How to move cache drive to different slot

[hocky]

Hi,

i just did a (clean) shutdown of my UNRAID 6.5.3 box because i wanted to do some changes on the power cabling.

After restart, it appears as if two slots of the onboard SATA-controller (i´m using a ASRock - Z370 Extreme4 board) have an issue detecting drives. 

The problem is that one of the drives is my cache drive and i am missing data now that was not yet written back to the array.

Since the other SATA-ports are still working, i´d like to plug the cache drive into a different slot.

However, that changes the device name and UNRAID is detecting the cache drive as an unassigned drive.

How do i tell UNRAID that the cache drive has a different device name?

 

Help is very much appreciated.

 

Regards, Thorsten

[hocky]

Hm, nobody?

Or is it too obvious? I didn´t found a clue in the forum or in the FAQ. It´s most likely just a small change in one of the config files. But which one?

[trurl]

Nothing you can edit. You will have to reassign. Might try mounting it UD and back it up first just in case.

[itimpi]

Disk drives are normally recognised by their disk serial number rather than their device Id.   Unless changing the connection changed the way the disk serial number is reported tHere is obviously something else going on here.

[trurl]

I assumed he was talking about the "serial" displayed in the webUI for the disk. There have been cases where certain controllers decide to present that differently than it was on a different controller so unRAID doesn't recognize it as the same disk.

[hocky]

Thanks for the replies.

1 minute ago, itimpi said:

Disk drives are normally recognised by their disk serial number rather than their device Id.

That was actually what i was hoping: that the drive is recognized by UNRAID although it came back in a different slot.

The ASRock MB has 8 ports: 6 of them are tied to one controller, the remaining 2 tied to another. The cache disk is now on the other controller, so that is probably what is preventing UNRAID from recognizing the drive.

22 minutes ago, trurl said:

You will have to reassign. Might try mounting it UD and back it up first just in case.

OK, so you think there´s a chance that UNRAID recognizes it´s a previously used cache drive? 

[trurl]

Just now, hocky said:

Thanks for the replies.

That was actually what i was hoping: that the drive is recognized by UNRAID although it came back in a different slot.

The ASRock MB has 8 ports: 6 of them are tied to one controller, the remaining 2 tied to another. The cache disk is now on the other controller, so that is probably what is preventing UNRAID from recognizing the drive.

OK, so you think there´s a chance that UNRAID recognizes it´s a previously used cache drive? 

 

I prefer to reserve the word "slot" for the actual disk numbers unRAID uses to refer to the disk, such as disk1, disk2, cache, cache2, or parity (which is slot0). I use the word "port" if I am talking about the connection, or the word "bay" if talking about a physical location in the case.

 

To help clear this up for us. With the array stopped, post screenshots showing the cache assignment and the unassigned.

[hocky]

14 minutes ago, trurl said:

I prefer to reserve the word "slot" for the actual disk numbers unRAID uses to refer to the disk

Sorry for confusion. To clarfiy: I moved the disk to a different bay in the storage chassis which is connected to a different SATA-port on the motherboard.

This is how it looks like now:

 

and here with the array stopped:

[trurl]

Try again

 

13 minutes ago, trurl said:

With the array stopped, post screenshots showing the cache assignment and the unassigned.

 

[bonienl]

Changing to a different SATA port on your motherbaord should not change the identification string of the disk and Unraid should use the disk as before.

[trurl]

That does look like a normal identification for that disk.

 

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and post the complete zip.

[hocky]

3 minutes ago, trurl said:

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and post the complete zip.

Voilá

unraid-diagnostics-20180829-1709.zip

[trurl]

Of course the syslog only goes back to last reboot, but I don't see any evidence there or in any of the other diagnostics files that you ever had a cache disk assigned. You even have docker assigned to disk2.

 

20 hours ago, hocky said:

that changes the device name and UNRAID is detecting the cache drive as an unassigned drive.

How do i tell UNRAID that the cache drive has a different device name?

What exactly are you referring to by device name? Do you mean the same thing as the "serial" number that unRAID displays in the Identification column? What was it before?

[hocky]

2 minutes ago, trurl said:

Of course the syslog only goes back to last reboot, but I don't see any evidence there or in any of the other diagnostics files that you ever had a cache disk assigned.

Well, i had. :-) I can even mount the cache drive as an unassigned disk and there i can find the cached data.

3 minutes ago, trurl said:

What exactly are you referring to by device name? Do you mean the same thing as the "serial" number that unRAID displays in the Identification column?

No, i was referring to the /dev/sdd which was different before. But as i learned, UNRAID doesn´t seem to refer to this name anyway.

[trurl]

Well it shouldn't have "lost" the assignment then. How long had you been using it as cache? Had that assignment survived a reboot before, for example?

[hocky]

5 minutes ago, trurl said:

Well it shouldn't have "lost" the assignment then. How long had you been using it as cache? Had that assignment survived a reboot before, for example?

Must be about 3-4 weeks ago when i assigned the SSD as a cache drive. Because i´m still in testing, i rebooted a couple of times since then. I also upgraded RAM on the machine last week or so, so i even switched it completely off at least once.

 

BTW: i´m still testing, the system is not yet in production. So probably it´s the best idea to restart from scratch. However, the purpose of testing is to find issue like this one that shouldn´t appear in production so i´d like to understand the root cause of the problem.

 

Addition: I just did a test moving the parity drive to a different bay/port in the chassis. Same as with the cache drive: it´s listed as an unassigned drive and not recognized as the parity drive.

Is there sth wrong with my system?

[trurl]

14 minutes ago, hocky said:

Addition: I just did a test moving the parity drive to a different bay/port in the chassis. Same as with the cache drive: it´s listed as an unassigned drive and not recognized as the parity drive.

Is there sth wrong with my system?

Your screenshots and diagnostics didn't have a parity drive assigned. Did you make that assignment since those posts?

 

Though I didn't notice anything about flash in diagnostics, the disk assignments are stored on the flash drive. Maybe try putting it in your PC and letting it checkdisk. Also try another USB port, preferably USB2.

 

Also, any disk assignment you make doesn't really take effect until you start the array, so if you just now tried to assign parity but didn't start the assignment really hasn't been made. I suspect this might be the case here since you didn't have time to build parity if this was a new assignment.

[hocky]

6 minutes ago, trurl said:

Your screenshots and diagnostics didn't have a parity drive assigned. Did you make that assignment since those posts?

No, i added the parity drive about the same time i added the cache drive.

The reason why it didn´t show up in the screenshot i posted was because it wasn´t detected by the motherboard´s internal SATA adapter (which is actually the reason the issue start at all: both, the cache and the parity drive were attached to the two internal sata ports i mentioned above. And both ports seem to be dead now, not detecting any drive attached to them)

 

[bonienl]

In that case the GUI will tell "missing device" instead of "unassigned". It remembers previous assignments unless you run a New Configuration command.

[hocky]

1 minute ago, bonienl said:

In that case the GUI will tell "missing device" instead of "unassigned". It remembers previous assignments unless you run a New Configuration command.

Hm, no - it says "unassigned", not "missing" in my case. So probably there was an issue with my config right from the beginning.

 

Update on the issue: In the meantime, i reassigned both the cache drive and the parity drive to the array. The cache drive was recognized right away. Unfortunately, that´s not the case with the parity drive, it´s rebuilding from scratch right now...

[bonienl]

Because you changed an "unassigned" slot to a new disk assignment, Unraid considers this a new device.

In case of your cache device, its contents are recognized and can be instantly reused.

In case of your parity device, Unraid did not have parity before (unassigned), it need to build it a first time.

From now on you should not see anymore the unassigned slots when moving disks to other SATA ports. It should keep on working as before.

In case it doesn't make a new report (with diagnostics)

[hocky]

2 minutes ago, bonienl said:

From now on you should not see anymore the unassigned slots when moving disks to other SATA ports. It should keep on working as before.

I´ll wait until the parity build is done and give it a try moving disks again. I´ll report back in any case.

For now, thanks a lot guys, i learned a lot about the system in this conversation.

[John_M]

2 hours ago, hocky said:

i even switched it completely off at least once.

 

1 hour ago, hocky said:

give it a try moving disks again.

 

Are you moving disks between physical SATA ports without powering down? Hot-plugging disks is a complicated business that needs support at various levels to work reliably. It's much safer and more predictable to power down completely before physically moving disks.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, John_M said:

Are you moving disks between physical SATA ports without powering down? Hot-plugging disks is a complicated business that needs support at various levels to work reliably. It's much safer and more predictable to power down completely before physically moving disks.

I hadn't even thought of that. If he's doing that, especially with the array started, then I would expect exactly what he's getting since unRAID has already mounted everything it thinks it should.

[John_M]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

I hadn't even thought of that.

 

It cropped up in another thread a couple of days ago, otherwise I wouldn't have thought of it either