Hey guys, what is the fastest way to add disks and keep the server reading/writing without issues? I thought I had it figured out but feel I may be wrong in this regard. I have a server in which I manage somve VM's and docker containers for CCTV and rarrs which all use about 3 drives, 2 for the array and 1 for parity. I was running out of space with my media drive having about 200GB left and my CCTV drive about 1TB left so I ordered 2 refurbished 18 TB drives.

 

I received the drives and installed them and immediately unRAID started to do a Disk clear upon bootup. After about a day it finished and both drives were added to array. I wanted to do a pre-clear as I understood that you should perform that on all new disk and especially refurbished ones so I took disk 4 offline, removed MBR on it for Pre-Clear plugin to be able to see the drive and started that process. After about 24 hrs that completed with no errors.

 

I then added the drive back to the array but now it's doing a data rebuild. I understand that even though the drive was empty, this still needs to happen but while it's happening can I move the data from disk 3 to drive 4? If so, can I then start the Pre-Clear on disk 3 once the data is moved over? 

 

Or am I overthinking everything and I don't even need to do a Pre-Clear at this point? My concern is with the length of time this is taking, I anticipate almost 2 weeks before I'll be all done. I'm not exactly hurting for space at this point but just want to make sure I'm following correct procedure is all.

If you remove a drive after adding, it will need to be rebuilt, you have two options:

 

1) add a new drive without preclearing it, the disk will need to be cleared by Unraid first, but the server is still available during that

 

2) preclear the drive before adding, when you add it, it can be formatted right away and be ready to use.