flash drive failed

[Phorte]

hi all,

 

had my first scare last night! my unRAID system has only been up and running now for less than a week (ASUS M4A785T-M, Athlon X2 245, 2GB DDR3-1333). 1x 1TB parity and 2x 1TB data disks (only running Basic for now). all running off a brand new Kingston G2 USB drive as recommended in the wiki.

 

successfuly installed SABnzbd on Sunday day. last night, i noticed SABnzbd wasn't refreshing correctly. gave the system a reboot and it failed to recognise a system disk. i check the USB stick and it was no longer readable!!

 

so i formated and reinstalled unRAID onto the usb stick, plugged it in and my biggest scare was assigning which disks were for data and which was for parity again seeing as they were all 1TB disks. luckily, i got them right and the shares were picked up automatically *phew* not much involved in setting everything back up again! in fact, im much more confident in doing it the second time round, including SABnzbd.

 

but because of this, i am now doing the following preventative measures:

• 
   
  
• keeping a screenshot of the main screen so i know which disk is set to parity and which is set to data, as they're all WD disks, the only difference were the serial numbers. i almost got it wrong! eek
  
• keeping a copy of my /boot/config/ folder everytime i make a change
  

 

i had to unfortunately rebuild my parity drive though because i didnt check the faq on how to tell unRAID that i'm confident the parity drive is still ok. i'll definitely do this if the USB drive fails next time.

 

i tell you what, it was a major scare. i still don't know why the USB drive became unreadable and i had to format. its brand new - hopefully it's not a sign of the drive dying anytime soon. if so, good thing i haven't bought a license yet!

 

thought i'd share my story with you all. thanks again for such a great piece of tech and also a great community!

 

cheers,

linh

[Rajahal]

Mixing up your parity and data disks is indeed a scary situation.  Keeping a backup copy of a screenshot of the 'main' page (or the devices page) is the recommended solution, just keep it somewhere besides the unRAID server (learned that bit the hard way, hehe).

 

However, unRAID does throw up at least one bit of warning if you happen to assign your parity/data drives to the wrong slots.  When you click back over to the main page, unRAID should say 'invalid configuration' and at least two of the disks should have two disks/serial numbers listed (the one you have assigned first/on top, and the one unRAID remembers second/on bottom).  If you press 'Start' at this point, then you are S.O.L., as one of your data disks will be overwritten with parity info.  But if you pay attention and notice the warnings unRAID is giving you, you shouldn't have a problem.  Just click back over to the devices page and assign the disks correctly.  When the disk assignments match up with what unRAID remembers, then the message on the main page should read 'valid configuration' and only one disk/serial number should be listed for each drive slot.  At this point it is safe to click the 'Start' button.  The array should start immediately, since no parity build/check should be necessary.

[Phorte]

great! cheers for the clarification

 

well, it's happened again. my two week old kingston g2 4gb stick has died again! thats twice in two weeks.

 

funny you should mention keeping the screenshots somewhere besides the unRAID server after being so proud of myself at making backups and screenshots, i actually kept htem on the server. went out and bought a new usb stick (this time, a toshiba 8gb because they didn't have any other 4gb's in stock (eg. i wanted sandisk)). rebuilt the server again.

 

running well again. i guess the kingston usb drive i got was just from a faulty batch same symptoms again. stopped responding and failed to boot. plugged it into another machine and it comes up as unrecognised.

 

finding a usb drive that works flawlessly is my first step that im trying to overcome before i take the plunge in purchasing a license (still running basic here as i only have 3 attached drives). i'll see how this new toshiba drive functions for a good month before i start to increase the size of my unraid server

[Kode]

I created a spreadsheet on google docs so i know what each drive is and its position, it currently looks like this:

 

Position      Size S/N                      Manufacturor   Model   SATA Port

Parity     1.5TB S1 UVJ1 LZ400890 Samsung         HD153WI SATA5

Cache        300GB      V601XN0G              Maxter                       SATA6

Data 1      1.5TB S1 UVJ1 LZ302796 Samsung         HD153WI SATA1

Data 2      1.5TB S1 UVJ1 LZ302800 Samsung         HD153WI SATA2

Data 3      1TB          S13PJ 1KQ709578  Samsung         HD103UG SATA3

Data 3      1TB          S13PJ1KQ709577 Samsung         HD103UG SATA4

 

[xamindar]

A note about that Kingston G2 micro SD card USB reader. I got one of those with a micro SD card I purchased. The reader gets REALLY hot when plugged into the usb port for a while. I only use it for short periods at a time. It seems like a few micro usb drives I have used get really hot, just the way these small things are? So I would assume it just ran hot until something on it burned out.