saw the red x icon (Device is disabled, contents emulated.). there is no issues with the drive's logs.. i tried going into the drive and see no problems with smart, so i reseated the drive (after shutting down), and now the smart attributes info and capabilities are not shown, http://i.imgur.com/YFrFZNy.png?1. I have tried connecting to another sata cable as well as port.

 

the array status is also Array is Started, but Parity is invalid.

 

Any idea how can the array start if the drive is not accessible? and what is the meaning of Device is disabled, contents emulated.? I don't wish to break anything so for now I have stopped the array.

tower-diagnostics-20161120-1947.zip

Disk has SMART disable, when it's part of the array unRAID enables it.

 

Turn it on by typing:

 

smartctl -s on /dev/sdb

 

and post new diagnostics.

 

Also, did you by any change grabbed the diagnostics before rebooting? If yes post those also.

Thanks, reenabled it manually, and now its shown. However it is still a red x, not sure why.. i didnt get the previous diagnostics before reboot

tower-diagnostics-20161120-2245.zip

Red X means that a write to that disk failed, so unRAID disable it, without the diagnostics from when it was disable we can't see what happened.

 

SMART look OK, though there are some CRC errors, you may want to replace that SATA cable, then you can rebuild using the same disk, if it happens again grabs the diags before rebooting.

 

To rebuild to the same disk:

-stop array

-unassign that disk, select no device

-start array

-stop array

-re-assign disk

-start array to begin rebuild.

Ah ok thanks, the errors were from previously. The drive is rebuilding now though it seems to be 9 days left (3.5MB/sec lol) .. so any write to the 'failed' drive is actually to the parity drive, hence the word emulated contents?

That's very slow, post new diagnostics.

 

Did you replace the SATA cable?

I turned off torrents and it seems to be alright now, 30+MB/sec. The sata cable has been changed when I did the second restart. So any writes to the drive now will update the parity and rebuild accordingly?

Yes, you can use it normally although it's going to be slower, avoid large writes.

Thank you very much for your help and explanations! Fingers crossed now..

... I turned off torrents and it seems to be alright now, 30+MB/sec.

 

That easily explains the VERY slow performance.  You should NOT use the array at all -- writes or reads -- during parity checks, parity sync, or drive rebuilds.  This will cause a MAJOR degradation of performance.  It "works" ... but it does so VERY slowly.  In fact, a series of operations will take FAR longer to do simultaneously in that scenario than the total time it would take to do them one-at-a-time.

 

It would be good if there's an option to turn off plugins dockers and vm when performing array operations

Most use cache or an unassigned device for those, it's faster and doesn't interfere with the array.