Is it safe to take disks from an external enclosure and install them internally?

[MostHated]

Hey all,

    When I built my unraid server, it originally just on my old Ryzen 5 desktop that didn't even have a case, it was just in a box, and I had a 5 bay USB enclosure in which I duct taped some extra fans and what not, lol. Now I have a proper 4U chassis with plenty of airflow and drive bays and I wanted to move the drives into there, but Unraid sees them as "External_USB3.0_DISK01_20170331000C3-0:1 - 1 TB (sdb)".

 

Is it going to be safe to remove them from the enclosure and put them back into the array? I only have 4 disks in the array currently and then in a two cache pool.

 

As you can see below, there really isn't much on there yet to begin with, so if I had to (and there is even a way?) to move the stuff off those two drives and on to the current internal, that would just takes a few minutes. Whatever ends up being best. I was waiting until I did this to move some stuff over from my NAS, just so there would be less hassle.

 

Thanks,

-MH

 

 

[JonathanM]

You will have to do a new config, because as you said, the drive ID's are going to change. There is a good chance the enclosure may also change how the drive geometry is mapped, causing the partitions to become unmountable.

 

So, the safe thing is to copy the data from the external drives elsewhere before making the transition. You could copy internally from drive to drive using mc or similar, but with so little data it may be easier to just copy it to your desktop.

[MostHated]

I appreciate the reply. I wasn't sure if you could just move data around on the drives willy-nilly because of the parity drive. While there is little data, I wanted to make sure to learn/follow proper best practice, as I was going to transfer 2tb over once it was completed, then I had some more drives on order. I figure best to learn to do it the right way while there is not much to lose, lol.

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, MostHated said:

I wasn't sure if you could just move data around on the drives willy-nilly because of the parity drive.

Sure. Parity is realtime, it tracks all bits as they are changed, moving files, formatting drives, whatever. Parity doesn't store data.

If you want to use mc to copy all data from /mnt/disk1 to /mnt/disk3, and /mnt/disk2 to /mnt/disk3, go right ahead. What you must not do is mix /mnt/diskX with /mnt/user, because /mnt/user is just the combined list of all the files on /mnt/disk1,2,etc.

[MostHated]

That is definitely great to know. I do appreciate it. 👍