April 14, 20224 yr Looking for the correct way to format XFS drives so i can just drop them into a new Unraid array and after adding them turn on parity. I'm trying to avoid having to move all my data around in unraid. I have 130ishTB on a bunch of drives. I would have a lot of down time while moving the data from unassigned devices over to the array as it seems like I cant pool/merge/union the unassigned devices right? If I format drives correctly and move the data over before going to unraid I should be able to just configure all the plugins/dockers, add two parity drives and be up and running Currently my research suggests if i set the spinning disks in gdisk partitioning with sector size of 64 and then to starting at sector 64 instead of the default 2048 that is how Unraid likes it. I then format it as xfs and label the drive. Seems to look right, however when i do this i get a superblock issue and can't then mount the drive due to a superblock issue. Seems like the superblock resides in the first 512 blocks. What am I missing? has anyone manually partitioned and formatted drives in other OS's for use in Unraid and what did you have to do?
April 14, 20224 yr Community Expert Solution The easiest thing would be to plug the drives into Unraid as Unassigned Devices and use the UD plugin to partition and format them correctly for Unraid (as XFS or BTRFS) drives. You can then use them on other systems to add files and when you add them to Unraid (as long is there is no current parity drive) then Unraid will accept them and leave their data intact.
April 14, 20224 yr I don't remember the magic sauce, but if you format them in UD, you should be able to remove them and add data in any other distro that understands XFS. All root folders on all the drives will become user shares with their content merged in the /mnt/user/folder structure, so you can set up shares at the same time by judiciously using root folders.
April 14, 20224 yr Author Ok that makes sense just booting into unraid temporarily then booting back instead of trying to do the formatting manually. I have enough empty i can do 5 at a time that way. If i didn't have them in a hgst 4u60 and a bunch of them being sas drives it would be a lot easier
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