Possible to change a drive controller card?

[Dan oh]

Because of a power surge on one of my drives it’s cooked the controller card, the one mounted to the drive itself. I am able to replace that controller card with one of my other hard drives that failed this last year of the same make and model. However I figured that when I go to install the drive back into my array, (even though it already has all the data properly set) that it’s likely going to see it as a new drive and want to rebuild that data. Is there anyway to bypass that rebuild and override since the data is good? It’s the same drive just different controller board so therefore likely different serial number.

[trurl]

Tools-New Config will let you assign any drives as you wish and then optionally build parity. 

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, Dan oh said:

Because of a power surge on one of my drives it’s cooked the controller card, the one mounted to the drive itself. I am able to replace that controller card with one of my other hard drives that failed this last year of the same make and model. However I figured that when I go to install the drive back into my array, (even though it already has all the data properly set) that it’s likely going to see it as a new drive and want to rebuild that data. Is there anyway to bypass that rebuild and override since the data is good? It’s the same drive just different controller board so therefore likely different serial number.

Depending on the drive model you may need to swap a chip from one board to the other to get a good read.

[Dan oh]

On 6/15/2021 at 8:08 PM, jonathanm said:

Depending on the drive model you may need to swap a chip from one board to the other to get a good read.

Thank you, I'm attempting to swap the whole board on the drive. Its on a Western Digital 3.0TB WD30EFRX but how will UNRAID see this drive after I do? Will it see it as a new drive and attempt to rebuild or will it allow me to insert it back into the system as an existing drive? Or, is there a way to tell the system its the same drive/data, and not to rebuild?

[Dan oh]

On 6/15/2021 at 7:13 PM, trurl said:

Tools-New Config will let you assign any drives as you wish and then optionally build parity. 

So even if it has a different board attached to the drive now I can still tell UNRAID it's fine and to only rebuild Parity? If all the data is the same, why the need to rebuild anything?

 

[trurl]

10 hours ago, Dan oh said:

So even if it has a different board attached to the drive now I can still tell UNRAID it's fine and to only rebuild Parity? If all the data is the same, why the need to rebuild anything?

 

On 6/15/2021 at 7:13 PM, trurl said:

optionally build parity

by default New Config rebuilds parity, but there is a checkbox to tell it parity is valid. A parity check is still recommended just to make sure everything is working well.

[Frank1940]

10 hours ago, Dan oh said:

Thank you, I'm attempting to swap the whole board on the drive. Its on a Western Digital 3.0TB WD30EFRX but how will UNRAID see this drive after I do? Will it see it as a new drive and attempt to rebuild or will it allow me to insert it back into the system as an existing drive? Or, is there a way to tell the system its the same drive/data, and not to rebuild?

 

Did you research this?   I seem to recall that this would work in the past but some HD manufacturers made some changes to the way things worked and basically broke the simple replacement of the drive controller board.  After you do the HD controller board swap, you might want to use the manufacturers testing utility to make sure that the drive is healthy before you go gung-ho  with using it in your server.