Guys,

 

I think Ive finally gotten unRAID and my ftpd (glftpd) set up the way i want, and everything seems to be working perfect. Ive copied a little bit of data over (nothing critical yet) and I want to go through a "practice run" before I do put critical data on the drives, plus i figure it will be best to go through the process because I'm sure it'll happen eventually. What are the best practices when doing this? What should I expect? Is there something to do this built in already? Currently I only have three drives installed (2 1-TB data drives and 1 2-TB parity drive).

 

I was thinking I should just shut the server down, unplug disk1, power it back on and see what happens. I would imagine I would be red balled, but will my data still be accessible? Also, will I run in to trouble when I try and reintroduce disk1 back the the array?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Casey

From my experience a long while back. I did the very same thing. I however was using 3 Junk drives and I literally pulled a power cable while a drive was powered up. My array realized a drive was down and simulated the missing drive. When I shut down and reintroduced the drive, it knew there was a problem and rebuilt the bad disk.

 

Just keep in mind when you unplug it will want to rebuild by default. I would make sure you do a parity check first just to make sure that if/when you try this it rebuilds back everything and there isn't any missing data. Of course you might want to make sure it rebuilds simply because if you are going to test why not test the entire process.

Thanks for your reply.

 

I did run a parity check a few days ago, although some new data has been added since then. Im not at all concerned abou tthe data as its more just files for me to test the ftp transfers than anything else, but i figured while its there I should see what will happen if something does go wrong.

 

I will do the same thing, pull the power, see what happens, power the drive back on, and theoritically I should have no data loss, if I understand this all correctly.

 

How long does it usually take to rebuild the array after the drive is introduced again? Im sure it depends on the size of the drive, but is it something that takes 1-2 hours or 10-12 hours? Just curious because I am eager to start moving my data.

 

Thanks again for all the help I get here.

Keep in mind I pulled the power on a drive that I didn't care about. I wouldn't advise pulling power on a drive you do care about while powered up. I don't know the technicalites of the heads pulling out or landing, but I'd probably pull the power while powered off personally.

 

You should be able to start using the machine almost imediately after it starts rebuilding data. It will/should simulate the drive while you are reading from it and you should be able to write to it. I think when I rebuilt a 2TB drive it took I'd guess 6hours. Thats a wild guess, but it wasn't in the 10-12 hour range.

 

Keep in mind the more you do with it while its rebuilding will hamper its rebuild time and your read/write speed.

Keep in mind I pulled the power on a drive that I didn't care about. I wouldn't advise pulling power on a drive you do care about while powered up. I don't know the technicalites of the heads pulling out or landing, but I'd probably pull the power while powered off personally.

 

You should be able to start using the machine almost imediately after it starts rebuilding data. It will/should simulate the drive while you are reading from it and you should be able to write to it. I think when I rebuilt a 2TB drive it took I'd guess 6hours. Thats a wild guess, but it wasn't in the 10-12 hour range.

 

Keep in mind the more you do with it while its rebuilding will hamper its rebuild time and your read/write speed.

Re-constructing a drive takes roughly the same amount of time as initially calculating parity.  The code/process is 99% identical, the only  difference is the disk being written to.