Remove a drive from unraid

[Kedryn]

I'm testing Unraid on a QNAP TS859PRo. It seems to work fine, so i think i'm going to buy the license when the trial ends. 
For now, i have a question. I've read some pages around, and it seems that there is no "easy" way to remove a drive and replace it with a bigger one if it has data on it.
I have another machine with 36TB of drives, but under Storage Spaces in win10. When i need to remove one drive, while i have free space on others, it's a simple matter of "preparing" it. With a single command, the Storage Spaces will empty it, moving all files to the other disks, and the i can remove it and replace. 
Unraid, for what i read so far, does not have this feature. Or i'm wrong?

 

Edited April 15, 2021 by Kedryn

[itimpi]

As long as you have valid parity there is no problem replacing a drive in unRaid with a larger one.

 

the approach is different in that you do not first copy the data elsewhere.   when you remove the drive to be replaced unRaid will start emulating the missing drive using the combination of the other drives plus parity.    When you plug in the replacement (larger) drive unRaid will ‘rebuild’ it to have the same contents as were on the ‘emulated’ drive.   Once the rebuild has completed (thus restoring all the original contents) if the replacement drive is larger then the file system is expanded to fill the whole drive.

[Kedryn]

Yep, but what if i dont use parity?
The point is, why Unraid didn't implement such a simple thing (move the files to other disks, then deatach it from the pool) ?

 

[John_M]

51 minutes ago, Kedryn said:

Yep, but what if i dont use parity?

 

If you don't use parity then add the new disk to the array, transfer the files - I'd use rsync from the command line but other tools are available - then do a New Config without the old disk and remove it. With no parity to sync up the job's done.