adding a 2nd parity drive and adding additional drives

[russo]

Hi All,

 

few questions:

 

I need recommendations on the sequence of adding a 2nd parity drive and 2 other regular drives.  These 2 additional drives will simply replace 2 smaller drives.  What is the recommendation for this process?  I would like to try to minimize downtime.

 

on a side note.  I have 2 Unraid servers (mirroring each other.)  Nothing is mission critical.  Is it recommended to keep this setup or  can I simply eliminate the backup server and  go with adding a 2nd parity drive?

 

regarding parity drives.  I currently have a 16tb parity drive. I know that the parity drive has to be  larger or same size as your regular drives.  Can I add a 18TB parity drive and run a 16,18 setup or do i need to match the 16tb parity drive?

 

thanks

 

Edited January 20 by russo

[trurl]

Answering in reverse order.

 

Each parity disk must be at least as large as the largest data disk, but they don't have to be the same size.

 

Parity (even dual) is never a substitute for backup whether using Unraid or some more traditional RAID implementation.

 

Assuming you want to keep the data from the drives you are replacing, you must rebuild them onto the replacements.

 

With single parity, you can only rebuild one at a time. With dual parity, you could rebuild 2 at a time. But of course, you have to build parity2 before you have dual parity. You could rebuild one data disk and build parity2 at the same time.

 

There is technically no downtime during any of this, but file access will affect rebuild performance, and rebuild will affect file access performance.

 

All this assumes you don't have some actual problems you haven't mentioned or noticed. Be careful with connections. If you want us to take a look attach diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread.

[russo]

thank you, Trurl

 

you've been helpful

 

is there any issues adding the parity drive at the same time as the 2 additional regular drives?

[trurl]

Just now, russo said:

is there any issues adding the parity drive at the same time as the 2 additional regular drives?

I never suggested you could do that. Let me know if you need further explanation or more detailed instructions.

[trurl]

7 minutes ago, trurl said:

I never suggested you could do that. Let me know if you need further explanation or more detailed instructions.

Since you marked this as the "solution" I'm concerned that you may not know how to proceed.

[russo]

I've done some reading.  I think i'll take the safe route and do one upgrade at a time.

[itimpi]

40 minutes ago, russo said:

thank you, Trurl

 

you've been helpful

 

is there any issues adding the parity drive at the same time as the 2 additional regular drives?

Earlier on you said these were to replace 2 existing drives so they were not additional drives but replacement drives.  If so then it needs to be done in 2 steps