Should I Be Performing a Regular Parity Check?


Cakey

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(2 x 4TB drives, 1 x 4TB parity, 1 x SSD cache, used as plex server and file store only, with some files (photos) auto backed up to the cloud)

 

Hey All,

 

As in the title, Im not sure if I should be running a parity check as regular maintenance? I had thought that it was something you should only do when adding hardware to the array, so the last one I ran was a year ago when I built the box. Oops?

 

I guess that this is a very basic piece of maintenance that Im missing. Is there any other process that I should be running on a monthly schedule? (I have scheduled TRIM type maintenance running on the SSD, at least I remembered that!)

 

Edit to add: Software is all kept up to date in a timely fashion :)

Edited by Cakey
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Monthly is a good choice.  Doing a parity check verifies that all of  the disks can be read and has often detected minor issues which can be easily corrected before they become major ones which might result in data loss.  (Think of it like finding high blood pressure during a routine physical as opposed to a heart attack!)

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  • 1 year later...

3x 3TB Data drives 

1x 3TB Parity Disc

1x 500GB Cache Drive

Running 4 dockers (Plex, Resilio Sync, Transmission BT client, Unifi-Controller.

Resilio sync the most important data to another Unraid server at another location in case something happens to this location...

 

Have had 3 disk crashes so far.. No problem to resync everything after putting in a new disk.

 

I run checks every 2 or 3 months.. Usually 3 months in between.

 

Age of discs:

Parity:  3y 5m

Data1: 2y 1m

Data2: 7m 26d

Data3: 6y 1m 15d  (I guess this is the next one to give up soon..)

Cache: 1y 3m 20d

 

 

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