Not sure if the smartest move

[ChristianL]

Hello all, newbee here with unRAID.

 

I have an AMD NAS setup. Right now only fours discs; 2x4T and 2x6T for parity. I'm not counting the system yet a production and have my important data still off that system.

 

Today I put a HBA 9311 8i in and changed the cables from motherboard SATA to the HBA. Worked smooth; array started with valid parity.

 

Then I had a cosmetic thing to fix as one of the 4T discs was positioned in a slot far away from the other tree discs so I decided I want to move the disk to reflect the position in the cage same as slots in unRAID.

 

I used the "New Config" tool but for whatever reason the Parity 1 and Parity 2 now get rebuild at the same time. Is that a problem or will the parity overall still be consistent after those 7 hours even when P1 and P2 are written at same time.

 

[itimpi]

43 minutes ago, ChristianL said:

I used the "New Config" tool but for whatever reason the Parity 1 and Parity 2 now get rebuild at the same time. Is that a problem or will the parity overall still be consistent after those 7 hours even when P1 and P2 are written at same time.

It is quite normal for both parity drives to be rebuilt at the same time after the actions you say you took.   The New Config tool always assumes by default that the changes you made to drive assignments will invalidate the current parity drive(s).

 

If you think about it in normal running any time you write new data both parity disks have to be updated accordingly so writing to both of them at the same time is quite a normal occurrence.

[Kilrah]

Note that you did not have to do anything, unraid doesn't care where drives are connected to.

[itimpi]

21 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Note that you did not have to do anything, unraid doesn't care where drives are connected to.

 

True if only the physical connection was moved.   Was not clear to me if any change was made in the drive assignments at the Unraid level which would have invalidated parity.

[ChristianL]

Thanks @itimpi and @Kilrah,

 

and yes, I moved the drive assignment of one data drive inside the unRAID list. Understood that the physical connection is not relevant for unRAID as the S/N of the drive is more important (I like that concept quite a bit).

 

When I freshly build the server I first inserted only one data disk and placed it in slot 11. My beginner mind thought that this disk would not be added to the array and remain a single drive for initial data transfer. Until I understood unRAID is not a RAID and I just added the parity drives and other data drive and build the current array. 

Parity 1 and 2, and data disk 1 remained in their slots at the begin of the list. Now I had that huge list in the drive list which looked ugly and long-term confusing. And since I',m still learning I thought: heck, move the drive and see what happen (after reading some postings pointing to the "New config" tool and special situation with parity 2 drive setups. And the fact that parity 2 is position-sensitve of drives in the list. 

 

(My next mistake was that the first data disk I entered I formatted in ZFS while the second drive is XFS; but I guess I will not touch this for now as it technically not much matter). 

[Kilrah]

Ah yes, read that as physical slot but it might indeed have been GUI slot.

[ChristianL]

Just to close the loop: Parity rebuild on both devices finished in the expected 9 hours; temps of the HBA remain at 53C as per storcli64. There is a 12cm fan above pushing quite some air over the cooling fins. Devices in the sequence as desired in the assignment list. 

 

 

Rebooted twice to see and array is up. I guess now I can add few more spinner.