[6.4.0] Failed drive (Solved)

[ajgriglak]

Hey guys, just noticed the red X next to one of my drives.  I have not rebooted.  Attached is the diagnostic report.  Please let me know of any other info needed.

 

Thanks in advance!

tower-diagnostics-20180125-1057.zip

[JorgeB]

Disk looks fine, not really a good idea to use USB disks as array disks, if you don't have more SATA ports strongly recommend you get an HBA.

 

Jan 25 01:31:59 Tower kernel: usb 8-2: USB disconnect, device number 3

 

[ajgriglak]

Thanks, Johnnie.  Appreciate the quick response.  The USBs have been working fine for about a year, but I hear ya.  I'm trying to keep this as cheeeeeap as possible.    

 

So, I'm thinking I should power everything down and check the cabling as a next step?

[trurl]

15 minutes ago, ajgriglak said:

Hey guys, just noticed the red X next to one of my drives. ...

If you setup Notifications, you won't have to "just notice" these things. unRAID will notify you.

 

unRAID will continue to let you access files on a disabled drive because it emulates its data from parity and all the other drives.

 

You don't want to wait until you "just notice" you can no longer access files because yet another drive has a problem. Multiple disks with problems are much more likely to lead to data loss. unRAID requires parity plus all other disks to recover the data from a missing or disabled disk.

[trurl]

4 minutes ago, ajgriglak said:

I'm trying to keep this as cheeeeeap as possible.    

 

A better way to keep it cheap, and at the same time make it more reliable and perform much better, would be to use fewer and larger disks. Maybe something to consider for the future.

[trurl]

Another problem with your setup using USB drives is they aren't giving SMART reports so we can't tell how likely any of them are to cause problems when you really need them, such as to rebuild the data from a missing disk. Could be some of them are nearly failing already.

 

Hope you have good backups of any critical and irreplaceable files.

[ajgriglak]

Thanks, Trurl:  Notifications is one of those things that's on my 'to-do' list...  

 

And, I will definitely look into rearranging my setup to use fewer disks, I kind of just put together with what I had laying around at that time and have been adding on as needed.

 

I appreciate the support!

[pwm]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Another problem with your setup using USB drives is they aren't giving SMART reports so we can't tell how likely any of them are to cause problems when you really need them, such as to rebuild the data from a missing disk. Could be some of them are nearly failing already.

 

Hope you have good backups of any critical and irreplaceable files.

Quite a lot of USB enclosures supplies SMART - but smartctl often needs a bit of help knowing how to access the information.

 

But for a general solution, unRAID would need suitable input fields to specify this information.

[JorgeB]

In this case the external drives do supply SMART info, the Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controller he's using with some internal disks does not.

[trurl]

28 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

In this case the external drives do supply SMART info, the Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controller he's using with some internal disks does not.

 

So treading on thin ice in even more ways.

 

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Hope you have good backups of any critical and irreplaceable files.

 

[ajgriglak]

OK, I hear all the recommendations and what I'm doing wrong.... 

 

I powered everything down and reset all the cables.  Restarted and re-enabled the drive.  The Data-Rebuild is in progress, and everything looks great.  It will take some time to finish the rebuild, but I'm going to mark this [RESOLVED].

 

Thanks again!