Identifying and Replacing a Faulty Drive in Unraid

The process of replacing a faulty drive in Unraid is straightforward, but requires some technical expertise. The first step is to shut down the array and identify the faulty drive. In this case, one of the drives had failed due to a hardware issue, causing it to stop working on its own.

To access the faulty drive, the system admin had to remove the screws that held it in place, allowing them to take it out of the enclosure. This was necessary because the drive's internal casing prevented direct access to the faulty component. The admin then removed the old drive and set it aside for proper disposal.

The new drive was labeled with blue tape to indicate its status as a "bad" or "lazy" drive, due to the fact that it checked out before being replaced. The serial number on the new drive was noted as Za21D, which would be used to keep track of its identity in Unraid.

Rebuilding the Array: A Simple Process

Once the old drive was removed and the new one installed, the system admin needed to rebuild the array. This process involves copying data from the other drives in the array to the newly added drive. However, since the faulty drive was still connected to the system, it couldn't be used during this process.

To bypass this issue, the admin had to shut down the array and power cycle the system before attempting to rebuild it. The UPS on the rack provided a safe and stable power source, which was essential for uninterrupted data transfer.

Monitoring the Rebuild Process

During the rebuild process, Unraid displays a GUI that allows the admin to monitor its progress. In this case, the rebuilt array showed a resolution that was different from the previous version, suggesting that the new drive had upgraded the system's capabilities.

The admin noticed that the rebuilt array displayed "Disc Four Not Installed" and took note of this for future reference. The final step involved clicking on the "Stop Replacement Disk Installed" option to complete the process. However, since the faulty drive was still connected to the system, it couldn't be powered down immediately. Instead, the admin had to shut down the array again to ensure that the system was stable before proceeding.

The Importance of Unraid

Unraid's simplicity and ease of use make it an attractive choice for small teams or individuals with limited technical expertise. The system's ability to expand and rebuild the array easily, as demonstrated in this example, makes it well-suited for environments where disk space needs to be added or replaced frequently.

By using Unraid, administrators can avoid complex RAID configurations and focus on more important tasks. In this case, replacing a faulty drive was a straightforward process that required minimal technical expertise. The system's ability to self-heal and adapt to changing circumstances makes it an excellent choice for those who value simplicity and reliability in their storage solutions.

Conclusion

Replacing a faulty drive in Unraid is a relatively simple process that requires minimal technical expertise. By using the system's built-in features, such as its GUI and power cycling capabilities, administrators can easily identify and replace faulty drives without disrupting the array's operations. Unraid's ease of use and expandability make it an excellent choice for those who need reliable and efficient storage solutions.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe got a drive failure folks you think i would have fixed this while i built the server but no it was another video opportunity get your next gaming pc from build redux compare pricing to buying the parts yourself and stop overpaying pick your starting budget see your estimated gaming performance and then see your pc based on your choices plus redux offers a growing support hub to answer all your questions and it's backed by a two-year parts and labor warranty so you're covered pick your budget pick your games and get build redux you're going to hear a lot of positive things about unraid in this video and i'm here to tell you right now this is not sponsored in any way whatsoever um unraid has never paid us anything they did give us this key about three years ago to use and besides that everything we're about to say regarding unrate and its use and stuff we're going to show right now is 100 independent from the brand so i just want to make that clear but people were like this is a determinate ad it's not because what we're going to show you is the one of the reasons why we chose unraid now i went with unraid when i was talking about service solutions back in 2019 was linus remember when linus was kind of going on tour giving everyone servers linux basically was like you're smart enough to build your own here's an unrate key i swear to god that's how it went so anyway uh yeah one of the things that we loved about the idea of unraid is the fact that it can seamlessly build uh unraid or unconnect a drive from the array and you'll never know there's a problem unless you load up the gui and then see that there's a problem with the drives so if a drive fails the way we're set up here is we have eight drive we have eight drives total two drives are for redundancy six drives are actual storage capacity that we're using and those six drives are are in an unraid array so if a drive fails it will just take that drive offline rebuild the array redistribute the data from the redundancy drives and then you're running without ever noticing anything ever happened which is the only reason we even know this happened this bad drive right here disc four with the serial number showing is the fact that phil loaded up the gui to just i remember why why did you load up the gui when we were shutting it down to get ready to build it yeah cause he he logged in remote to shut it down he's like oh we got a red x on a drive so it has completely taken that drive uh offline now the only reason we didn't know is because we don't have notifications of the drive health or the unraid health setup otherwise it would have started pinging you like hey drive4 has a problem drive4 has a problem hey and if you're not taking care of it it'll just continue to annoy you we have 10 terabyte iron wolf pro drives in here we have two left that we were sent because we have eight in here two ten total we have i think a couple that have already come out of fields right because he has somebody sitting in his actual edit rig as well so he'll edit local and then when he's done he'll uh he'll ingest everything into his system then when he's done he'll move everything over to the to the server and keep it off his drive um so some of these are sitting inside of his his system now we've got something like what 52 terabytes or yeah so we've used 22 point or 27.8 terabytes with 32.2 free and this is still we've held on to so much garbage like really old project files we don't really need to keep the raw footage just the final exports is fine um so we can actually clear a lot of space off of here what we're doing today is we're showing you now how we're going to fix this which is kind of nice nice nice i was gonna say neat and nice at the same time so it's very nice disc four it's also showing us the serial number as you can see right here because each drive especially when it comes to smart reports things temperature as you see the temps our drives are staying very cool i don't know why this one's one c hotter so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the little down arrow and i'm going to turn off each one of these drives you can hear them clicking away and turning off so what i'm gonna do right now is i'm gonna spin that drive up there we go now i'm gonna see which drive turns on oh it's not the bottom one i can feel it it's this drive right here it's p3 in stack two so it's it's p3-2 it's this drive right here and when i'm touching it i'm feeling like it's trying to spin up it's fun up but when it first turned spun up it was going very slow all right so i'm gonna spin this down again oh yeah as soon as i clicked down i felt it like on the drive yep and it is now off we'll shut down the array and with unraid being the awesome utility that it is i should be able to just put this drive in its place and it will automatically rebuild the raid and add this back to the stack so let's do that echo i bet you i bet i bet you thought i was gonna forgot to forgot today's code but you're right i did that's why it looks so different suddenly today's code is is this worldwide yes it is so we stopped the array now uh and now we go to disk four here should come down and what say no device so we're removing that drive from the array essentially so it's not gonna like now if i take it off and rebuild it what we should end up seeing is a a new device type of deal that we can then bring online and add to our array so we can't just shut it down take the drive out put a new one in it's i mean theoretically we could but we're still gonna do this the proper way of actually removing it from the array so now that it says no device now we can come over here and shut down the server power down okay now we can remove that drive so it was p3 is what i said right yeah it was p3 on stack two now because i in my infinite wisdom went through and like fully cable managed all the wires attached to the front of the cage because i could take the cage screws out push down the tabs and push the cages out the front but i would have to unplug and remove all the drives so i find it actually easier in this particular system for me to just remo remove the four screws on the side holding in the aio and i do you guys wanna know why i went with aio it's not because i'm just some water cooling snob i legitimately do not have an air cooler that will clear the lid i tried two different coolers um a vitru cooler and one of my smaller be quiet coolers and they will not clear the lid so i just stuck with the aio because it fits here it really is nothing any more complicated than that i've thought about ordering one of the low profile coolers because in terms of ultimate reliability i really want as many or as few moving parts as possible so i'll probably revisit that in the future the only problem is to do that i'll have to take the motherboard back out because to reach the rear bracket under the motherboard there's no hole there and the bottom side of this chassis doesn't come off to allow access to both sides of it so i'll have to take it all out to do that and i really want to do that so anyway so now i can do this and where i taped my ssd was not doing me any favors i just want to point that out that that was stupid of me to do that it's right here taped to the wall and i can't slide the cooler where i need to to clear it but i can bend it because it's steel not the drive but the all right so here's our bad drive we'll set this apart or aside in fact i'm going to label it now with blue tape just to remind me this guy is bad so the serial number on here is uh zulu alpha 2 1 david uh david no delta i i'm going back and forth between like the police in the military delta november sierra what's g golf that's right and so we have here za21d and sg so this is the drive right here we shall mark this as lived its best life but also it's the lazy drive because it checked out first okay so p three instead of up yay okay because i couldn't reach where it fell uh okay so we're just putting it back together now and we'll take you through the reverse now when we when we rebuild the array it's going to have to copy a lot of data so it's important to note that while it's doing that um it's going to need to be uninterrupted like uninterrupted power during all that in fact i have a ups on my rack and it'd be even best to have that ups plugged into it because it can take hours for it to be complete so what we're going to do is we're going to get to the points where we show you how to get it rebuilding but we're not going to actually start the rebuild process because right now nothing's changed it still has a drive that was that removed itself so we put a new drive in it will see it but it's still not using it until we rebuild the array so it actually copies data to it the nice thing about this too is if we wanted to have a a monitor always connected to this on the server we could on the rack we could but i'm not going to do that because filled this remote's into it but we can load a gui mode on here though is it such a different resolution suddenly you notice that it filled the screen on the last boot and this time it's just okay whatever we also think it's funny that it basically loads what looks like a windows 98 like gui and it has firefox as the the browser for it yeah it's weird yeah it's a totally different resolution it's like actually native press or actually weird i don't know i don't know maybe we just upgraded our resolution with that drive that drive was holding back the res i don't know here we go look at that see it says disc four not installed so we can come over here we have to stop the uh yes so we need to stop the array first because you can't make any changes to it while it's active and being used so once it spins down all the drives there we go we can now click down here and say there it's now assigned and you see it's blue that means it's assigned but it's not a part of the array so we would have to rebuild the array but we are not going to do that and this is it right here see stop replacement disk installed that would say start and that's what would start it but we're not going to do that yet we're gonna actually have to say power down because we don't want to have this sitting here now on this for five hours or however long it's gonna take so anyway as you can see this is why we use unraid because it's extremely simple um regular raid setups i mean they not to say there's anything wrong with them they're not it's just when it comes to ease of use maintenance and redeploy for the size that we are in a small team this is what made the most sense for us like i said once again not a sponsor they did not sponsor this video in any way um this is just what we've been using and it works and the nice thing is when we're ready and we want to add four more drives to this and expand it it'll be just as easy as you saw with adding potential another controller card having it controlling those four drives having it be recognized and unraid assigning them and redeploying and re building the array so there you go guys short easy video of how easily we were able to identify replace and reinstall a new drive with unraid thanks for watching guys as always we will see you in the next one is it lunchtime yet no it's not it is somewhere we have cookies in the fridge\n"