May 9, 20251 yr I was a bit astonished to discover that all but one of my WD Gold Enterprise drives are now hitting 7 years old. The parity is 12TB and I have several 12’s and 8’s that I’m replacing before the fail. I especially want to replace the parity drive first, but I need advice on should I just swap it out with a new precleared 20TB drive or should I add the 20 as a second parity and then after that populates remove the old 12, leaving the new 20 alone? For some reason my gut tells me that its not that simple. If I remove the 12 after the 20 becomes a secondary parity, I get the impression that it’ll rebuild all over again if I change the 20 from a secondary to a single parity. What should I do?
May 9, 20251 yr Community Expert 10 minutes ago, ret60sp said: If I remove the 12 after the 20 becomes a secondary parity, I get the impression that it’ll rebuild all over again if I change the 20 from a secondary to a single parity That is correct. They are different algorithms, so the contents are different. If they were identical, they could only allow you to rebuild a single disk failure. Attach Diagnostics ZIP to your NEXT post in this thread.
May 9, 20251 yr Author Ok, attached are the diagnostics. Correct me if my plan is stupid, but I intend to stop the array and change the parity assignment from the 12TB drive to one of the new 20's and start the array. It'll start the rebuild and take a day or two. Is this the process? On a separate note I intend to convert from XFS to ZFS in the near future, will this parity upgrade need anything different before I start the swap? unraidserver-diagnostics-20250508-2135.zip
May 9, 20251 yr Community Expert Rather than examine SMART for each of your disks, I will just ask Do any disks show SMART warnings ( 👎 ) on the DASHBOARD page?
May 9, 20251 yr Author The parity disk had an error two weeks ago, and the sector error was rewritten and the error cleared itself. Thats what prompted me to look at my drive ages. So currently there are no smart errors but there were....
May 9, 20251 yr Author I prefer to change to NEW tires BEFORE the flat in the rain or snow is when the old tire(s) decides to blowout....
May 9, 20251 yr Community Expert Solution I've never used ZFS in the parity array. 13 minutes ago, ret60sp said: stop the array and change the parity assignment from the 12TB drive to one of the new 20's and start the array. It'll start the rebuild and take a day or two. Is this the process? yes
May 9, 20251 yr Author All this started when I realized that the original motherboard I was using was 15 years old and the Xeon CPU only had 4 cores. So I first upgraded the motherboard and switched from a Xeon to a Rysen 9 - 9950. Ram increased from 32 to 64 and with the 9950 having 16 cores I breathed new abilities into the Unraid server. Then, I saw a parity smart error pop-up.... it cleared but I'm not one to wait for a drive failure if I can preemptively replace it and repurpose that drive for something else until it dies.
May 9, 20251 yr Community Expert When you go to replace data drives, it can only rebuild to the same filesystem. You have to reformat to change the filesystem.
May 9, 20251 yr Author Ok. so I need to just stick with XFS in the main array and use ZFS for drives outside of that main array, like separate pools?
May 9, 20251 yr Community Expert To make an array disk ZFS, you would have to copy its contents elsewhere so you could reformat it.
May 9, 20251 yr Author Yes, thats why I added two 20's and two 16's and a 2TB NVMe so I can move things and reformat. But I'm a little intimidated by the process.
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