Switching hard drive orders to get rid of some loud hard drives.

[alitech]

I have 2 very loud seagate drives in my system. They are desktop hard drives and I just want to get rid of them. 

 

Here is a look at my config right now. 

 

The 2 noisy drives are the ones that start with "ST"

What I would like to do is change the configuration with the following:

 

• Change the parity 2 drive to parity 1
• Change Disk 3 to Parity 2 (there isnt much data on it)
• Remove the 2 offending drives

 

I know my config will change from a 7 disk array to a 6 disk one, but I am ok with that. I still have a lot of capacity to play with one drive removed. 

 

I am unsure of how to do this. Whenever a disk is removed, the array just says drive missing and no option to redo the drive configuration so that everything is in order and the parity is complete.

 

If I can get some guidance on this, that would be awesome. 

 

 

 

 

[itimpi]

The easiest way to do what you want would be:

• Move all the files that are currently on disk3 to one of the other array drives you intend to keep and that that has space for them as the existing contents will be destroyed when you later use it as a parity drive.
• use Tools -> New Config ro say you want to reset the array configuration.  I would advise also using the the option to retain current assignments as it means you are less likely to make a mistake later in drive assignments.
• return to the Main tab and re-order the drives to how you want them to end up.    This will result in both of the ‘ST’ drives no longer being assigned so that they become visible under the Unassigned Devices section.   Make sure you do not assign a drive that currently has data on it to a parity slot as that would destroy its content.  You can re-order the data drives at this point if you want to.
• Start the array to commit the new assignments and build new parity based on these new assignments.   UnRaid will leave the contents of the data drives alone as it will recognise that they are already in an unRaid compatible format.
• if you have any specific include/exclude drive settings for any of your shares make sure they are updated to reflect the new drive arrangement.   The same would apply to any docker containers or VMs that mention specific array drives.

one downside to the above approach is that your array is not protected against one of the remaining data drives failing until parity has finished being rebuilt.  
 

There ARE approaches that could maintain at least one valid parity drive during all steps of the process but it is ‘trickier’ and multiple steps would be required to make changes incrementally so the process would take significantly longer.

[JonathanM]

At some point you will still have to manually move the data from disk 1 to another drive, or rebuild it while at least 1 of the current parity drives is still valid, meaning no other drive changes have been made yet.