September 20, 20241 yr I'm consolidating a couple disks and will remove them from my system to save a little power. I'm following this to remove the drive. The drive I'm removing is disk9 I have a disk 10 that's staying. Will disk10 become disk9? or will I have a hole where disk9 used to be? will it go disk7, disk8, disk10? Also.. If I don't zero out the drive first and do the rebuild.. Will I still be protected if I have dual parity? I'm thinking no since it "resets the array configuration" and has to rebuild parity from scratch? Thanks, Jim
September 20, 20241 yr 34 minutes ago, jbuszkie said: Will disk10 become disk9? Nope, it will be an unassigned disk.
September 20, 20241 yr Author 15 minutes ago, JonathanM said: Not without rebuilding the parity2 slot. Will the array be protected while it rebuilds parity2? Is this documented somewhere? Thanks!
September 20, 20241 yr 3 minutes ago, jbuszkie said: Will the array be protected while it rebuilds parity2? Is this documented somewhere? Thanks! It's a little complicated. Parity1 doesn't care what order the disks are in, as long as they are all there. Parity2 uses disk slot number as well, so it's invalid when you move slots around. There is no easy way to tell unraid to only rebuild parity2, so you have to set a new config with all the drives where you want them, WITHOUT assigning parity2, and select that parity is already valid, start the array, cancel the automatic parity check, stop the array, add parity2 back, allow it to build. All this assumes the drive being removed is properly zeroed, that can take a very long time. Most people just take the risk of being unprotected while parity is being rebuilt when removing a drive slot. That assumes all your drives are healthy, but if you don't think all your drives are healthy that needs to be addressed BEFORE going through this drastic of a procedure.
September 20, 20241 yr Author Ok.. So something like this: Zero the disk (I'm like 25% done with that.) Take a screen shot the array config stop the array. unassign disk10 assign disk10's drive to disk 9 unassign parity2 New configuration (keep existing assignments) start array with trust parity Start a parity check and let it go a little to make sure it starts and doesn't report tons of errors. (sanity check) Stop parity check Stop array re-assign parity2 Start array Parity 2 rebuild done? Jim Edit: added/changed the steps I did. Edited September 21, 20241 yr by jbuszkie update the steps I did
September 20, 20241 yr Author 17 minutes ago, JonathanM said: Have to set the new config before you change the assignments. It's always scary doing that! lol
September 20, 20241 yr 2 hours ago, jbuszkie said: It's always scary doing that! lol I would recommend you always start by using the option to retain all current assignments, and then return to the Main tab and make the minimal. Hangers required. That at least reduces the chance of messing up disk assignments.
September 21, 20241 yr Author Solution 21 hours ago, jbuszkie said: Ok.. So something like this: Zero the disk (I'm like 25% done with that.) Take a screen shot the array config stop the array. unassign disk10 assign disk10's drive to disk 9 unassign parity2 New configuration (keep existing assignments) start array with trust parity Start a parity check and let it go a little to make sure it starts and doesn't report tons of errors. (sanity check) Stop parity check Stop array re-assign parity2 Start array Parity 2 rebuild done? Jim Edit: added/changed the steps I did. Ok I did the above steps and I seen to be working ok. (parity 2 is in the process of rebuilding) caveats: This documentation needs to be updated: It's pre 6.12 and the mdX device numbers have changed to mdXp1 for 6.12 The Clear Drive script as I had loaded in User Scripts plugins is not working for my unraid. The script used pre 6.12 nomenclature. The procedure calls for unmounting the drive before doing the zeroing.. umount /mnt/diskX dd bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mdX status=progress Again the mdX needs to be mdXp1 And this worked fine until I tried to shutdown the array. The shutdown script didn't like the fact that the drive was already unmounted and looped trying to unmount that drive. I believe this is a bug and the shutdown script should check to see if the drive is already unmounted... Now one can just do a new config make all the changes you want and just have it reconstruct the parity.. but even though my system is healthy and I'm sure it would have been fine... I'm paranoid and wanted to be protected at (almost) all times! Thanks for the input, guys!
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