I have a 9 disk array and one disk is giving me problems. I think it's a broken port on my SATA expansion card.  It might be the disk itself, even though it passes all the smart tests. 

 

To give a little history. I swapped my Unraid system from an Intel 2500k system to a Ryzen 1700 system. Had to get a new PCIe SATA expansion card. When I rebooted the system, everything was fine apart from disk 7 which was listed as missing with a blue warning beside it. I powered down and checked the cables and when I rebooted the disk was listed again but with an orange light beside it saying it was running in emulated mode. (It's only  a 1TB drive)

 

I thought it would be ok to just let it rebuild the drive using parity sync.  When I checked it the next day, it was hung. No response from the server at all. Had to power it off. I blamed the fact that I didn't have the latest Unraid version and that maybe there was some problems with Ryzen. So I updated to 6.7.2 and the server hasn't crashed since then which is good. I tried to do a parity sync again but had to stop it after a few days. The time to completion just kept getting longer and longer. It was barely going at 1 MB/sec. 

 

So, since I happened to have 3 TB free space on the array, I said I would shrink the array. First I was went to use Unbalance to move the contents of the drive. It told me to use Docker safe Permissions. Which I did, but, it got stuck at the faulty disk for hours. I closed it and tried the Unbalance tool again. This time it didn't give any warnings, so I ran it. Left it for a few hours, when I came back it hadn't even moved 100MB of a 25GB file. So I stopped it again. 

 

And that's where I am right now. My question is, well a few 

 

The parity sync was only 50% completed when I stopped it, is the data on the drive gone now? That the only way to get the data back is rebuild the drive from parity?

 

I take it that if I don't copy the data on the drive first, there is no way to remove the drive and shrink the array without losing that data? 

 

I have a powered USB 3 hard drive, 1TB. Could I use that as temporary solution to rebuild disk 7? Then I can move it's contents and shrink the array.

 

 

Just a reply to one of my own questions, the last one. 

 

Yes, you can use a USB 3 drive. I was able to rebuild the drive using parity and now I am using Unbalance to copy the data across. Will shrink the array when that's finished. 

 

Just one more problem left and that's the way the Server crashes if it's left idle for too long. Have seen some solutions for this regarding disabling C-States, changing the power supply idle to typical etc. Will try out a few of them and see how I get on.