I decided to sell some spare hardware and I’m looking to purchase another 18TB HDD so I can put it in my array. I have a 5 bay enclosure currently and wanted to reduce the drive count and at the same time add more capacity. 
 

All the data currently on the array will fit on one of the new drives how do I accomplish this without loosing any data? I’m only aware of one drive being replaced at a time. 

No data disk can be larger than parity.

 

Attach diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread for more specific advice

That's the reason I haven't added it to my array yet. I'm using UD to add it to my server. See attached. Would I just just take out my parity drive then rebuild it with the larger drive then take out another, rebuild again then manually move all the remaining data on the other drives to the array?

 

Edited June 19, 20224 yr by ChatNoir
clean up all the files from diagnostics

The diagnostics come in a zip file, please attach that, no one will download all the files.

I cleaned it up.

On 6/18/2022 at 9:15 PM, ChatNoir said:

The diagnostics come in a zip file, please attach that, no one will download all the files.

I cleaned it up.

tower-diagnostics-20220621-1405.zip I had to compress it.

1 hour ago, Pstark said:

 I had to compress it.

No, it is already a single zip file. If it seems to be a bunch of folders and files it is because your computer automatically opens zip files. You just need to get the zip file wherever it was downloaded.

On 6/18/2022 at 11:48 PM, Pstark said:

I'm using UD to add it to my server

What exactly are you using UD for with the disk?

 

On 6/18/2022 at 8:32 PM, Pstark said:

purchase another 18TB HDD

Is that in addition to the 18TB already seen in diagnostics?

19 hours ago, trurl said:

What exactly are you using UD for with the disk?

 

Is that in addition to the 18TB already seen in diagnostics?

I'm using UD to mount the drive(18TB) since it's not apart of the array. It's not part of the array since it would have to be the parity drive and since it's much larger then the rest of the drives, I would loose aprox 10 TB of usable space.

Edited June 22, 20224 yr by Pstark
typo

If you set a new config, add a blank 18TB as parity, and add your current 18TB as disk1, and the rest of the drives which have data you want to keep as disk2, disk3, etc, then build parity that would accomplish what I think you want.

 

You will need to copy data from disk to disk manually, and since you already started with one 18TB in UD, you may as well keep doing that manual process to copy the content of all the disks you want to remove, then only build parity with the drives you want to keep. If you copy instead of move, you can keep the removed drives as backup.

On 6/22/2022 at 11:26 AM, JonathanM said:

If you set a new config, add a blank 18TB as parity, and add your current 18TB as disk1, and the rest of the drives which have data you want to keep as disk2, disk3, etc, then build parity that would accomplish what I think you want.

 

You will need to copy data from disk to disk manually, and since you already started with one 18TB in UD, you may as well keep doing that manual process to copy the content of all the disks you want to remove, then only build parity with the drives you want to keep. If you copy instead of move, you can keep the removed drives as backup.

I don't plan to keep the previous HDD's. It would just be the 2 18TB drives.

Personally, I would do the copy.  Then keep the disks for a few days to a couple of weeks in case you find a problem.  

 

Then prepare the disks for sale by over-writing the platters with garbage.  (google    hard drive eraser software    )  The reason being that moving data does not actually change the data bits for each file on the hard drive!  What it does is change the file allocation table to indicate that the data space is now abandoned and available for writing new files to that data space.  (There are data recovery programs that can recover most--- if not all-- of the files on those disks.)

6 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Personally, I would do the copy.  Then keep the disks for a few days to a couple of weeks in case you find a problem.  

 

Then prepare the disks for sale by over-writing the platters with garbage.  (google    hard drive eraser software    )  The reason being that moving data does not actually change the data bits for each file on the hard drive!  What it does is change the file allocation table to indicate that the data space is now abandoned and available for writing new files to that data space.  (There are data recovery programs that can recover most--- if not all-- of the files on those disks.)

Can someone one point me to a guide for replacing 2 drives so I don’t loose my docker setup? Once I have that, I can mount the other drives UD and manually copy the data over. I think I made good decisions that will pay off being none of my shares are allocated more then one drive. 

Edited July 8, 20224 yr by Pstark
Typo

On 7/8/2022 at 12:19 PM, Pstark said:

Can someone one point me to a guide for replacing 2 drives so I don’t loose my docker setup?

Your system share has files on the array. Better if this share is on fast pool (cache) and set to stay there so docker/VM performance won't be affected by slower parity writes, and so array disks can spin down since these files are always open.

 

Why to you have 75G docker.img? Have you had problems filling it? 20G is often more than enough, and certainly looks like it would be plenty for your use.

4 hours ago, trurl said:

Your system share has files on the array. Better if this share is on fast pool (cache) and set to stay there so docker/VM performance won't be affected by slower parity writes, and so array disks can spin down since these files are always open.

 

Why to you have 75G docker.img? Have you had problems filling it? 20G is often more than enough, and certainly looks like it would be plenty for your use.

Thanks for pointing out my docker image was not in the cache drive. I moved it to the cache drive now. As to why my docker img is 75G, I'm not really sure. Is there a way to reduce it size?

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Docker_Management#Re-Create_the_Docker_image_file