Help with proceeding after 2 drive failure & possible failing cache drive

[Homerr]

I'm mostly back up and running.  After setting up unRAID a couple of years ago I've been mostly hands-off except to check it weekly.  Last Thursday I had one drive fail, Disk 9 which was a Seagate 2tb that was showing thousands of errors, I didn't do anything at the time (had to go to work).  Later that day after work I had Disk 4 showing errors also, an ancient Maxtor 500gb.  Both showed lots of issues in SMART so I stopped the array, shut down, and pulled those two drives out.  I ordered two 4tb WD drives and set one to Preclear in the unRAID server.  I hooked the other 4tb WD and 2tb Seagate up to my PC and used the freezer trick to get past the clicking(!) on boot of the Seagate; the same with the Maxtor but it had no issues being found; I was able to get all the data off both drives using a live USB install of Ubuntu.

 

The precleared 4tb WD was assigned to be Disk 9 and an array rebuild was triggered when the array was started, I let that finish.  Then, with the other 4tb WD connect to my PC I copied all the data I recovered from the Seagate & Maxtor to unRAID over the LAN (note: there were no 'do you want to replace the existing files' type messages, seeming to indicate this was all original data, i.e. the only copy other than backups - so  the first array rebuild seemed to have just added the first 4tb WD drive and nothing was 'rebuilt').  On one of my logins here to check how it was going I noticed a red error notification box saying the Cache drive under Cache Devices had issues.  The data transfer was almost complete so I let it finish, then invoked the Mover.  Not too happy with Seagate drives at this point, and I add this 4tb WD I'm using for data transfer as Parity 2 since the other Parity is a 4tb Seagate, I'd like more data security at this point.  (Important stuff is backed up to Crashplan, but trying to alleviate the PITA factor.)  So another rebuild after installing this Parity 2 disk and another warning about the Cache drive, that's where things are this morning.

 

(Looking at the FAQ I'm a little hazy on some of the terms like 'cache drive' and 'cache pool', are these just drives that would show up under Main as Array Devices - and not to do with  Cache Devices on Main?  The uncertainty of some of this, well I just don't want to screw anything up.)

 

Questions / steps forward:

1.  The red X next to Disk 4 under Array Devices notes 'Device is missing (disabled), contents emulated'.  Do I stop the array, unassign Disk 12 for example, and then assign that 3tb WD to be Disk 4?  Is it going to bark at me?  Will this invoke an array rebuild?

 

2.  The Cache drive under Cache Devices, I've lost confidence in it as it seems it is on it's way to failing.  Is  this true? 

 

I've attached it's SMART info, but running the extended self-test showed 10% progress and then 'Errors occurred - Check SMART report', but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for.  The FAQ talks about replacing a Cache drive, but not removing it as far as I can tell.  Can I remove the Cache?  Or would it be best to remove one of my 2tb drives (i.e. Disk 11) from the Array and reassign it as Cache?

 

3.  Older drives, I plan on removing Disks 2, 5, and 6.  I understand this will be remove, rebuild, repeat.

 

Edit:  I had to shut down the server since I was working on my house between this morning between the latest array rebuild and posting this, in case seeing 'finding o errors' is significant in this first pic attached.

 

 

unraid-smart-20180210-1328 2tb Seagate Cache drive.zip

[JorgeB]

5 minutes ago, Homerr said:

1.  The red X next to Disk 4 under Array Devices notes 'Device is missing (disabled), contents emulated'.  Do I stop the array, unassign Disk 12 for example, and then assign that 3tb WD to be Disk 4?  Is it going to bark at me?  Will this invoke an array rebuild?

You can't assign an existing array disk to rebuild disk4, you need a new disk.

 

6 minutes ago, Homerr said:

2.  The Cache drive under Cache Devices, I've lost confidence in it as it seems it is on it's way to failing.  Is  this true? 

Yes

[trurl]

Basically your only options with regard to disk4 is to rebuild it to a disk not already in the array, or set a New Config without it and resync (rebuild) parity instead.

 

5 minutes ago, Homerr said:

After setting up unRAID a couple of years ago I've been mostly hands-off except to check it weekly.

Do you have Notifications setup?

[Homerr]

I did have notifications set up, just realizing I changed my email password in December and forgot to change it here.