Multiple maintenance items - order of operations/best practice?

[another_hoarder]

Hi guys,

 

My Unraid box is a hodge-podge of previously loved consumer hardware which is totally fine for my needs, runs about 25 dockers and gives me 49GB of usable NAS space on top of Unraid 6.9.2 with one SSD cache drive (docker + VMs) and one SSD unassigned device (dumping ground for downloads) (screenshots below).

 

Everything has been working more or less perfectly for a long time (aside from the silly SMART wakeups that I've never been able to find a solution to other than "it's fixed in 6.10+).  Everything is in xfs.

 

But like with everything else, I feel it's maintenance time after ~2 years of not touching this at all.

 

Here's what I'm thinking

1. I got a brand new 18TB WD Gold, which I'd like to make my parity drive.
2. My two semi-ancient 1.5TB drives get retired from the array entirely. (-3TB storage)

3. Old parity 14TB becomes a data drive.  So net gain of 11TB.

4. Upgrade from 6.9.2 to latest?
 

Can someone help me with the best order of operations / or point me to some guides?  I'd love to minimize the work but ultimately I'd rather play it safe, too - about 15TB of my 40TB used is backed up, but restoring the other 25TB, while not impossible, could take a very long time.

 

I was thinking of transferring out the 3TB of data since I have space for it, removing the drives (I remember there's a way of doing that), then maybe adding the 18TB drive (do I still have to preclear?) as a 2nd parity drive, waiting for that to rebuild, then removing the 14tb and removing 2nd parity drive, allowing that to rebuild, then adding the 14tb drive as a data drive, and ... allowing that to rebuild.  Or is there a better process. 

Also, upgrade before or after?

 

Any comments would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks!

 

[apandey]

if it was me, I would so it in this order:

1. upgrade unraid version - so that all other operations benefit from running on latest software, and you are not left dealing with any older bugs that may be less supported

2. replace parity with 18TB, rebuild. Don't add a 2nd parity if you don't intend to keep 2 parity drives. Just shutdown, take out 14TB parity and replace it with 18TB, assign it to parity slot and start the array to rebuild parity

3. replace one of the 1.5TB data drives with the 14TB. If you want, you can move data off that drive, but its not really needed. Follow https://wiki.unraid.net/Replacing_a_Data_Drive

4. Move data off the remaining 1.5TB drive and then remove it from the array. Follow https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array

[another_hoarder]

That was simpler than I expected and totally makes sense.  Will follow this to the letter.  Many thanks, @apandey 🙌