Issue Swapping Parity Drive and Adding New Drive for Expansion

[Edge9028]

Hello, Unraid Community,

I'm facing a challenging issue while attempting to reconfigure my Unraid disk setup and would greatly appreciate any insights or suggestions you might have.

 

My current setup includes two 16TB drives: one designated as a parity drive and the other used for storage. My goal is to repurpose the current 16TB parity drive as an additional storage drive and introduce a new 18TB drive as the new parity drive.

 

Here's a step-by-step breakdown of what I've tried:

 

With the Unraid array offline, I attempted to remove the existing 16TB parity drive from its role and subsequently add it back as a standard storage drive.

 

Following this, I tried to add the new 18TB drive as the new parity drive.

 

However, at each attempt, regardless of the array being offline and performing these actions in distinct steps with restarts in between (i.e., removing the parity drive, restarting, and then trying to add the new 18TB drive as parity), I encounter the following error message:

 

"You may not add new disk(s) and also remove existing disk(s)."

 

I made sure to attempt these changes with the array stopped to avoid any data integrity issues. Despite this precaution and attempting the removal and addition of drives as separate actions, the error persists, preventing me from completing the reconfiguration.

 

Could someone please provide guidance on where I might be going wrong, or if there's a specific procedure I should follow to achieve this configuration without triggering the error? Any advice on steps I might have missed or alternative approaches to successfully swap the parity drive and expand storage would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your time and assistance!

 

Thanks

[itimpi]

You have to make these two steps and let one complete before attempting the other.  I would recommend upgrading the parity drive first.

 

[Edge9028]

Thanks,

 

I have unassigned the old parity, in the process of upgrading parity drive now, as recommended. I will wait until this finished (looks to be roughly a day) and then I will report back.

 

Hopefully there's no issues bringing the the previous parity drive into the array for storage.

 

Thanks for your help.

[itimpi]

7 hours ago, Edge9028 said:

Hopefully there's no issues bringing the the previous parity drive into the array for storage.

Should not be, although you when you add it you will need to wait for Unraid to Clear it (to avoid it affecting parity) before you will be able to format it and start using it to store files.

[Edge9028]

Thanks guys, followed @Edge9028 advice, and everything went according to plan!