jcase Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 I have a very simple, very old unraid system - 3 data drives and a parity drive. It's running 4.7, because all it does is store my digital media. I had no reason to upgrade. However, in the past week or 2, one of my data drives failed and I need to replace it. My drives are all 2Tb, but my replacement drive is a 4Tb. If I understand correctly, unraid will make the 4Tb drive the parity drive and re-build the data on the other drives when I replace that drive. My question is this... should I upgrade to v6 before I replace the drive or should I let the old version do that work, then upgrade on an array of good drives? Or does it matter? Quote Link to comment
exist2resist Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 Let the old version do the work. Having said this do not remove your old parity drive or you will not be able to restore the failed drive. I don't know how you would go about this but this presents a bit of a problem considering you have a larger drive now. Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 1 hour ago, jcase said: If I understand correctly, unraid will make the 4Tb drive the parity drive and re-build the data on the other drives when I replace that drive. There is the “ParitySwap” procedure that is designed specifically to handle this case. However I have no idea if it is available in a release as old as 4.7 - maybe someone will have a long enough memory to answer that question. The answer might determine the best route forward. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 I'm not sure 4.7 supported larger than 2.2TB. Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 1 hour ago, jonathanm said: I'm not sure 4.7 supported larger than 2.2TB. Thinking about it you are correct. When I started with UnRaid I wanted to use 3TB disks so had to go with the v5 beta at the time to be able to use them. Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 I don't remember all the details. I know some controllers don't support more than 2.2TB, and I never needed parity swap back then. Looks like parity swap (swap-disable) is documented for 4.7: https://wiki.unraid.net/Legacy/Unraid_4.7_Manual#Replace_a_failed_disk Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 Given the totality of your situation, I think it might be wise to take this opportunity to overhaul things completely. 4.7 uses ReiserFS exclusively, which is no longer recommended and performs very poorly with drives larger than 2TB. Please list all the components in your current system, motherboard, cpu, memory, power supply, HBA's, hard drives, etc. Also, how much storage is currently occupied? My initial thought is to back everything up to an external drive, and start over with a new version of unraid and whatever else is needed. Quote Link to comment
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