2 new drives, which order?

[ideasman]

Hi guys,

 

My current unraid array consists of 6x 4TB hard drives. I've bought two new 8TB drives and my plan was to replace the 4TB parity with one of the 8TB, wait for it to build, and then upgrade the next oldest 4TB drive.

 

Before I had a chance to do anything, one of the non-parity 4TB drives has flagged errors - so I'm not sure my plan above is the best way forward.

 

Am i able to swap out the failing 4TB drive with one of the new 8TB drives, let it rebuild. Once that's complete, replace the 4TB parity with the other 8TB and have all the space available?

 

Or is there another way that would be better?

 

Thanks

 

[JonathanM]

Assuming you assessed the situation correctly, parity swap is what you need. If any of your other drives isn't able to be read during the procedure you will lose data, so you really want to be sure of what are doing. If you're at all hesitant, attach your diagnostics to the next post in this thread so someone can look things over for you.

[ideasman]

Hi @JonathanM,

 

Thanks for the reply. The disks are still readable but I'm just a little cautious as Disk 3 has an error:

 

edit: i made use of the parity swap feature! at first it wouldn't let me do it with a "too many disks missing" error but i realised i needed to start the array once with the erroring drive removed/unassigned.

 

After that, I:

• stopped the array
• disabled array autostart, vms and docker
• shutdown the server
• took out the erroring 4tb drive
• installed one new 8tb
• started up the server
• set the new 8tb disk as parity
• set the old parity disk as an array member
• the "start" button confirmed that it would copy the parity from the old 4tb parity disk to the new 8tb
• after that completed (10 hours?), the array was started and the old parity disk was being rebuilt to replace the original erroring disk

 

Once the old parity disk was rebuilt as an array member, i shutdown the server again and replaced another one of the 4tb drives (which had a few smart errors but was still working) with the second brand new 8tb drive.

 

Thats ticking away now.. gotta say i really do love unraid

 

Edited June 4, 2023 by ideasman