Hi Forum,

In my Unraid I am using two 4TB parity drives, and four 4TB data drives. I just bought three new 14TB drives. I think that i want to go to a single 14TB Parity drive, and replace two of the 4TB data drives with the two other 14TB drives.

 

I feel like since I'm swapping both parity and data drives, that there are a lot of moving pieces. I was hoping someone could give me a simple breakdown of what steps i should be doing, and in what order.

 

To simplify what I'm trying to do:

 

Current State

Parity:

2x4TB

Storage:

4x4TB

 

Desired State

Parity:

1x14TB

Storage:

2x4TB

2x14TB

 

Thanks!

 

You have to replace one of the parity drives first.  I would be doing parity 1.  (Not parity 2 because the parity calculation is so much computational complex than Parity 1!)  

 

After Parity 1 is rebuilt, you will then have to remove parity 2  because the next step would to to replace one of the 4TB data with a new 14TB HD.  (Rule says that any parity drive  must equal to or larger than the largest data disk.)  Allow it to rebuilt the data.

 

Then repeat for the second 14TB data disk.

 

Keep both 4TB data drives in their current state for a month.  (Just in case of an infant-mortality failure on one of the new 14TB drives!!!)

Edited February 7, 20224 yr by Frank1940

Thanks for the response @Frank1940, sounds simple enough (famous last words). Should I disable both parity drives from my array and then just rebuild with a single drive? Or replace parity one, let it build, then remove parity two?

You want to leave that Parity 2 drive in place because if you have a problem reading from some of the data disks while you are building parity 1, you will have a easy path for recovery using parity 2.