Upgrade Parity, repurpose parity and add drive

[Talos]

Hi,

 

I currently have a 9 drive array. It consists of:

Parity - 6Tb (X300 Toshiba)

Disk 1 - 6Tb (X300 Toshiba)

Disk 2 - 6Tb (X300 Toshiba)

Disk 3 - 6Tb (X300 Toshiba)

Disk 4 - 3tb (Hitachi 7200rpm)

Disk 5 - 3tb (Hitachi 7200rpm)

Disk 6 - 3tb (Hitachi 7200rpm)

Disk 7 - 3tb (Hitachi 7200rpm)

Disk 8 - 3tb (Hitachi 7200rpm)

 

Ive just moved my system into a new case (a Meshify 2) which gives me capacity for 11 drives. I've bought 2 new 8tb Ironwolfs and plan to expand my array by 2 drives. Ive already pre-cleared both the new ironwolf drives and both came back clean. The new array configuration i want is:

Parity - 8Tb (New Ironwolf)

Disk 1 - 6Tb (Same position)

Disk 2 - 6Tb (Same position)

Disk 3 - 6Tb (Same position)

Disk 4 - 3tb (Same position)

Disk 5 - 3tb (Same position)

Disk 6 - 3tb (Same position)

Disk 7 - 3tb (Same Position)

Disk 8 - 3tb (Same Position)

Disk 9 - 8tb (New IronWolf)

Disk 10 - 6tb (Old Parity)

 

Ive had a search on the forum and seen the posts about the Parity Swap Method and other people saying just replace the parity drive but i'm confused and don't want to risk blanking my array and losing all my data.

 

Previously when i've upgraded my drives i've built a whole new server and copied the data from the old server to new one but i dont have the luxury of doing that this time.

 

So what is the best method for me to 1) upgrade my Parity to support the larger drives in the array and 2) repurpose the old parity into the array and add in the 2nd ironwolf?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!

 

Edit: Forgot to mention i'm running Unraid Pro 6.8.3 currently.

Edited October 1, 2021 by Talos

[itimpi]

The parity Swap procedure is not relevant to you as it applies to the special case of having a data drive failed and wanting to use a larger disk as parity and the original parity dtive to replace the failed dtive.

 

In your case there are 2 basic methods I can think of depending on the risks you want to take:

• quickest is to do a ‘New Config’ and assign all drives to their final positions.   You then start the array to build parity based on this new disk set.   The downside is that you are not protected against one of your existing data drives failing during this process until the parity rebuild has completed.
• safer is to first replace the existing parity drive with its replacement and rebuild parity keeping the old parity drive intact until this completes (giving you a fallback option in case of failures during this process).   After rebuilding parity to get the array back to a protected state follow the standard process for adding new drives to the array.

[Talos]

Thanks for clarifying my options itimpl. I finished the array expansion overnight and all is working as expected. Cheers!