Upgrading smallish server to bigger drives?

[bclinton]

Hi friends! I have been using unraid for about 18 months now. I have 2 8 TB drives with 1 being parity along with 2 1tb cache SSD's. It's been humming right along. I am up to about 5 TB on the data drive. With the prices of big drives coming down I am going to be swapping my 8TB parity and data drive soon. What would be the suggested process in doing this? I was thinking I should swap the parity drive first, let it rebuild with a new 12 TB drive. Once all is good, swap the data drive with the new 12 TB drive. Would that be the best way to accomplish this? At the rate I add data I figure this would be good for at least 3-4 years for me.

[JorgeB]

14 minutes ago, bclinton said:

I was thinking I should swap the parity drive first, let it rebuild with a new 12 TB drive. Once all is good, swap the data drive with the new 12 TB drive.

That's the best way.

[itimpi]

If you have space for it you could start by upgrading the parity drive and then adding the old parity drive as a data drive to give 8TB additional usable space.  Would avoid the need to have 2x12TB from the outset.

[bclinton]

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

If you have space for it you could start by upgrading the parity drive and then adding the old parity drive as a data drive to give 8TB additional usable space.  Would avoid the need to have 2x12TB from the outset.

 

I considered that but I wanted to see if I could reduce the power used by the server. I started with 16 TB data and 1 8TB parity but realized that I would be at least a couple of years from needing more that 8 TB of data. After I removed the 8TB drive my power usage went down almost 20 watts at idle.