January 29, 201214 yr Bought a 2TB 7200RPM WD Caviar Black to become my parity disk for more speed. Currently: 1. WD Green 2TB (Parity) 2. WD Green 1TB (Time Machine) 3. WD Green 2TB (Photo Library) 4. WD Green 2TB (Media Share) 5. Samsung 1.5TB (Media Share) 6. Hitachi 1TB (Cache) WD Black TB replaces disk 1, that disk replaces disk 5, disk 5 replaces disk 2. How would you guys go about this? I'm currently thinking I'll run parity check whilst it's pre-clearing the 2TB. Then pull the parity drive out and replace it with the 2TB Black -> reconstruct parity and double check it by running parity check again. Now I'm stuck at this bit, I don't really want to use parity to reconstruct the 1.5TB on the 2TB disk because I have the data there already and I can't verify the rebuild... Can I pull a drive out (say cache) then copy the 1.5TB to the 2TB directly block by block? I need to then copy the 1TB to the 1.5TB drive in the same manner. Thoughts?
January 29, 201214 yr WD Black TB replaces disk 1, that disk replaces disk 5, disk 5 replaces disk 2 Would it not be eaier to replace parity with your new drive and then swap the old parity with disk 2? No need to reconstuct disk 5 then
January 30, 201214 yr Maybe we're missing something. Wouldn't disk2 be free to do whatever once the old parity disk went in it's place? Me thinks ljh89 is dead on. Replace parity with new disk but leave old parity on server, rebuild parity, remove disk2 and rebuild with old parity disk. It's only 2 rebuilds vs the 3 originally outlined. What we miss?
January 30, 201214 yr Author Maybe we're missing something. Wouldn't disk2 be free to do whatever once the old parity disk went in it's place? Me thinks ljh89 is dead on. Replace parity with new disk but leave old parity on server, rebuild parity, remove disk2 and rebuild with old parity disk. It's only 2 rebuilds vs the 3 originally outlined. What we miss? Yes you are missing something I want the additional 500GB to be used for Media. Disk 1 and disk 2 do not contain shares (I write directly to the disk for performance reasons) and I don't want the Media data sprawling across all the disks. I think I'm going to buy a PCI-E SATA card, put the parity + TM disks on there, and perhaps the cache drive too.
January 31, 201214 yr Maybe we're missing something. Wouldn't disk2 be free to do whatever once the old parity disk went in it's place? Me thinks ljh89 is dead on. Replace parity with new disk but leave old parity on server, rebuild parity, remove disk2 and rebuild with old parity disk. It's only 2 rebuilds vs the 3 originally outlined. What we miss? He didn't miss anything, I would do it ljh89/daniel.boone's way. Step 1. Insert the New Drive 2. Start up UnRaid, 3. Stop the array 4. Assign new drive as the parity drive (leave old parity un-assigned) 5. start array and rebuild parity. 6. When #5 is DONE, shutdown unraid. 7. Remove Disk 2 - put in mac book or wherever 8. Start UnRaid 9. When array doesn't start due to missing disk 2, Assign the old Parity drive as disk 2 and rebuild. Once rebuild is done, the new larger disk 2 will be there with all the data.
January 31, 201214 yr I think i understand now what you are saying about the "extra 500"... if you must go that way, then you will need to rebuild the array 3x, or copy data.
January 31, 201214 yr With unRaid as your means of managing the files you either swap and rebuild one at a time or swap and rebuild parity, add the old parity drive to array and move files between drives using some gui or console. You could use Rsync to help with the process as well. Personally I would move files manually using the console. Three rebuilds in a row just doesn't seem like a good idea. There is a bug in the 4.7 related to drive rebuilds. I don't recall you mentioning the version but it's just another thing to look out for. If your considering partition copy software I pretty sure it will not work. UnRaid prepares drives in a unique way. I don't believe partition copy software works the same.
January 31, 201214 yr If your considering partition copy software I pretty sure it will not work. UnRaid prepares drives in a unique way. I don't believe partition copy software works the same. If you use software that does a block by block copy it "should" work. but only to the same size drive I would bet. Try it, I'm now curious (just don't do it with data can cannot do without )
January 31, 201214 yr Author Block by block does work on drives of different sizes, the data just needs to be less than the capacity of the copied drive. Also need to make sure it's compressed down (i.e. defragged!) but this was on OS X. I've decided to buy a PCI-E 2 port card which means I can add a 6th drive to the array and then copy the 1.5TB to the 2TB and then the 1TB to the 1.5TB. Bit of a faff but rebuilding 3 times seems abit silly!
January 31, 201214 yr Block by block does work on drives of different sizes, the data just needs to be less than the capacity of the copied drive. Also need to make sure it's compressed down (i.e. defragged!) but this was on OS X. I've decided to buy a PCI-E 2 port card which means I can add a 6th drive to the array and then copy the 1.5TB to the 2TB and then the 1TB to the 1.5TB. Note, this is not OS X, copying a drive of a different size by block May Not work (as unraid has parity to worry about, etc)! If you run pre-clear on the new drive, then did a block-by-block copy that MIGHT work. Bit of a faff but rebuilding 3 times seems abit silly! You asked how it could be done with your current setup and the processes by which you wanted. Copying over the data then doing a parity rebuild is likely your "safest" method.
February 1, 201214 yr Note, this is not OS X, copying a drive of a different size by block May Not work (as unraid has parity to worry about, etc)! If you run pre-clear on the new drive, then did a block-by-block copy that MIGHT work. I figured when the block copy expanded to fit the new drive the benefit of the preclear might be lost. I would not recommend someone trying this on anything other than a testing capacity. I do see space for a new app here though. I wonder if it would be possible to add a block copy function to the preclear script. Something that would zero the freespace after the block copy was complete.
February 6, 201214 yr Author Well, I was lucky! Transferred the data off the 1.5TB drive onto the pre-cleared 2TB parity, ran pre clear script on it, and then it promptly died!!! How lucky is that!?!
February 8, 201214 yr Well, I was lucky! Transferred the data off the 1.5TB drive onto the pre-cleared 2TB parity, ran pre clear script on it, and then it promptly died!!! How lucky is that!?! Sorry little confused. I hope the drive died after the preclear but it sounds like it died after the data transfer. I'd say your lucky either way. Easy enough to replace and pickup where you left off. Parity drive is still good right. Replace the failed drive ASAP. You wouldn't want to have another issue while a drive is missing from the array. Also spotted you desire to put the parity on a HBA.. I believe it's best to place parity on MB Sata port. I've read that to be the best place for such a drive.
February 8, 201214 yr Author I had transferred the contents of the 1.5TB to the 2TB (that was parity) and then ran a pre-clear on it. I noticed in the syslog that the 2nd read through run was producing thousands of errors. So I plugged it into my Mac Pro, ran a SMART Diagnostic test and it failed. Then it made some strange noises and completely failed. Must have been hanging on! Why shouldn't I have the parity drive on the Sil3132? It says on the performance wiki that I should move the drive to a separate controller card... I couldn't quite bring myself to buy a 4 port RAID card (£100 Vs £10) when I only have 6 drives currently!
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