January 4, 20251 yr Long story short, I put 6 "new" 20TB drives in an array of 12 3TB drives (including 2 parity drives). Decided later on build a new system and need those 6 20TB drives. I thought this was as easy as swapping out the data drives for the 3TB drives that used to be in there two at a time...but apparently not (even though there is not over 2.5TB per drive of storage used)... That said I see the shrink array dock here: https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/shrink-array/, and it's clear that the fastest method is the "Remove Drives Then Rebuild Parity" method to do two disks at a time; but is there a way to ensure that I am replacing two disks at a time and not just REMOVING one or two disks, waiting for parity rebuild, then ADDing disks back in and rebalancing/etc? Basically I want to replace two drives at a time with 3TB disks back to the original config of all 12 disks being 3TB and need a sanity check. Edited January 4, 20251 yr by VACInc
January 4, 20251 yr Author I think the answer is this straight forward but want to verify; basically follow the steps of "Remove Drives Then Rebuild Parity" in the shrink array doc, but when you get to step 7 "Return to the Main page, and check all assignments. If any are missing, correct them. Unassign the drive(s) you are removing. Double check all of the assignments, especially the parity drive(s)!" -- you swap two drives out for the "new" 3TB drives and assign the new drives in their place instead of just unassigning the drives you'd remove.
January 5, 20251 yr Community Expert You cannot directly replace drives with smaller ones, it's not clear to me if the old 3TB drives still have the data or not?
January 5, 20251 yr Author Nope! Data on the old drives is gone. I understand you can't actually just swap them as I already tried that. What I'm asking is can I follow the above "Remove Drives Then Rebuild Parity" process and add them to the new config two at a time when you'd typically just remove a drive and that would accomplish the same thing?
January 5, 20251 yr Community Expert You could but the drives would be empty in the end, if I'm understanding the question correctly, and assuming all drive are healthy, I would suggest doing a new config with all the 3TB drives you want back in the array, then mount the 20TB data drives with UD one at a time, and copy the data to the new array, this assuming you have at least one extra SATA port to have an extra disk connected.
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