Upgrading hard drives.. Advice needed. New build vs replace


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Hi All

 

I have been using 10 * 2 TB Hard drives with one as a parity with unraid pro version 6.10.3. Out of the 18 TB, I have free space of around 2TB in the array. Out of the 9 Data drives, one of them started showing SMART errors and another is currently dead. 

 

I have ordered 3 * 12 TB WD Gold drives which is expected to be delivered in a day or two. Currently the array is starting fine except for the one missing hard drive. 

 

Now once I receive the hard drive, is it advisable for me do setup another unRAID server(trial) with 3 * 12 TB drives, copy the data over the network and then request for the license change to the new UUID of the flash drive (not sure how to do this yet) or would you guys advise me to replace the parity first on the existing, rebuild, replace the missing drive with 12TB, rebuild and then finally replace the one with SMART errors and rebuild

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How is your backup situation? If something goes south during this operation, can you retrieve another copy of anything important?

 

With single parity, you are already running on the ragged edge of data loss, since you are emulating the dead drive with a drive showing smart errors.

 

Whether or not you have a second copy of your important data determines how I personally would proceed in your situation.

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1 minute ago, sabarirjpm said:

no backups

Parity is NOT a substitute. You must always have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable.

 

2 minutes ago, sabarirjpm said:

How do I identify which data is in which drive 

Do you know which shares have important and irreplaceable files?

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Disk8 is the missing disk. Which one has the SMART errors?

 

I see many of your disks are reiserfs. That would be a good reason to just copy them instead of trying to rebuild any to larger disks.

 

Of course, you have to rebuild disk8 to recover any of its data. Missing/emulated disk8 is mounted as XFS and has 1.3T data.

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Disk 2 is reporting smart error and the report is attached. Disk 8 is currently in "not installed" state. This server is being used as a media server storage and mostly contains music, movies collected over years. 
When I ssh to the server and list the contents of /mnt/disk8 it shows the data. Am assuming that these are the ones which belong to disk 8 which is currently in "Not Installed" State

tower-diagnostics-20220729-1724.zip

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2 minutes ago, trurl said:

Disk8 is the missing disk. Which one has the SMART errors?

 

I see many of your disks are reiserfs. That would be a good reason to just copy them instead of trying to rebuild any to larger disks.

 

Of course, you have to rebuild disk8 to recover any of its data. Missing/emulated disk8 is mounted as XFS and has 1.3T data.

So you suggest a newer build and copy the data over? Will prioritize the failed, failing drives. Is that ok?

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3 minutes ago, trurl said:

you have to rebuild disk8 to recover any of its data. Missing/emulated disk8 is mounted as XFS and has 1.3T data.

And all other disks are mounted as well, so you can read any of them to copy their data off the array. I don't recommend trying to move or copy any of their data to other array disks since the array is already not in a good state, and all disks must be read to emulate disk8.

 

Disk2 has 6 reallocated and 14 pending. Could be worse I guess.

 

You can see how much of each disk is used by each user share by clicking Compute... on the User Shares page, or Compute All button at bottom.

 

3 minutes ago, sabarirjpm said:

a newer build and copy the data over? Will prioritize the failed, failing drives.

I would prioritize backups of anything important and irreplaceable before anything else. I guess copying them to new drives in a new system while keeping the originals would be a backup of sorts.

 

How soon will you have a new build? Can you shutdown until ready to do the copies?

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You can't run both systems on one license.

 

I guess you could go with a test license on a new flash on the new system until you get the data copied over the network, then set the new system up again on the original flash with the original license.

 

Or maybe you could transfer the license to that new flash you were running with a test license. I'm not sure about that.

 

Or, you could copy emulated disk8 somewhere off the array, setup the new system with the original flash and its license, mount the other disks Unassigned in the new system to copy their data.

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Just to reconfirm. I am planning to do the following

1. Setup a new system, get the trial of unRAID and setup 3 new drives

2. Copy over the data from the existing to the new setup over the network

3. Make a note of the drive assignments on the new server

4. Move the original flash with the license to the new setup, select new config tool and assign the drives according to the note on step 3 and make unraid aware of the new drive changes.

 

Will the above steps work and help me in a successful migration? Assuming that another drive won't go down during the copy

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In step 4, if you delete config/super.dat from flash, it will forget all about your disk assignments anyway and you will have to assign them.

 

Is it appropriate to keep everything else about your configuration from the old server to the new? That would depend on a lot of things being the same, not the hardware (though VM passthru would have to be redone), but the same files would have to be in the same top level folders so they would be in the same shares, and other things. Anything you have configured in the webUI is in the config folder on flash, and if you take all of that to the new server it needs to match how things are on the new server.

 

We can discuss in more detail if you want.

 

Or you could just start from a fresh install on that original flash drive and only keep your license, which is the .key file in the config folder.

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On 7/29/2022 at 10:33 PM, trurl said:

the same files would have to be in the same top level folders so they would be in the same shares

That may seem a little more complicated than it really is.

 

User Shares are simply the combined top level folders on array and pools. For example, if you have a top level folder named 'media', that is a user share named 'media', and everything in that folder and any other top level folder named 'media' on any array disk or pool is also part of the 'media' user share.

 

The settings you have made for each user share is in config/shares on flash, but if you don't have settings for a top level folder, it is still a user share, but with default settings.

 

You can examine many of the files in config on flash and can probably understand how they correspond to many of the webUI settings.

 

You should disable Docker and VM Manager in Settings before trying to move anything, and not enable these until everything else is in place.

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@trurl

Got two temporary 2 TB hard drives and unfortunately both of them were not healthy and the moment I popped those, I started receiving the smart errors and the missing disk went to the disabled state. 

Of the 3 * 12 TBs that I received, One of them is empty, can I just swap the older drive with the 12 TB? I am reading in the wiki that the parity swap will automatically happen when I pop in one of the 12TBs and the existing parity will then be converted to a data drive. Is it safer way to proceed?

 

Assuming that it is possible, another question is how do I preclear the 12 TB(do I need to do this?) before I put it into use?

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