How to empty a disk drive then shift it to parity?

[FlyingTexan]

I have 50TB of free space so want to take one of my 14TB drives and move it to parity. Right now I only have one.  Unbalance doesn't seem to want to work. Keeps saying the /data file is too big for any one disk even though they're all selected.  Is there no simply way to just move the data off a drive to the array and have remove it?

[dboonthego]

I haven't used unbalance and it's been several years since I've copied a disk, but I did it manually from console making sure to specify disks, not shares.  Assuming destination disk2 has enough free space.  Like this:

 

rsync -avPX /mnt/disk1/ /mnt/disk2/

 

 

[FlyingTexan]

Ok but I have 50TB free spread out over several disks. It's not like I have a 14TB free. How would I move that data to other disks?

[dboonthego]

Will you be replacing the disk? Or reducing your data disk count?  Assuming you're reducing.  To convert your 14tb to parity, the exsiting data needs to go somewhere else. 

 

I'm sure Unbalance makes this task easy, but to do it manually, target some disks with the most free space and copy some source directories that will fit on destination.  You might have to create the destination subfolder first.

 

Same command with subs included should work and you should consider your share settings to make sure the dest disk is included in your configuration.

 

You'll have to repeat until you find a new home for all the files.  Once data is copied, you can unassign and assign to parity.

 

rsync -avPX /mnt/disk1/subfolder/ /mnt/disk2/subfolder/