sounds a bit slow, but it can depend on your network as all the data has to transfer over the network twice (to and from your PC/Mac). The fastest way is normally to do the copy from a console/telnet session so that all copies are internal to the unRAID server. If you are not familiar with the Linux command line then typing the 'mc' command will bring up the Midnight Commander tool which gives a menu driven method of doing file manipulations. If you decide to go that route and are not sure what to do feel free to ask further questions. Link to comment
trurl Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Could also be read errors slowing things down. Post another syslog. Also, make sure no plugins or other applications or network users are reading or writing to the server until you get it squared. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 19, 2015 Author Share Posted August 19, 2015 Could also be read errors slowing things down. Post another syslog. Also, make sure no plugins or other applications or network users are reading or writing to the server until you get it squared. I think the initial slowness was caused by me moving Music folders containing very small files like album artwork. Once I started moving TV Shows and Movies, thing sped up significantly. Now that everything has been moved to the other drive and the dying drive is empty, what's the best course of action? Can I somehow remove the dead drive from the array and then just yank the parity drive and swap it out with one of the 6TB drives? Link to comment
trurl Posted August 19, 2015 Share Posted August 19, 2015 Moving to v5 subforum. Sounds like you have copied all the data off the drive onto other drives. Is that true? If so, do you really want to rebuild the drive? Especially since you are saying you would need to do swap-disable to do so. If you don't need the data on the drive anymore, then just New Config without it. When you do New Config, it will let you assign all your drives again and you can just leave out the failed drive from the configuration. Then when you start it will rebuild parity. Be very sure you don't accidentally assign a data drive to the parity slot. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 22, 2015 Author Share Posted August 22, 2015 Correct, all data has been moved off the drive and I just got a replacement 3TB drive in the mail. For now, I just want to replace the failed drive with the 3TB drive and I'll deal with a larger parity drive later. Is there a way to replace the failing drive with the new drive? I've never done a replacement before except when I had a disk that had a red ball, whereas this one is green. Link to comment
trurl Posted August 22, 2015 Share Posted August 22, 2015 Correct, all data has been moved off the drive and I just got a replacement 3TB drive in the mail. For now, I just want to replace the failed drive with the 3TB drive and I'll deal with a larger parity drive later. Is there a way to replace the failing drive with the new drive? I've never done a replacement before except when I had a disk that had a red ball, whereas this one is green. If you remove the other drive and put the new one in, then when you boot it will say the disk is missing and it won't start. Then you can assign the new disk to the slot and when you go to start it will tell you that it will rebuild. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 22, 2015 Author Share Posted August 22, 2015 Correct, all data has been moved off the drive and I just got a replacement 3TB drive in the mail. For now, I just want to replace the failed drive with the 3TB drive and I'll deal with a larger parity drive later. Is there a way to replace the failing drive with the new drive? I've never done a replacement before except when I had a disk that had a red ball, whereas this one is green. If you remove the other drive and put the new one in, then when you boot it will say the disk is missing and it won't start. Then you can assign the new disk to the slot and when you go to start it will tell you that it will rebuild. That sounds easy enough. Will the array be available during that time? Also, should I preclear the drive before I swap them? Thanks for helping! Link to comment
trurl Posted August 22, 2015 Share Posted August 22, 2015 Correct, all data has been moved off the drive and I just got a replacement 3TB drive in the mail. For now, I just want to replace the failed drive with the 3TB drive and I'll deal with a larger parity drive later. Is there a way to replace the failing drive with the new drive? I've never done a replacement before except when I had a disk that had a red ball, whereas this one is green. If you remove the other drive and put the new one in, then when you boot it will say the disk is missing and it won't start. Then you can assign the new disk to the slot and when you go to start it will tell you that it will rebuild. That sounds easy enough. Will the array be available during that time? Also, should I preclear the drive before I swap them? Thanks for helping! Yes the array will be available. Note that any use of the array will not affect the results of the rebuild, but it might affect how long it takes, since all of the disks are used during the rebuild. The only time a disk needs to be clear is when you already have valid parity and you are adding it to a new slot. Since a clear disk has no effect on parity, this allows parity to remain valid when the disk is added. A disk used for rebuild does not need to be clear. It will not affect parity since its contents are calculated from parity and the other disks. A disk that will be used for parity also doesn't need to be clear, since parity is going to be rebuilt in that case anyway. Even though these scenarios do not require a clear disk, I and many others always preclear a new disk and recommend others do as well, just to test it. You need to be able to trust every bit of a new disk, since every bit of it will be needed if you have to rebuild any other disk. Link to comment
Spyderturbo007 Posted August 25, 2015 Author Share Posted August 25, 2015 Even though these scenarios do not require a clear disk, I and many others always preclear a new disk and recommend others do as well, just to test it. You need to be able to trust every bit of a new disk, since every bit of it will be needed if you have to rebuild any other disk. Is there a way to remove the offending drive from the array and preclear the new drive while still being able to use the array? The reason I ask is that I'm out of SATA ports and will need the port in use by the damaged drive. I'm assuming I can use the New Config, but that scares me since I'm not 100% sure how I should assign the drives. There is also a very stern warning about losing all your data. Link to comment
trurl Posted August 25, 2015 Share Posted August 25, 2015 Even though these scenarios do not require a clear disk, I and many others always preclear a new disk and recommend others do as well, just to test it. You need to be able to trust every bit of a new disk, since every bit of it will be needed if you have to rebuild any other disk. Is there a way to remove the offending drive from the array and preclear the new drive while still being able to use the array? The reason I ask is that I'm out of SATA ports and will need the port in use by the damaged drive. I'm assuming I can use the New Config, but that scares me since I'm not 100% sure how I should assign the drives. There is also a very stern warning about losing all your data. If you intend to rebuild onto the new disk, then you MUST NOT New Config. Since you are just trying to test the new drive, you can put it in another computer and use the manufacturer's diagnostics which you can probably download from their website. Link to comment
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