Insanean Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 Basic setup: 2 brand new 4tb WD Red drives as data disks setup with no current parity Drive server up and running; transferred data from an external 4tb wd MyBook usb 3.0 drive onto server Shucked external drive (Which turned out to be a non white label WD Green) and put into server to use as a parity drive Problem: error; disk in parity slot is not the biggest question: Why is UnRaid saying a 4tb external drive is smaller than the 4tb data drives I'm currently using? Is this a funky partition problem? How do I get UnRaid to make the former external drive to work as a parity drive? New to UnRaid and would love any help. Thanks in advance! Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete diagnostics zip file to your NEXT post. Quote Link to comment
Squid Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 19 minutes ago, Insanean said: Why is UnRaid saying a 4tb external drive is smaller than the 4tb data drives I'm currently using? Because for reasons known unto themselves sometime manufacturers put less sectors onto an external drive. Since you've got no parity currently, your easy solution is to copy the files from one of the data drives to the shucked drive, and then make the original data drive the parity. 1 Quote Link to comment
Insanean Posted January 31, 2020 Author Share Posted January 31, 2020 (edited) 11 hours ago, Squid said: Since you've got no parity currently, your easy solution is to copy the files from one of the data drives to the shucked drive, and then make the original data drive the parity. I hadn't thought of that. Forgive my noobness, but how do I safely do that. To be honest I'm kinda sketched out about using the "not quite" 4tb drive. Why does it have fewer sectors? Does WD do this to drives that don't pass QC by partitioning off or somehow disabling defective sectors? I was simply hoping to use a drive I had lying around. I may just buy another new one. Edited January 31, 2020 by Insanean Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 There isn't much to worry about as far as safety is concerned since you already have no redundancy. To copy the data from an array disk to that "smaller" disk will require a few steps with a (not very big) learning curve. We can lead you through that if you want. Simplest is going to be Unassigned Devices and UD+ to format that disk so it can be used in the array, then Midnight Commander to copy the data to the UD, then New Config to get it into the array and parity built on the other disk. I say simplest because Midnight Commander is builtin, but many prefer to use Krusader docker for the copy part of that so that would be another thing to setup. You might google Midnight Commander to see if that is something you feel you can use. Even simpler would be to do the copy over the network by making a round trip from the server to your PC and then back again but that would be somewhat slower. Or, if money is not a huge issue, you could just get an "internal" HDD for parity, and add that shucked drive to a new data slot. Quote Link to comment
Insanean Posted January 31, 2020 Author Share Posted January 31, 2020 Thanks for all the options. I do have UD+ already installed since I already tried deleting the partitions and reformatting the problem drive thinking there was partition problem. I'm leaning toward krusader based on a quick search of the 2 file management utilities you mentioned since it has a GUI and I'd rather not get into command line operations, I don't trust myself enough for that yet. Going to my PC isn't an option as it does not have enough storage. That's one of the reasons I built the server in the first place. I'll do some more research, maybe watch some YouTube vids on the matter and let you how I make out. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! Quote Link to comment
Insanean Posted January 31, 2020 Author Share Posted January 31, 2020 Welp, interesting development. After doing some reading and seeing if I actually could eek out enough space to backup the server onto my PC, I discovered that one of my two RAID 0 drives is failing with uncorrectable errors (timing couldn't be worse) . In the interest of getting the data off the array ASAP (I have no idea how long it's been like this) before loosing the whole thing (the bulk of my game library) I'm putting the shucked drive in my PC. I'll have to get another new drive to use as parity. I feel better about leaving a brand new server without parity for a few days than hoping a failing drive will last until I get a replacement. Thanks for the help though. In any event I learned a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise. Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted January 31, 2020 Share Posted January 31, 2020 4 hours ago, Insanean said: Going to my PC isn't an option as it does not have enough storage. That isn't exactly what I meant. What I had in mind is copying over the network from a shared UD on the server to a user share or shared disk on the server. Not actually copying it to your PC and then back to your server. The PC would still be involved in between but would not actually store any of the data. 2 hours ago, Insanean said: I'll have to get another new drive to use as parity. 👍 Quote Link to comment
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