Recommendations on the best practice to reduce the number of drives in my array in a timely manner.

[spofoe]

Looking for a recommendation or best practice to reduce the number of hard drives in unRAID. Right now, I have 7 disks with 68TB of storage plus a 16TB parity drive. I have purchased and not installed 4 additional 16TB drives. I would like to get back down to five total drives, all 16TB for 64TB of storage with a parity drive. I understand the process to switch out let’s say one of my 8TB drives and have the server rebuild that data onto the 16TB drive I will replace it with.

 

What is the best way to move all the data on a disk that will not have a one-one swap and will be permanently removed to the other drives across the array? Ideally I would like to move all of the data from drives 5-7 to drives 1-4, and then start to swap out my 8TB drives. I have already added one 16TB drive to make sure I have enough space to move everything around. 

 

1. Do I go to my share settings and exclude the disks that I wish to remove?

2. Do I use the CMD line or Krusader Docker to manually move all the files off a drive and onto another one?

3. Do I remove the drive from the system and let unRAID rebuild the data onto the other drives?

4. Is there another way that is more particle?

 

Thank you for your help in advance.

[Hoopster]

3 minutes ago, spofoe said:

Looking for a recommendation or best practice to reduce the number of hard drives in unRAID

The shrink array process is designed for this.

[spofoe]

Awesome, thank you so much Hoopster. I was not searching for the right terms. This is exactly what I was looking for. 

[Hoopster]

22 minutes ago, spofoe said:

What is the best way to move all the data on a disk that will not have a one-one swap and will be permanently removed to the other drives across the array?

The Unbalance plugin will let you consolidate data from multiple drives onto one or more drives.