wk20a Posted October 20, 2015 Posted October 20, 2015 I just noticed that my drive was showing a red ball and went ahead and pulled the syslog and smart report. I'm hoping that someone here can help me interpret the results. My natural assumption is that the drive has failed, it's one of the older drives in my setup. I currently don't have a cache drive so if I were to replace this with a cache drive, how does it handle the data that is sitting on it? smart.txt syslog.txt
Helmonder Posted October 20, 2015 Posted October 20, 2015 The cache drive has nothing to do with rebuilding a drive... Are you confusing a parity drive maybe ? If you are using parity then removing this drive and inserting a new one will rebuild it with the same data. If you are not using a parity drive then removing the drive will remove your data so you need to make sure to copy it somewhere else before.. Looking at your smart report I do not see big things.. It is best to monitor the drives values.. If they change / increase (in the error department) then that is a reason to replace the drive, if these values remain stable that is not immediately necessary (unless you want to replace it based on age).
trurl Posted October 20, 2015 Posted October 20, 2015 What do I do if I get a red ball next to a hard disk? Also, you aren't running a current version of unRAID. You should at least upgrade to 5.0.6. You will get better support that way.
wk20a Posted October 20, 2015 Author Posted October 20, 2015 The cache drive has nothing to do with rebuilding a drive... Are you confusing a parity drive maybe ? If you are using parity then removing this drive and inserting a new one will rebuild it with the same data. If you are not using a parity drive then removing the drive will remove your data so you need to make sure to copy it somewhere else before.. Looking at your smart report I do not see big things.. It is best to monitor the drives values.. If they change / increase (in the error department) then that is a reason to replace the drive, if these values remain stable that is not immediately necessary (unless you want to replace it based on age). Thanks for the help! I wasn't sure if I was reading the smart report right, at first I though it looked like it was showing errors and I thought the drive was toast. If this is correct, then I assume it is fine just to leave the drive and continue to run the server with the red ball next to the drive? I do have a parity drive.
trurl Posted October 20, 2015 Posted October 20, 2015 The cache drive has nothing to do with rebuilding a drive... Are you confusing a parity drive maybe ? If you are using parity then removing this drive and inserting a new one will rebuild it with the same data. If you are not using a parity drive then removing the drive will remove your data so you need to make sure to copy it somewhere else before.. Looking at your smart report I do not see big things.. It is best to monitor the drives values.. If they change / increase (in the error department) then that is a reason to replace the drive, if these values remain stable that is not immediately necessary (unless you want to replace it based on age). Thanks for the help! I wasn't sure if I was reading the smart report right, at first I though it looked like it was showing errors and I thought the drive was toast. If this is correct, then I assume it is fine just to leave the drive and continue to run the server with the red ball next to the drive? I do have a parity drive. No! It is not fine to run with a red ball. unRAID disables (red balls) a drive when a write to it fails. You must rebuild the drive. unRAID will not actually use a drive with a red ball. Instead, it is emulating the drive. When an attempt is made to read a disabled drive, unRAID doesn't read the drive. It gets the drives data by reading all the other drives plus the parity drive, and then calculates the drives data. Also, when an attempt is made to write to a disabled drive, unRAID updates the parity drive as if the drive had been written, but the drive is not actually written to. This is another reason you must rebuild the drive. It doesn't actually contain any of the writes that were made to the drive after it was disabled. Also, you have no protection to any of your other drives until this drive is rebuilt. If you get multiple drives redballed, then you will lose all of the data on the redballed drives. Parity can only rebuild a single drive if all the other drives are good. Did you read the wiki link I gave?
trurl Posted October 20, 2015 Posted October 20, 2015 Also, see this wiki about how parity works. It's really pretty simple and if you understand it, it will go a long way to making a lot more sense of unRAID and help keep you from making mistakes that will cost you your data.
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.