So I was trying to download a torrent (while seeding like 5 others) when I noticed my rates just kept gradually falling to 0B upload/download until spiking back up to 1-2MB before falling again. I check my Proxmox SMART test of my drives and then it shows one disk was degraded. When I try to view the overall “disks” tab in Proxmox it just times out and shows an error [communication failure (0)]
So I try to do a zpool scrub tank_name, which started Monday May 4 22:02:21 2026…
While scrubbing the checksum errors on the online repairing disk (wwn-0x5000c5004d033fc1) just keep climbing… I made the degraded disk go offline. Here’s the current status of zpool status tank_name:
root@nova:~# zpool status Orico2tera4
pool: Orico2tera4
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices has experienced an error resulting in data
corruption. Applications may be affected.
action: Restore the file in question if possible. Otherwise restore the
entire pool from backup.
see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-8A
scan: scrub in progress since Mon May 4 22:02:21 2026
3.53G / 378G scanned at 36.9K/s, 3.47G / 378G issued at 36.3K/s
9.61M repaired, 0.92% done, no estimated completion time
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
Orico2tera4 DEGRADED 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-ST2000NM0011_Z1P2D6SC ONLINE 0 13 1
usb-External_USB3.0_DISK01_20170331000C3-0:1 ONLINE 0 0 3 (repairing)
mirror-1 DEGRADED 0 1 0
wwn-0x5000c500357c0b91 OFFLINE 0 0 21
wwn-0x5000c5004d033fc1 ONLINE 0 1 2.00K (repairing)
errors: 49 data errors, use '-v' for a list
I haven’t used these disks for super long, it’s only been about 5 months of my homelab actually being used, and I wasn’t doing constant torrenting until February. The disks are refurbished, 2TB each, and they’re stored in a USB connected drive bay. my usage is pretty low, just 432.80 GB of 4TB (11.13%)
I’ve looked at my snapshots with zfs list -t snapshot, not sure when I should try to restore from a snap, but I’ve never done it before. I’ll make sure to take backups more seriously from now on, don’t be me…
It can run for days and puts additional strain on the hardware.
Check the physical attachment and obvious hardware failures first.
In case the hardware seems fine, try to
zfs sendthe most important data to a safe place.I’ve tried recycling a USB-based 5-bay enclosure (which I previously used in hardware raid mode) for my unraid-based backup and even in that lower criticality use-case it was an absolute showstopper. Its kind of a shame that USB seemingly can’t be used this way. It would make redundant data storage so much more affordable.
You have enough failures on each disk to make me suspect an issue with the usb-connected drive bay. I ran into similar issues with a cheap pci-e sata adapter, where little hiccups and latency in the communication layer would cause zfs to take disks offline randomly. Read, write, and checksum errors would slowly accumulate across all of the disks. Switched that machine to a proper enterprise hba, the issues vanished, and the disks are all healthy 3-4 years later.
+1 to this observation. I run zfs arrays at both home and work and it’s way more likely that your controller is flaking than you have that many simultaneous drive failures.
The unfortunate reality though is that you can’t trust the current copy of this data, even the snapshots, unless the restore passes a scrub post-restore.
As another poster mentioned, I’d suspect the drive bay. Those things aren’t known for being reliable.
yikes!
How often were you running scrub & trim?
