(Solved) New hardware - From 8 to 6 SATA-ports - how to set-up

[Dreamfault]

 

Hi.

 

I´ve been away from Unraid for about a year due to moving to another house. I sold my server and planned to buy a new one. I kept the USB-stick and disks.

 

I have bought a new one now, but the new motherboard only has 6 SATA-ports. My old motherboard had 8. My HDD setup was 1x4TB parity drive, 2x2TB datadisk, 3x1TB datadisk 1x500GB cache disk. 7 disks in total.

I only used about 2-3 TB in total on the server so I have free space on those drives.

 

What i want to accomplish is to change the setup to fewer disks, approx. 4-5 in total instead of 7, incl. cache drive. 

When the server is up and running that will be easy to fix, but how do I start the Unraid with fewer SATA-ports than before? I don´t want to buy a HBA, because I will only need it the first time. Can i accomplish this in another way? I have thought about a few options, but i don´t know if it is possible.

 

Solution 1:

Connect all data-disks+ parity, but not the cache, in totalt 6 disks. I can the use unbalance to move some of the data on the 1TB disks to the other disks. What will happen when Unraid can´t find the cache disk? When I have fewer disks I can connect the cache drive and use Unraid as normal.

 

Solution 2:

Connect parity+ 5 datadisks (1 missing) + 1 cache drive, 6 in total. If I choose rebuild without 1 datadisk. Is it possible that Unraid will rebuild on the disks remaining and then I can use the server as normal?

 

Any other solutions that is better?

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by Dreamfault

[trurl]

Solution 2 doesn't work at all because rebuild only rebuilds to the same disk slot. Parity doesn't even know or care if you have any files, it just lets you reconstruct all the bits on a disk by reading all the bits on parity and all other disks.

 

Solution 1 would work. You should disable Docker and VM Manager in Settings so those don't get created on the array and leave them disabled until you have emptied the disks to be removed, New Config with cache and only the disks you intend to keep, and rebuild parity.

 

[Dreamfault]

I might have forgotten how many disk drives I actually had. When I started Unraid OS, it went in to normal state, and working as it should. I think...

 

I connected the 6 data drives I thought I had. 1 seems to be broken and won´t start. I changed both SATA-cable and power cable and changed SATA-port. It will not work. 1 shows as unassigned. 

 

Should I consider everything as ok and use it as normal now?

 

Screenshot and diagnostics attached.

 

 

 

 

vars.txt actila-diagnostics-20210817-1944.zip

[trurl]

For some reason, syslog in your diagnostics thinks it is January 1. Does your server have the correct date and time?

 

That is a very old version of Unraid, you should upgrade.

 

The disks shown are the ones Unraid thinks should be there. Assuming you haven't done something like restored an old flash backup with different disk assignments, then it should be OK.

 

If Unraid thought you were missing any disks, it would show them as missing in the screenshot, and if you were missing more disks than you have parity disks, it wouldn't even let you start the array.

 

The parity check is due to unclean shutdown. Why is it paused?

 

If parity completes without a lot of sync errors that would also indicate those are the disks that should be there.