December 13, 20232 yr My NAS has 4 drive bays. I currently have an array of 3 drives (2 data and 1 parity). In addition to the 3 drives, I also have a 4th external drive that had about 4TB of data in it. I connected it to the NAS using a USB cable and mounted the drive using unassigned devices and used Krusader to move the data to my array shares. Now I have formatted this 4th hard drive on my macbook and shucked it and am trying to use it in the 4th bay. I stopped the array, added the drive to the bay, and am trying to add it to my array. But am running into the following error: You may not add new disk(s) and also remove existing disk(s). Does someone know what I might be doing wrong ? Note: All the 4 drives are 14TB Another thing I noted is that this drive is under 'Disk Devices' section as opposed to unassigned devices. I am assuming that when I "Mount" an Unassigned Device, it makes it a "Disk Device" ? Also, when I select it as Parity 2 unraid is fine with it. But when I select it as my 3rd data disk, it won't allow me to proceed.
December 13, 20232 yr Author Solution SOLVED: Here's the solution: Went into Tools -> New Config -> Selected "Preserve current assignments" to "All" -> Checked the box that says "I want to do this" and clicked Apply. When I went back to the Main tab, it now allowed me to add the 4th disk like I was adding it for the first time. Basically looks like what it does is that if the disk has never been used by Unraid before then it will be partitioned to UnRAID standards. If it is previously used by Unraid then its contents are left intact. Parity is also set to be invalid and thus need rebuilding.
December 13, 20232 yr Community Expert For anyone else reading this thread, New Config isn't the normal way to add a disk to the array. @cruzerkk New Config isn't normally needed to add a disk. I suspect you already had a missing disk and Unraid wouldn't let you add a disk when another disk was already missing. Perhaps you previously assigned a disk to the array and removed it without setting a new array configuration (New Config). If you remove a disk without New Config then the missing disk would mean you had no parity protection.
December 13, 20232 yr Author Quote I suspect you already had a missing disk and Unraid wouldn't let you add a disk when another disk was already missing. Perhaps you previously assigned a disk to the array and removed it without setting a new array configuration (New Config). I believe that you are right. Although, I am not quite sure why unraid made the disk a part of the configuration in the first place. I connected the disk to my NAS server externally and used Unassigned Devices plugin and mounted it. Then used Krusader to move existing data to the array. Didn't know that this would cause unraid to think that the external drive is a part of the configuration, especially, even after I completely formatted it and inserted it into the 4th bay. Quote If you remove a disk without New Config then the missing disk would mean you had no parity protection. I never completed parity sync process till that point. Reason being I wanted to move my data over to the array sooner (since I had close to 7TB). Although, I had selected one of the 3 disks as Parity in my config, I had paused the sync. Now I am running the parity sync finally after it accepted my 4th drive. .
December 13, 20232 yr Community Expert 42 minutes ago, cruzerkk said: I never completed parity sync process till that point. That's why you could not add the new disk, it's not possible to add a disk while parity is invalid.
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