piyper

I have read a number of threads to figure out the best way of doing this, however, I wanted to check with the experts here to make sure. I also have a few questions (most likely stupid ones) which is what was giving me pause in the first place. I have been running unRaid for years and have just recently upgraded to the latest version. My drives are all old'ish and most are long out of warranty. The reason I am looking at replacing the parity drives is because, I am down to my last "spare" drive which is being rebuilt right now after a failure (disk 6) in the picture. I run an SSD for cache, docker images (sdk) and VMs (sdl) (just in the process of rebuilding those from VirtualBox vms, but that is another conversation) on the unassigned drives, so the only drives that are "spun up" all the time are SSDs, the standard mechanical drives hold all the data, but they never really spin up unless I'm streaming or doing actual work. So these mechanical drives are spun down most of the time. I have designed this to keep the wear on the mechanical drives to as low as I can and it really helps with the heat that the server throws off. My setup is attached, anyone have any suggestions about my setup, I would be happy to hear them. I am not hurting for space right now and that is not the motivation for replacing the parity drives, but I have to buy a spare or two anyway, so I thought I would just make my parity dives bigger (the price point is better on a 6TB drive) and use the old ones (4TB) as my spares. Sorry i'm boring you with all this, but some of you seem to like "the details" before answering questions. So, replacing both Parity drives, I think I can just pull out the old ones and place in the new ones and have unRaid just rebuild them automatically. But: What if I have a drive failure while both are being rebuilt?, I would lose data! Then I thought I could just replace one at a time. I think that will work, but: What if I replace one and it rebuild fine, then I replace the other and during the rebuild that drive has errors on it that are correctly compensated for, but wouldn't it make the second disk smaller than the first, then would unRaid complain because the second parity drive is smaller than the first? Am I worried about nothing? What is the best procedure for replacing both parity drives? Thank you in advance for your time!

Sorry, when I said "you" I did mean Limetech. I have been frustrated with this whole ransomware attack and was not thinking clearly of the audience. My apologies. Thank you and everyone in this community for the help and the time taken to answer questions like these.

Thank you, I will give it a read. I know this is a few more questions, but it does pertain to the same title. I had a Trojan attack one of my computers and it somehow got at the unraid usb drive. I still have the backup usb drive you supplied many years ago when I bought the file server from you. I booted with that and reconfigured the server and it looks like the data on my data drives is still intact so that is a plus. I will have to do some re-configuring, which is why I'm asking about upgrading since I have to do that anyway. After I ran a virus removal utility on the unraid usb, it seems to be corrupted, windows does not even recognize it as a usb drive anymore. Do I even need a USB that unraid supplies anymore or can I just use your "unraid creator" utility on any usb stick and if so, does the pro version of my licence for version 5.0-rc16c still apply to the new version and how would I obtain that key?

Is there anything special I have to do to upgrade from 5.0-rc16c to the latest? Can I just download the latest and fire it up and all is well ?