Hi,

I'm building my first unRAID server and I'm not sure if the behavior I am seeing is by design or a bug.

I have 9 drives which aren't currently assigned to an array.

5 are being precleared at the moment and the other 4 still need to be done.

 

In the dashboard view under statistics, only the 5 drives which are currently being precleared have a blue indicator next to the drive and have the green thumbs up next to the SMART status. The other 4 are grey with no thumbs up.

 

If I click on the preclear plugin, do nothing else and then come back to the dashboard, all nine drives have the blue indicator and green thumbs up. However after a few minutes the 4 drives which aren't being precleared return to a grey unassigned status.

 

I assumed the drives should always be blue. Isn't the only way to run a SMART test on a drive (via the GUI) from this screen?

Therefore shouldn't I have that ability before I have started or run a preclear?

 

I've already run SMART tests against all the drives from a telnet session, so it's not an issue, but the behavior seems odd.

Is there something else which I need to do in order to change the status of the unassigned drives?

 

I've attached some pictures to illustrate the issue.

 

Thanks

 

That just means the disk is spun down to save power. When it spins down the status goes grey and the smart report drops off line (because it's spun down.)

Thanks for the response. That certainly explains why it does it.

 

Do you know of anyway to spin up an individual disk (in order to get to the SMART info)?

 

It appears I can fudge it by going to the Main tab and then assigning the drive and unassigning it, but that won't work once the drives have been assigned to the array.

 

Thanks for the response. That certainly explains why it does it.

 

Do you know of anyway to spin up an individual disk (in order to get to the SMART info)?

 

It appears I can fudge it by going to the Main tab and then assigning the drive and unassigning it, but that won't work once the drives have been assigned to the array.

 

Not sure about the unassigned drives actually, but on the main tab the disk should have an up or down pointing arrow next to the status indicator. Clicking that arrow will either spin the disk up or spin the disk down. (This might be true of unassigned disks as well I don't have any right now so I can't look to verify)

Thanks for the response. That certainly explains why it does it.

 

Do you know of anyway to spin up an individual disk (in order to get to the SMART info)?

 

It appears I can fudge it by going to the Main tab and then assigning the drive and unassigning it, but that won't work once the drives have been assigned to the array.

 

Not sure about the unassigned drives actually, but on the main tab the disk should have an up or down pointing arrow next to the status indicator. Clicking that arrow will either spin the disk up or spin the disk down. (This might be true of unassigned disks as well I don't have any right now so I can't look to verify)

 

Unassigned drives also have the spin up/down arrows.

I think I must be going blind, as I can't see any icons with spin up/down arrows.

 

What tab should I be looking at?

 

Dashboard is the only one that I can see which shows the drive information - and there doesn't appear to be any icons on that.

Under Main everything is currently unassigned, so there is no information displayed.

 

Does the array need to be running for them to be displayed?

Your main tab..

I've attached a picture of what my main tab currently looks like.

 

As I'm in the process of preclearing all the drives I haven't assigned any drives to devices, so I assume once that is done the icons, etc will appear.

Yes... no sense in spinning them down while they are preclearing... finish thepreclear, add them to the array, start the array... all will be fine..

I think you are correct, and because your array hasn't been started you don't get the controls for spin up or spin down. (I didn't know it worked that way...)

 

The main takeaway is that this isn't unexpected behavior or a problem really. unRAID is just trying to conserve power by spinning down disks that haven been inactive for a set amount of time. unRAID will spin up the drives automatically when needed and there is a setting you can change to determine the spin down delay, or even set disks to never spin down.

 

When disks are spun down they show up as inactive (usually, in your case they might be unassigned) and you lose the smart / temperature status, since requesting that information would spin up the disk.

 

Thanks once again. Very much appreciated.

I believe that unassigned disks only acquire those little spin up/spin down arrows when they are formatted and mounted (outside the array) using the Unassigned Devices plugin. If they are blank or freshly pre-cleared they are not mounted and so don't have the arrows. That's my (possibly faulty) understanding, anyway.