Empty HD SMART Failure - Can I just Pull the Drive and not replace it? (SOLVED)


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Last month when I started to evaluate unRAID for use as my home server, I set it up on an older i3-3245 with 8GB of ram system with a 10TB shucked EasyStore WD drive for parity, and an 8TB shucked EasyStore WD drive as my lone data drive. Along with those, I threw a 256GB SSD drive for cache.

Everything ran great for a month so I went ahead and purchased the license and also decided to replace my existing desktop PC hardware, which allowed me to replace the older unRAID server hardware with an i7-6700 cpu and 16GB of ram.

 

While I had the case open, I happened to have an a WD Red 3TB (about 4 years old) sitting around unused so I added it to the unRAID server.

Within a few days I started getting SMART failures for that drive.

 

Fortunately, there is no data on that drive, so I just disabled it in unRAID. I don't think it's bothering anything as is now that it's disabled but it annoys me to have a red X on my dashboard : ) I was about to physically just pull it out of the case but wanted to check here first:

 

1. Is that safe to do? I do not want to replace it. Eventually I'll get another 8TB drive to add but no need now as I only have about 5GB of data on my server.

2. Attached is the diagnostics. It seems from reading the forums that sometimes these SMART errors are not to be worried about?

unraid-diagnostics-20190727-1317.zip

Edited by mark2741
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No, you need to take further action.   As far as Unraid is concerned you are currently running with one failed drive, so with Single parity you are not protected against another drive failing.   The fact it had no data on it is irrelevant as Unraid requires all none-failed drives to be functioning perfectly to be able to rebuild a failed drive. If you do not intend to replace the drive what I would recommend is:

  • Stop the array
  • Go to Tools->New Config and use the option to keep all current assignments.
  • Go back to the Main tab and set the drive you want to remove to be Unassigned.   Note that removing a drive invalidates current parity.
  • start the array to build parity based on the remaining disks.

When this completes your array will be back in a protected state.

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