Replacing Entire Drive Array

[gitbox]

My NAS currently has five 2TB drives and I want to replace them with three 4TB drives. What is the easiest and most reliable way to do this? I already have a 4TB parity drive and the NAS is about 2/3 full.

 

Thanks,

Robin

[Energen]

Assuming that your NAS is full and you can't add any new empty drives you're only real option is to move as much data as you can off 1 or 2 of your existing drives onto the other drives, consolodate to as few existing drives that you can.

 

Then add as many new drives that you can replacing the ones you've emptied off.

 

Then repeat that process with the remaining 2TB drives, moving that data to the new empty drives.

 

It's a bit of a hassle, but it's just about the only way to do it.

 

You can use the unblance plugin to simplify the process a little bit to consolodate data.

 

[ConnerVT]

Replace one of the 2TB drives with a 4TB drive.  Allow the drive to be rebuilt from parity.

Repeat, until all 3 4TB drives have been installed.

 

Then follow the Shrink Array procedure from the Unraid docs.  There is a couple ways to do this, but in your case (small capacity drives) the easiest would be to move the data on the drives to be removed to the new 4TB drives, remove/uninstall the drives from the array, and rebuild parity.

[gitbox]

Thanks! I like the remove, replace and rebuild idea. 

 

Some of my current drives are still Reiser FS. I would like to change them to XFS during this swap. If the removed 2TB RFS drive is replaced with a 4TB drive and rebuilt, it would retain the file system, correct? Any way around this? Or will this be two independent processes?

 

Now that I think about it, I only have two RFS drives. The other three are XFS so I guess I could swap the 2TB XFS drives for 4TB then move the data off the RFS drives to them. Is that doable?

 

Sorry for all the questions and thanks for the help!

 

-Robin

[ConnerVT]

I don't have first hand experience with switching from ReiserFS to XFS, I came to Unraid after XFS was the default.  I did recently upgrade my 6TB drives to 16TB, and shrank  my array.  So confident in my answers for that part.

 

My feeling is that as long as you change the Disk Setting File system type: from the default "auto" to "XFS" before formatting the drive (checking the format box at starting the array, after assigning the new drive) it *should* format to XFS and rebuild.  (Data is data).  But I will defer to @JorgeB or one of the true Unraid gurus to confirm if I'm correct.

 

Of course, swapping one XFS drive for another should definitely not be an issue.  I would still manually set File system type: to XFS anyway.  That's my common practice.

Edited June 27, 2023 by ConnerVT
speeling

[itimpi]

10 hours ago, gitbox said:

Now that I think about it, I only have two RFS drives. The other three are XFS so I guess I could swap the 2TB XFS drives for 4TB then move the data off the RFS drives to them. Is that doable?

Yes.

[JorgeB]

36 minutes ago, ConnerVT said:

My feeling is that as long as you change the Disk Setting File system type: from the default "auto" to "XFS" before formatting the drive (checking the format box at starting the array, after assigning the new drive) it *should* format to XFS and rebuild.  (Data is data).

That won't work, rebuild from parity can only rebuild the original filesystem, if you format the disk with a different one all data there will be deleted and parity updated to reflect that.

[ConnerVT]

Thank you JorgeB.  This is why I asked for your input.

 

Even more important than the things you know is knowing what things you don't!  😁

[gitbox]

One last question. I have precleared all three of my 4TB drives so I am ready to make the swaps. I am going to remove one 2TB XFS drive and replace it with a precleared 4TB drive and then rebuild the array. The question is, when the rebuild is done, will the 4TB drive have 4TB of storage or 2TB since the old one was that size? Does the rebuild replicate the capacity also?

 

Thanks again,

Robin

[itimpi]

3 minutes ago, gitbox said:

One last question. I have precleared all three of my 4TB drives so I am ready to make the swaps. I am going to remove one 2TB XFS drive and replace it with a precleared 4TB drive and then rebuild the array. The question is, when the rebuild is done, will the 4TB drive have 4TB of storage or 2TB since the old one was that size? Does the rebuild replicate the capacity also?

 

Thanks again,

Robin

 

The rebuild starts by replicating exactly the existing disk contents, and then when it completes that stage the file system is expanded to fill the whole disk.  It is possible that you may have to reboot to get the file system expansion to take place although in theory the reboot should not be necessary.

[gitbox]

Thanks itimipi. It did exactly as you said.

 

I now have two of the three 2TB XFS drives swapped and rebuilt with the 4TB drives - working on the third. The last step will be moving all the data (2.5TB) from the two ReiserFS drives to the three 4TB XFS drives. I plan on using the unBALANCE plugin unless there is a better way.

 

Yay! I'll finally be rid of ReiserFS.

 

Thanks to all who replied,

Robin