Background

I've had numerous problems over the past year or so, ever since i moved from 19 data drives to 20, in fact, or more specifically, going from 11 internal drives to 12 in my Centurion 590 case. Almost all my parity drives have failed and I at first blamed this on 2TB WD EADS drives being unreliable. However, upon testing these drives after removal 3 of 4 have been fine and have been working okay in my external enclosures as part of my array. I tried changing the parity drive's SATA cable and SATA slot. Now I think there may be a PSU problem, either with the drive's power connector or with the PSU itself not having enough juice for hte 12th drive in the case. Now, changing the PSU is tantamount to rebuilding the server, and I don't have time to do this for a little while. I also don't want to have 12 drives in my server case at the moment, but I have a failed drive that needs replacing.

 

Cut to the chase

I have a disabled 2TB drive in my tower and I need to replace it with another drive, but not in my tower - in one of my two Sans Digital 5-drive bays. These are also full of drives, but two 1TB drives have no data on them. The two 1 TB drives are empty of data, have the same amount of free space on them, and show up as being of exactly the same size in Unraid. I've tested media files from the missing disk at random and they play back fine, suggesting that my parity drive is able to rebuild the data on the fly just fine.

 

No really, cut to the chase already!

Question is: Can I zero out the two drives using this method while there's a missing disk. By my reckoning, doing so should leave the parity info intact. I could then remove these two drives and the missing disk? I'd replace one of the 1 TB drives with a new 2 TB in order to rebuild the data from the missing disk onto it.

A problem I foresee is how to tell unRAID to trust everything in my new configuration and to start building data onto the new disk, when it may see three missing disks and only one replacement.

You cannot. initconfig will cause unRAID to forget about the missing 2T drive. Parity will become invalid.

 

You can try this:

1. Copy data from missing 2T disk onto the empty 1T drives.

2. Zero missing 2T drive as described in the "method" and complete the procedure.

3. Replace one of the 1T drives with a 2T drive and let the drive rebuild.

4. Copy the data from the remaining 1T drive on to the new 2T drive.

5. Use the described method to remove the remaining 1T drive.

 

Good Luck!

Thanks, for the response - it was what I feared. Also, that's a great idea. One that I hadn't thought of because the 2 TB drive is what I used to copy the data off the two 1 TB drives in the first place!

 

I'll try this. Cheers.