so i finally copied all my data to the 15 disks array, calculated parity overnight (16hrs for nine 500GB and five 1TB disks), and all is well so far.

 

however, it just occurred to me that i'm going to want to stack the unRAID horizonal in a rack under my new DELL PowerEdge server...since i arranged the disks vertically left to right, top to bottom (1-5, 5-10, 11-15), and will want to do it the other way around (being German and kind of anal), so that it's top to bottom, left to right, i was wondering what the correct procedure is to do that without having to re-calculate parity?

do a screen shot of your devices webpage (landscape works best to me). This will give you drive number assignments and show you the serial numbers.

Shut down the array and re-arrange the drives like you want. turn it back on. it will come up with errors (most likely unassigned). DO NOT START THE ARRAY!! Go to the devices screen and assign, by serial number, the drives to the original drive numbers. Then you can start the array and you'll be fine. Physical location does not matter as long as they are logically assigned to the same drives numbers within unRAID.

aha, i see...or at least i think i know what you mean...well, i guess i'll take this baby apart (i have to change the fans in the back-planes as well), put it back together, and report back.

 

thanks, my fellow unRAIDer!

It is most important to get the parity drive assigned to the parity slot.  Other than that, as described... print the assignment page from the browser before, assign the same serial number drives to the same logical slots in the array and you will be fine.

 

Actually, other than the parity drive I think you can assign the others in just about any order you wish to the data slots.  I seem to remember that the code can deal with finding you have swapped drives around as long as all are present and the parity drive is still assigned the parity role.

 

Joe L.

Joe L.,

 

One reason for making the assignments to the same slots is user shares, if they are defined. They are based on the logical drive assignments, so those could be screwed up I would think if you don't match the assignments on the device screen. But like you said, Parity is priority!

Joe L.,

 

One reason for making the assignments to the same slots is user shares, if they are defined. They are based on the logical drive assignments, so those could be screwed up I would think if you don't match the assignments on the device screen. But like you said, Parity is priority!

It is true that if a file used to exist on /mnt/disk1/Movies and you subsequently assigned the disk to logical slot 3 the file would then exist on /mnt/disk3/Movies.  In both cases, it would be visible in /mnt/user/Movies and in the "\\tower\Movies" user-share from a windows machine via SAMBA.

 

If it was important that the file still exist on the same disk share, then you must make the same logical assignments of the data drives, regardless of the disk controller they are subsequently connected to as you manage your array.

 

Joe L.

thanks ya'll.

 

i'll have to do the fan-exchange in the SATA backplanes this weekend and will try to follow your advice...however, since doing parity "only" took 16 hours, i am not all that concerned anymore...if it's something that can be re-calculated from scratch overnight, then it really isn't that big a deal in my mind...once everything is in its place, i'm not going to have to dick with this for a while...

 

on we go.

I was speaking more on the diskshare configuration pages and your "include/exclude" settings there. Yes, unRAID will pickup the top-level directories and make them user shares. sorry for not being clear.

got ya! i see what you mean.

 

well, for the time being i put everything into an "unRAID" user-share sub-directory in order to have to map only one giant "drive"...works OK so far, since - contrary to my expectation - not *all* disks spin up when i access sub-folders within that share...if i loose that user-share assignment in the course of my swapping around, it'll be easy to re-create...but it's good to know that those user-shares are to be kept an eye on...thx.