Baelish Posted July 26, 2011 Share Posted July 26, 2011 I've been searching for a topic that handles this, but I guess it's a pretty unique situation: This weekend, I ran a preclear on two brand new WD20EARS drives, then assigned one as Parity and the other as Data 1. I must not have been paying attention, because I'm just now realizing (as I preclear three new Hitachi Coolspin 2TBs) that I chose the HD connected to my onboard SCSI port for my Data 1 drive and the HD connected to my PCI-e extension card for my Parity drive. I haven't yet written any data to the array, so I think that all I need to worry about is re-formatting the onboard SCSI drive as Parity / PCI-e drive as Data 1, but I wanted to check in here before doing anything crazy: should I preclear one or both of them first, as well? If not, will unRAID still recognize them as precleared when I ask it to format those drives accordingly? Thanks in advance for any help the board can provide! Link to comment
Joe L. Posted July 26, 2011 Share Posted July 26, 2011 I've been searching for a topic that handles this, but I guess it's a pretty unique situation: This weekend, I ran a preclear on two brand new WD20EARS drives, then assigned one as Parity and the other as Data 1. I must not have been paying attention, because I'm just now realizing (as I preclear three new Hitachi Coolspin 2TBs) that I chose the HD connected to my onboard SCSI port for my Data 1 drive and the HD connected to my PCI-e extension card for my Parity drive. I haven't yet written any data to the array, so I think that all I need to worry about is re-formatting the onboard SCSI drive as Parity / PCI-e drive as Data 1, but I wanted to check in here before doing anything crazy: should I preclear one or both of them first, as well? If not, will unRAID still recognize them as precleared when I ask it to format those drives accordingly? Thanks in advance for any help the board can provide! You can move the drives to ANY port you like, then use the disk assignment screen to assign them to their respective logical "slots" in the array, and then start it up. No need to clear them or reformat just to move them to a different disk controller. unRAID does no really care which port a give drive is attached to. Once assigned to the array and formatted a disk is no longer recognized as precleared. Link to comment
Baelish Posted July 26, 2011 Author Share Posted July 26, 2011 Nice! The more I learn about this system, the more I wonder how I was ever able to live without it... Thanks for the incredibly prompt and helpful response! Link to comment
Baelish Posted July 26, 2011 Author Share Posted July 26, 2011 Err, spoke too soon - I re-arranged on the disk assignment screen, and now I'm receiving the "Invalid configuration: Too many wrong and/or missing disks!" error... Do I just need to re-start the system for it to recognize the disk placement? Link to comment
SSD Posted July 26, 2011 Share Posted July 26, 2011 Err, spoke too soon - I re-arranged on the disk assignment screen, and now I'm receiving the "Invalid configuration: Too many wrong and/or missing disks!" error... Do I just need to re-start the system for it to recognize the disk placement? Disks generally need to be assigned to their original logical slot, irrespective of the physical port they are plugged into. So you could move a drive assigned to the disk4 slot (for example) to a different controller, so long as you can go back and assign that same disk to the disk4 slot when you are done. If you want to move disks to different logical slots, that is a different matter. You can exchange 2 drives between two logical slots, and unRAID would give an option to allow you to start the array and swap their positions. I haven't seen anyone post doing it in a while. Should work in any version, and does no harm to try. unRAID will always tell you if the configuration is valid and the array can be started. Sometimes you have to click the little checkbox to get it to start. Not sure of the 5.0 series supports this or not. Link to comment
Baelish Posted July 26, 2011 Author Share Posted July 26, 2011 That makes sense - so in my 5-drive hotswap cage, left-to-right numbered 1-5 (where 1 is the onboard port and 2-5 are on the PCI-e), 1 is currently data, 2 is currently parity, and 3-5 are preclearing. When 3-5 finish preclearing, I'll pull out the disk in #2 and put it in #1, replace #2 with #1, and leave the logical slots as-is in the unRAID menu. UnRAID will read the serial numbers, not care whether #2 is still on its original port or on a different one, and I'll now have the ideal speed setup (parity drive on mobo port) without any need for reformat headache. This sounds amazing if true... I have about 5 hours' preclearing time left, so I'll know pretty soon! Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted July 26, 2011 Share Posted July 26, 2011 Now you've got it. Keep the parity as the parity and disk1 as the disk1. Just move them physically. You never posted which version you are running. With 4.7 you will probably have to go to the devices page and re-assign the parity back to the parity and the disk1 back to being disk1. The disk handling was changed in newer 5.0b versions (maybe at 5.0b6 or so) and those versions should just figure it out. If this is a still new array, you could also just re-assign them logically on the devices page and do the initconfig command but the parity becomes disk1 and disk1 becomes parity meaning parity would have to be built again. So, why waste that 8+ hrs of time when you can just take a few minutes and hardware swap them? Peter Link to comment
Baelish Posted July 26, 2011 Author Share Posted July 26, 2011 Sorry, 4.7 - so I'll physically swap, then go back to the devices page, and logically swap (still a new array... no writes at all yet). Thanks for all the help! Link to comment
lionelhutz Posted July 26, 2011 Share Posted July 26, 2011 Yes, that's what you do. I expect 4.7 will logically swap them by itself after you physically move them, meaning you'll have to swap them back to get the original settings again. But it might do something else, like unassign one or both of them. In the future, you may have to re-arrange the hardware or even replace or change controllers and/or motherboards. After doing that and booting the machine, the main screen may show the disk assignments messed up and if it does then you just put them back to being correct and hit start. As I posted before, this is less likely to be necessary with the new beta versions (and the released 5.0 when it arrives). The cool part is that the main screen shows the expected drive in each slot so it's fairly easy to match the drives to the slots. Peter Link to comment
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