Relatively stupid question here, but really the only truly stupid ones are the unasked.

 

I've got 7 decent speed HDs in my array. I've got 3 drives that, well, aren't. They're older (3+ years at 24/7 usage) 500 gig drives that .. I just don't trust anymore.

 

I want to remove these. I have two thoughts on how to do so.

 

A) Copy all contents of those drives to one of my larger drives, then shutdown, remove the crap drives, restart and do a parity rebuild.

 

B) remove drives do a parity rebuild. I'd have to do this one drive at a time.

 

C) copy drive contents to my desktop, remove drives, rebuild parity, then copy files over.

 

I'd Assume A & C are the same, just differing which drive they are copied to. Which would be the suggested way? Ideally I'm looking to lower the possibility of data loss.  I'm thinking C would decrease the chance of loss, but that's just a gut feeling (having it in multiple separate locations.

 

As an added bonus this gives me 3 empty slots!

 

---- Edit.

 

Plan - verify parity. Copy data from older drives to desktop, shutdown, remove drives, rebuild parity, copy files from desktop to unraid.

I'd just copy from the old disks to the newer disks. I'd do it on the server directly using the cp command. rsync could also be used to copy and verify if you want to figure that one out.

 

Then, do a parity check, double check the remaining disks are good by looking at their SMART reports, remove the older disks and build parity.

 

Peter

So, essentially same thing as I was thinking in Option A. Copy to internal drive.

 

I know the SMART on all the newer drives are good (I'm kinda paranoid that way). Either way, won't be able to complete the second step till the parity verification is complete, I'd prefer to know parity is current & valid today vs a month ago. In about 20 hours parity should complete. (yea, that's one of the reasons I want to get rid of the old drives).

 

Thanks, it's nice to have a second brain in on a operation.

It is possible to remove multiple drives without losing parity protection, but the procedure is somewhat complex.  Since you know all your newer drives are healthy, I would just remove the three 500GB drives then run the initconfig command and build new parity.  Easy.