Quick Hard Drive Upgrading Question

[DaveHavok]

I was looking at running 5 x 2 TB drives with my first unRAID build since 3 TB drives are not supported yet.  When unRAID does support 3 TB rights, would I pull one drive at a time and rebuild the array each time until all 5 drives have been swapped to 3 TB drives?

 

Thanks!

 

Dave

[BRiT]

I just want to make sure you are aware that unRAID does not require all the drives to be the same size. There is no need to mass upgrade all your drives unless you absolutely need the space and have run out of drive slots. The typical unRAID array expansion is to simply add another drive.

 

You could run an array with a 3TB parity drive (once supported) and a 3TB data drive and any other combination of data drives that are equal to or less than the size of your parity drive. This means in the future it would be possible to run an array consisting of a 3TB parity drive, a 2.5TB, a 2TB, a 1.5TB, a 1TB, a 750GB, a 640GB, a 512GB, a 400GB, a 320GB, a 250GB, a 160GB, a 120GB and so on.

 

After upgrading your parity drive to 3TB, that is a possibility. The parity drive must always be equal to or larger than your data drives.

 

Another possibility is simply adding the new 3TB parity drive and new 3TB data drives and keeping the existing drives.

 

If you're set on running with only 5 disks then you could replace them one at a time starting with the parity drive then moving on to the data drives well over the course of years and have a fully functional unRAID system.