Physically Rearrange Parity Disk Location

[dancue]

I'm currently in the process of replacing a disabled disk and replacing my parity drive for larger drives. In going through this process I realized that the location of my drives physically are not where I would have liked them to be, making it difficult to find the right disabled disk to replace.

 

I went through each disk, removed it, refreshed the screen to find which one said missing and then notated it. I realize that now I have a guide having done that, but ideally I'd like to rearrange the parity drives and reassign the drive numbers for the rest to look like the following:

 

 

The left is what I currently have. I'd like to physically move Parity 2 to where 18 is and then renumber the rest in the GUI so that it corresponds to the layout on the right. If GUI won't allow me to renumber I am open to physically moving the rest as well.

 

I hope this makes sense. 

 

Edit: I realize I won't be able to do any of this until after I've replaced my disabled disk and parity drives. This is me preparing for after that process is complete.

Edited June 2, 2022 by dancue

[jmztaylor]

Unraid doesn't care which ports things are hooked up to.  Unraid only cares about the identifier (model+serial?) that shows up in unraid.  I have moved drives between controllers and unraid doesn't care.  It still worked without issue.  Not sure if that was what you are looking for or not.

[dancue]

2 hours ago, jmztaylor said:

Unraid doesn't care which ports things are hooked up to.  Unraid only cares about the identifier (model+serial?) that shows up in unraid.  I have moved drives between controllers and unraid doesn't care.  It still worked without issue.  Not sure if that was what you are looking for or not.

If that's true that makes things so much easier. I thought I read somewhere that with Parity drives that is not the case? I just want to make sure.

[jmztaylor]

If that's true that makes things so much easier. I thought I read somewhere that with Parity drives that is not the case? I just want to make sure.

I'll let someone else chime in to verify. But one way to test without breakage is to stop the auto start of the array, swap the drive to a new spot and see if it shows up properly before starting array. If it doesn't show up properly just swap it back. As long as the array isn't started there isn't any risk of breaking the array

Sent from my Pixel 6 Pro using Tapatalk

[itimpi]

5 hours ago, dancue said:

I thought I read somewhere that with Parity drives that is not the case?

You probably got confused by a statement that if you have a parity2 drive you cannot move drives between the slots on the GUI Main tab without invalidating parity since the slot number is part of the calculation of parity2 contents.    Those slots are independent of the physical connection because as was stated Unraid identifies drives for a slot by the serial rather than where they are connected.

[dancue]

Ok. Thank you both for your responses. I will test it out when my parity drives are done rebuilding. 

[trurl]

15 hours ago, dancue said:

went through each disk, removed it, refreshed the screen to find which one said missing and then notated it

Unnecessarily complicated. Unraid just cares about the serial numbers of each disk. All you need is to look at each drive label for the serial number. You could do that on all disks at once without booting Unraid at all.

[dancue]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

Unnecessarily complicated. Unraid just cares about the serial numbers of each disk. All you need is to look at each drive label for the serial number. You could do that on all disks at once without booting Unraid at all.

Right. I know that now, thanks! Unraid is truly amazing.

[dancue]

Just wanted to reply that this absolutely worked. Thank you guys.