I have a question on the best way to install a new drive.  I have no free slots left and want to take out an old drive and pop in a new 2TB drive.  I need to run a preclear on it first though.  If I pop out the old drive, pop in the new one and reboot.  What would be the next step so data doesn't rebuild and I can run a preclear?

Do you have extra space in your server to add that new drive in and keep the old one in too? If so then you can keep your array running with the old drive and run the preclear on the new one at the same time. The preclear script will refuse to run on any HD in the array anyway, so even if you take the old drive out and replace it with the new one as long as you dont associate the new one with the array you can preclear just fine.

if you do not have a slot or a way of externally accessing the disk.

I would document your system drives. screen snapshot or something.

 

Then I would

 

comment out emhttp in the config/go script.

shutdown

swap the drive in question.

boot

identify the new drive.

preclear it (array will be inaccessible for quite some time).

check it.

 

fire up emhttp manually.

Go through gui in changing drive.

enable rebuild on newly swapped drive.

 

Frankly, I'm not sure I would even use my main unraid array to do this.

I would use another machine so I could not make a mistake during the preclear.

Then go through all the steps above without doing the preclear on the array machine.

 

If I had removables and I had to do it on the production machine I might shutdown and pull out the drives from making contact (but leave them in place) for later. This way your only drive would be the new one.

 

I'm so paranoid about accidentally doing the preclear on the wrong drive.

 

I usually use an external eSATA/USB trayless unit to do my preclears. this way I never touch the array.

I'll have to open up the server and take a look if there's a free SATA connection.  I don't recall there being one but I'll double check.  I guess I could disconnect all the existing sata connections and just boot with the one drive, preclear it, then put all the drives back.

 

I'm almost tempted to just format the drive and skip the preclear. 

I'm almost tempted to just format the drive and skip the preclear.

Only you can decide how much time and frustration your data is worth. If you only use the server for convenience of access to data that exists elsewhere or can easily be recreated, just take the easy way. If you see yourself losing sleep over lost data should the worst happen and your server dies, then take the extra time and precautions now so if the server dies at least you can say you did your best to prevent data loss.

 

How much is your time worth to you?