November 26, 20241 yr So long story short, I'm new to UNRaid, and being the silly person I was, I started off by using drives that were too big for what I really needed. I had 3 x 10TB drives with 1 as parity on my system, but one of my data drives has now failed (they were refurbished drives with a great number of power on hours). I now what to move to 8TB drives as they are cheaper to buy new than 10tb and I don't need all the storage. Is there any way I can migrate to these new smaller drives? I can't replace the original disk as it says I can't use a smaller drive than before. The drives only held about 4-6TB of data on them, so if I can theoretically shrink the other drives to 8TB would be great to make the swap outs easier in the event of drive failures in the future. Sorry if this doesn't make make sense, I'm trying to wrap my head around all of this still and now I'm trying to sort this ASAP as I'm running only on my parity and 1 data drive. For context, the data is not critical, and could theoretically be replaced if needed, however the less data I have to replace the better. Thanks in advance!
November 26, 20241 yr Community Expert Create new array with smaller disks, use Unassigned Devices plugin to mount large disks outside the array and copy their data to the array.
November 26, 20241 yr Community Expert Have you replace the drive that failed and rebuilt it to restore the data that was on the failed drive?
November 27, 20241 yr Author 9 hours ago, Frank1940 said: Have you replace the drive that failed and rebuilt it to restore the data that was on the failed drive? I haven’t yet no, but I think this may be a good shout, I think I have a spare 10tb around somewhere that I can use to rebuild, And then use trurl’s suggestion and start a new array.
November 27, 20241 yr Author 9 hours ago, trurl said: Create new array with smaller disks, use Unassigned Devices plugin to mount large disks outside the array and copy their data to the array. This seems sensible, I have only bought 2 new 8tb disks so far, so I’ll rebuild the old array as Frank1940 suggests and then start a new array and import them outside the array. Quick query for you, if I start a new array with my 2 8tb disks and use a working 10tb disk as parity, can the parity disk be replaced with a smaller drive, or will I run into the same issue as the data drives? Thanks!
November 27, 20241 yr Community Expert 20 minutes ago, BradIJM said: Quick query for you, if I start a new array with my 2 8tb disks and use a working 10tb disk as parity, can the parity disk be replaced with a smaller drive, or will I run into the same issue as the data drives? You can switch to using a smaller parity drive as long as it is still at least as large as the biggest data drive.
November 27, 20241 yr Author 10 hours ago, trurl said: Create new array with smaller disks, use Unassigned Devices plugin to mount large disks outside the array and copy their data to the array. I just had a thought about this actually, considering one of my 2 data disks is dead (completely undetectable), how do I copy the data over from that drive? Will I be able to copy it from the parity drive?
November 27, 20241 yr Community Expert 1 hour ago, BradIJM said: just had a thought about this actually, considering one of my 2 data disks is dead (completely undetectable), how do I copy the data over from that drive? Will I be able to copy it from the parity drive? There is no 'data' on the parity drive - just the bits needed to reconstitute a failed drive (in conjunction with all the good drives) in the array where it has failed. Normally Unraid will be 'emulating this drive at that point so you can get its contents, but that needs the original array to be otherwise intact and have valid parity.
November 27, 20241 yr Community Expert See here for how single parity works: https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/overview/nas/#parity-protected-array There is why you must be care that the original array remains operational until you have recovered the data on the 'bad' disk.
November 27, 20241 yr Author 2 hours ago, itimpi said: There is no 'data' on the parity drive - just the bits needed to reconstitute a failed drive (in conjunction with all the good drives) in the array where it has failed. Normally Unraid will be 'emulating this drive at that point so you can get its contents, but that needs the original array to be otherwise intact and have valid parity. Okay got it, so this is my plan, correct me if it’s wrong Restore the array using another 10tb drive to recover data delete the array and restart it with my new 8TB drives mount the old 10tb drives and transfer the data over to the new drives sound good?
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