Removing old drives, good time to upgrade Parity drive?

[KimoB]

I am in the process of adding additional storage into my array, where i have 5x4TB, 1x8TB and 1 14TB parity.  3 of my 4TB are over 9 years old, and while they are chugging along, it is time for me to retire them to a second unraid box I use as an additional backup source.

 

I was planning on adding another 14TB drive, and moving data off from the old 4TBs to the remaining 4TB and 8TB drives.  During my preclear of the 14TB (on my other unraid box), it started throwing out errors, so I RMAed it.  The company did not have any 14TB available, so they sent me a 16TB.

 

Since I would need to rebuild my parity anyways when I remove any of the 4TBs, would it be OK to do the following?

 

1.  Stop array

2.  Make note of my config and then reset it

3.  Make sure my new parity (16tb) disk is set (after I did a preclear of course)

4.  Select my existing remaining data drives that I want to keep (but do not include the old 14TB parity drive)

5  Star array.

6.  Wait till the parity is rebuilt

7.  Go through the process on adding the old 14TB parity drive as a new data drive.

 

Would that work?  Can I skip step 7 and just include the 14TB as one of the data drives?  

 

Thank you for any advice.

[Frank1940]

I would do it basically as you have planned. 

 

The only thing I might do is to preclear that 14TB while you rebuilt parity on the new 16TB drive.  Then when you add it as a new data disk it will be ready for use as soon as it is formatted after you added it to the array.   (Notion the underlined AFTER!!!)

[trurl]

If you include old parity as a data disk when you New Config, then it will already be part of the array that new parity is synced with. Then you can format old parity and it will be ready for access. No need to preclear it or to wait for Unraid to clear it after adding it