Seems my USB drives up and die on me regularly. Logged in a few minutes ago and the banner at the top said something about Notifications not set, which from experience, means the USB drive died.

Won't be able to do anything until after work, but wanted to know what the most recent recommended drives are as on https://wiki.unraid.net/Hardware_Compatibility#USB_Flash_Drives has only EOL'd drives from what I can tell.

 

 

fractal-diagnostics-20190926-1241.zip

I’ve had really good luck with the Kingston DataTraveler SE9.

The main thing is to go for a brand name USB2 drive rather than a USB3 one as they seem to be more reliable and you get negligible performance benefit in Unraid from using USB3.    Heat also seems to be a factor in the likelihood of failure so some people also recommend avoiding the small form factor variants as they more prone to heat related issues although personally I have used Sandisk Cruzer Fit without issues.

Rebuilding parity.

Looks like the USB drive had a filesystem error. Passes disk test on my mac.

 

On the first reboot after testing the drive, I got the following errors:

Logged in and my config directory was empty. Yet, back in the Mac it had files!

 

So I copied the config directory back over from a backup and was able to boot - after assigning data drives.

 

Also, this is a Samsung Flash Drive Fit. The one that failed before that was a Lexar JumpDrive S45. Learned the hard way those tend to fail.

 

Hopefully, this is a one-time thing.

And it happened again while updating some dockers. USB drive has no errors once I pulled it out and disk checked it. Trying a different port.

I had one fail similarly a few weeks ago. Disk Utility never showed any errors on my Mac, but I had a spare flash drive so went ahead and set it up as a boot drive. No more problems.

Using a Lexar FireFly 8GB since end of 2012 - no problems so far.

If you buy a new stick, buy the Kingston DataTraveler SE9 - its recommended.

Edited September 28, 20196 yr by Zonediver