Upgrade before or after replacing failed drive


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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?

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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.

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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.

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