February 2, 20179 yr I would do a new config. ...either with parity added (and not check "parity is valid"), let parity sync and enjoy some protection. ...or without parity added (no worse off than with the current invalid parity) and enjoy the speed benefits while moving data around. Right now it seems like you are getting the downsides of both options - slowness and no protection against disk failure.
February 2, 20179 yr Followed the second method. Bypassed the clearing procedure since I already removed what few files remained on the drive overnight. Did a new config, indicated parity was valid, all seems good. Will parity-check once I'm finished moving things around. There is a reason the procedure goes to the trouble to clear the drive instead of just deleting the files on it or formatting it. An empty filesystem is not a clear drive. A clear drive is all zeros. You can remove a drive that is all zeros without invalidating parity since all zeros has no effect on parity. An empty filesystem, which is what you have if you delete all the files, or if you format a drive, is not all zeros. It has filesystem data on it which is how it keeps track of your files. Even an empty filesystem has filesystem data on it which represents an empty top level folder. And deleting files, as you may be aware, does not zero them, it just marks them as no longer used by the filesystem. So in addition to the data that represents the filesystem, there is still all the old data on the disk that is not associated with the filesystem any longer. As everyone else has already said, your parity is invalid.
February 2, 20179 yr Followed the second method. Bypassed the clearing procedure since I already removed what few files remained on the drive overnight. Did a new config, indicated parity was valid, all seems good. Will parity-check once I'm finished moving things around. Parity was absolutely NOT valid !! If you do a parity check now, you'll get a HUGE number of errors ... but it will correct your parity and it will then be valid. It'd actually be faster to do another New Config and do a new parity sync. Why did you think it would still be valid with a DIFFERENT set of disks than it was computed against? Bottom line is you got very lucky => the drive was clearly failing, and with parity disabled you would have had no way to rebuild it or read the emulated contents ... fortunately it "came back" long enough for you to do a parity sync, and then you could read the emulated contents when it finally bit the bullet.
February 3, 20179 yr All good, went through with a parity-check. Found 365,632,561 errors. Hopefully it was a correcting check. Run another check, look for exactly ZERO errors.
February 3, 20179 yr All good, went through with a parity-check. Found 365,632,561 errors. Hopefully it was a correcting check. Run another check, look for exactly ZERO errors. Agree -- as long as you did a correcting check, all it was doing was fixing your parity, which was clearly NOT valid ... but should be now. Run another check to confirm you get NO errors and all will be well
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