If that's the case then it's much easier to create the pool using unraid, delete the pool after creation, and mount the first disk using UD. Feels much safer and easier that way. I agree it's important for others to understand how it works, but if it was working correctly after I mounted the first disk with UD, then I don't see the point of all the multi-steps in your method, using the command line, etc. You can easily add/remove disks using the GUI by re-creating the pool if you need to change anything. So the steps I would recommend are:
- Create the pool using unraid GUI
- Change the balance status in the pool settings to get rid of RAID 1 if you don't need it and reclaim the space
- Stop the array and delete the pool (set the number of disks to "none")
- When you want to use it, mount the first disk using UD.
- If you want to change anything, re-create the pool using the Unraid GUI, with the disks in the same order, and make any addition/deletion you need to the pool, then delete the pool again.
As mentioned, I used the Synology Hybrid RAID or SHR (
https://kb.synology.com/en-uk/DSM/tutor ... d_RAID_SHR) to create my backup volume:
"In the end I decided to go for a single SHR volume over the 24 disks, that gives me protection for 1 disk loss and 72TB effective storage in total. It uses all the storage on all disks, only losing one disk of the largest capacity (so 4 TB in my case) for redundancy/parity. I wouldn’t do this for my main storage, but for a backup NAS I think that’s fine."
I definitely can't recover anything if the Synology dies or if I lose more than one disk, but I really don't care about this because it's a backup. I have all the data on my Unraid Servers, each protected by two parity disks. So I really wanted to maximum storage capacity on the Synology backup, with minimal protection. I would never use SHR for a primary data volume, I'd use RAID 6, but that costs a lot of storage (I'd lose 14TB instead of just 4TB).
For the QNAP with 8x2TB, I went for RAID5, which gives me a bit more than 12TB of usable storage, with 1 disk protection.
I'll email you the logs for the PC that doesn't work when the Unraid VM isn't on, thanks. [EDIT: done!]