I'd like to address these individually.
I think all of your issues come from you not fully meeting the hardware requirements and poor maintenance.
1. Overheating
Yes, overheating was my initial problem. I attempted to resolve this problem by purchasing a proper server case. I ended up getting this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147164 I honestly don't know what more could be done. How do you cool your drives?
2. Not running smart tests
That's valid. In the four months or so that it ran in the first place, I was still pretty new to FreeNAS, and I didn't know how to do that.
That, too is valid. I understand the benefits of ECC RAM, but I had to make a tradeoff in the cost department. I am not a wealthy software developer, I am a disabled man unable to work. Is ECC a hard-and-fast absolute requirement? If so, why don't you block the install if it is not present? Are there any other users who do not use ECC, or am I the only one?
I went to 8GB. I'm pretty sure that's what was recommended. What am I missing there?
5. Not following the drive replacement procedure
How do you propose I follow that? It requires an imported pool.
And in my opinion with every problem you have had you have only half way fixed it. You never rebuilt your pool so you could have full protection again, you rebuilt your server but without ecc ram and you tried to reuse the same bad drive that FreeNAS said failed.
That drive was eaten by a destructive SeaTools test (which it passed). From my reading, a transient error can be resilvered over. Are you saying that the drive is somehow 'contaminated' by having been eaten by SeaTools? And I very much wanted to rebuild my pool. The point of getting it working was so I could copy data off of it onto an ext volume, then blow it away and rebuild with new drives and the remaining old ones that were healthy. We haven't gotten that far yet. Your comment is like complaining that the cake is too runny before the baker even cooks it.
You keep calling zfs volatile but when I list out the things you have failed to accomplish it's obvious the blame lies else where. I suggest copying your data off in two places if you can.
The data is gone. I can make the pool mount with the commands I was given earlier, but trying to enter a directory causes the system to hang.
Currently it sounds like you are copying it to a zfs format. I would do this as well as another filesystem format like NTFS or ext. This way if zfs turns out to be to complicated you have your backup on a format you can plug into Linux or windows and access your data. Good luck!
I don't know where you got that idea from. I was attempting to copy it to a brand new 3TB drive I had formatted to ext. That, of course, didn't work since I couldn't get into the directories.
The reason I keep calling ZFS volatile is because that is what CyberJock told me.
CyberJock said:
I'd never have let the box sit unpowered for 18 months with no diagnostics and expect the box to still have my data safe and sound.
CyberJock said:
leaving it unpowered for 18 months was basically abandoning your data.
I don't see how that can be interpreted any other way. The act of doing nothing at all cost me all my data...that's volatility. How would you describe a filesystem that can't handle sitting on a shelf for 18 months?
For background, consider reading this thread from the beginning, and the original thread, located here:
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/i-messed-up-my-array-and-i-dont-know-what-to-do.11392/