Zenergy Posted April 4, 2023 Share Posted April 4, 2023 My request is simple, I would like to update my little NAS to a slightly larger little NAS. I have always been data lose cautious and always ran raid 6 (I took all the articles in the 2010's seriously, RAID 5 IS DEAD). I currently have the OG 3TB Reds and have recently been gifted a set of newer 4TB Red Pro for the slight boost in speed. From readind i need to upgrade my parity drives first, but my concern is all the instructions posted are for setups with one parity drive and not two. How do I tweak the instuctions for two parity drives? Thank you! Quote Link to comment
Frank1940 Posted April 5, 2023 Share Posted April 5, 2023 3 hours ago, Zenergy said: I have always been data lose cautious and always ran raid 6 Unraid is not RAID --- hence the name. From your screen capture, you have a standard array configuration with two parity drives. You have six drives in your array and this does not make it a RAID 6. As a complete aside and for further information about RAID6, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_6 3 hours ago, Zenergy said: have recently been gifted a set of newer 4TB Red Pro for the slight boost in speed. This 'set' contains how many drives? The answer to this question will be required to tell you how to proceed. The 'boast in speed' might be quite problematic-- depending on what you are measuring than anything else. 1 Quote Link to comment
Zenergy Posted April 5, 2023 Author Share Posted April 5, 2023 14 hours ago, Frank1940 said: Unraid is not RAID --- hence the name. From your screen capture, you have a standard array configuration with two parity drives. You have six drives in your array and this does not make it a RAID 6. As a complete aside and for further information about RAID6, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_6 This 'set' contains how many drives? The answer to this question will be required to tell you how to proceed. The 'boast in speed' might be quite problematic-- depending on what you are measuring than anything else. While I LOVE arguing sematic, this one, i will concede. I am running two parity drives so my question still stands, how do i tweak the instructions to replace both? I received 6x 7200 Red Pro 4TB drives, used, but used far less than my current ones to replace my 6x 5400 3Tb Red. I have assumed that I would see a boost in R/W performance when I replace the drives. Also, I know where these drives were used, so I can trust where they came from. Quote Link to comment
jonitfcfan Posted April 5, 2023 Share Posted April 5, 2023 (edited) 55 minutes ago, Zenergy said: I am running two parity drives so my question still stands, how do i tweak the instructions to replace both? Replace each drive one at a time? That's what I would do, then you'd still have at least one parity drive active while the new one gets (re)built. Unless someone else has a quicker/easier way to do this... Edited April 5, 2023 by jonitfcfan Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted April 5, 2023 Share Posted April 5, 2023 You can also replace both drives at the same time, of course risk is a little higher if there are issues with another disk. Quote Link to comment
Solution Frank1940 Posted April 5, 2023 Solution Share Posted April 5, 2023 3 hours ago, Zenergy said: I received 6x 7200 Red Pro 4TB drives, used, but used far less than my current ones to replace my 6x 5400 3Tb Red. I have assumed that I would see a boost in R/W performance when I replace the drives. You should see a performance increase due the 7200RPM vs 5400RPM... 4 hours ago, Zenergy said: I am running two parity drives so my question still stands, how do i tweak the instructions to replace both? This is what I would do: ====================== I would replace one of the two parity drives first. If that goes successfully with any issues or errors, I would do the second parity drive and one of the data drives. Put that data drive on the shelf after you remove and leave it there as an emergency backup. Then do two more of the data drives. Again, put the drives directly on the shelf. Do the final data drive. Put the drive on the shelf. Now use the server for at least a month to make sure there are no drive issues. Be sure to setup the notifications and a periodic non-correcting parity check. After the second non-correcting parity check that finishes without an error, you can decide what to do with those 3TB drives. ======================= This advice is a combination of the paranoid approach and the optimistic approach. Doing the one parity drive will verify that is not any problems with any other disk in the array. (If a problem crops up with only one disk, the parity replacement will still finish correctly. Obviously, the disk with a problem will have to be the next one to be addressed!) Doing two disks at a time will significantly shorten the time required. It will require twelve to sixteen hours for each rebuild cycle. I hope I am not preaching to the choir but I feel I should make you (and anyone else reading this thread) aware that dual parity in itself is not a backup for the only copy of irreplaceable data. See here for a discussion about that subject: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/130726-unraid-os-version-6113-available/page/5/#comment-1206692 1 Quote Link to comment
Zenergy Posted April 5, 2023 Author Share Posted April 5, 2023 5 hours ago, jonitfcfan said: Replace each drive one at a time? That's what I would do, then you'd still have at least one parity drive active while the new one gets (re)built. Unless someone else has a quicker/easier way to do this... Thank you everyone for the advice!!! What is tripping me up is that the insutctions say the parity drive can not be bigger than the data drives. So when I have two parity drives, how do I do one and not the other? Quote Link to comment
Hoopster Posted April 5, 2023 Share Posted April 5, 2023 4 minutes ago, Zenergy said: What is tripping me up is that the insutctions say the parity drive can not be bigger than the data drives. If the instructions you are referring to actually says the parity drive(s) cannot be bigger than the data drives, that is incorrect. Parity drive(s) must always be at least as large as the largest data drive. Parity drives can be larger than all the data drives if you wish to leave room for data drive growth. At one time, I had an 8TB parity drive in my system while all the data drives were 3-4 TB in size. This allowed me to replace all the data drives (up to 8TB in size) without replacing the parity drive. Now I have a system with an 8TB parity drive and all the data drives are also 8TB in size. 1 Quote Link to comment
Frank1940 Posted April 6, 2023 Share Posted April 6, 2023 3 hours ago, Zenergy said: What is tripping me up is that the insutctions say the parity drive can not be bigger than the data drives. No--- Quote from manual: Quote Any parity disk you add must be at least as large as the largest data drive (although it can be larger). If you have two parity drives then it is not required that they be the same size although it is required that they both follow the rule of being at least as large as the largest data drive. All data disks must be equal to (or smaller) in size to the smallest parity disk. That is why you have to replace the two parity disks before you can add the larger data disks. (However, you should be able to upgrade the 3TB parity drive and a 3Tb data drive at the same time since with dual parity, you can replace any two drives at the same time. But the replacement parity drive must equal to (or larger) than the largest data drive.) You could have dual parity consisting of a 8TB parity drive and 16Tb parity drive but then all of your data drives would have to be smaller than 8TB! Here is the link to the section of the User Manual for Data Storage: https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Storage_Management Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted April 6, 2023 Share Posted April 6, 2023 12 hours ago, Zenergy said: What is tripping me up is that the insutctions say the parity drive can not be bigger than the data drives. It would be useful if you could point to where it says this as it is a mistake that needs correcting it should say a Parity drive cannot be smaller that the biggest data drive. Quote Link to comment
Zenergy Posted April 29, 2023 Author Share Posted April 29, 2023 Just a quick short out to all that helped me! I took the low and slow approach, and I am fully upgraded. cheers! Quote Link to comment
JackSafari Posted April 29, 2023 Share Posted April 29, 2023 (edited) Thanks for this thread. I am about to upgrade a similar hardware configuration. I shall be going from 4TB drive config to a 12TB config. Currently I have 2x4TB parity drives, 3x4TB data drives. Existing array is 80% full out of 12TB total. I will be upgrading to 2x12TB parity drives, 1x12TB data drive (new), 3x4TB data drives(existing array). My plan is to replace both parity drives one drive at a time, then add the new 12TB data drive to the existing array of 3x4TB drives. The config also has 1TB NVMe cache drive, 64gb ram. 5600 6 core AMD CPU If there is any further information I need to know, please advise. Edited April 29, 2023 by JackSafari Quote Link to comment
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