Dear Unraid Community,

 

I bought a new 16 TB to replace my parity drive and used the old parity drive to replace a smaller data drive. To do so, I followed the parity swap procedure as described in the unraid wiki.

However, I made the mistake of not carefully reading the instructions before starting the procedure (my bad!). I used the unbalance plugin to empty the old data drive and move the data to the other drives.

Then I followed the instructions step by step. Currently, I wait for the parity to be copied. The next step would be the data drive rebuild. However, since the data drive is already empty, the rebuild would waste a lot of time/reads/resources to rebuild an empty drive.

Do I still need to run this step now, or is there an alternative way?

Second question: after the whole procedure is completed, should I move the data again using unbalance, to not have some drives fully filled, or is that not necessary.

 

Thank you for your help.

Best,

The only way to make that replacement drive (former parity) in sync with the array is to rebuild it. Doesn't matter at all whether the disk has an empty filesystem it is still completely full of bits, and all those bits must be in sync with the array.

There was no need to move the data from the drive, which I guess you already realize. There is no need to move the data back, but you can if you want. It is always a good idea to keep some free space on all disks. If any of your other disks are completely full you might consider those also.

If there is no data on the disk you want to swap you can create a new config. This is how you would shrink your array. You would rebuild parity.

 

In this case you either trust the data and rebuild parity or rebuild the empty disk from parity.