Hi all. I recently bought a 2TB hard drive to replace a 1TB hard drive in my unRaid server. What is the proper way to go about performing the "swap"?

 

Do I simply shut down the server, unplug the 1TB hard drive and plug in the new 2TB hard drive? What about a pre-clear? I have no more motherboard headers so I'm not sure how I could plug this HDD in to pre-clear it.

 

Also, I plan on using the 1TB hard drive as a data hard drive in a separate Windows machine. Is there anything special I need to do besides plug it in and format it through Windows?

 

Here is my setup:

 

unRaid 4.7 plus

5 data HDDs and 1 parity HDD

Supermicro ATOM motherboard with 2 GB of RAM

NO plugins or addons of any kind

 

I have a very limited Linux understanding and have only made it this far with unRaid because of the gracious help you all provide!

 

Thanks

Smitty

Preclear isn't necessary to do what you want, which is to upgrade a single drive with a new bigger one (assuming you already have a 2TB parity drive). Your procedure to simply swap it will work fine, as long as all your other drives are completely healthy.

 

Now... preclear is a VERY good idea, because it allows you to have a level of confidence that this new drive you are installing is healthy. Unraid relies on having ONLY one drive failure at a time to be able to rebuild your data, so introducing a drive you don't know for sure is good isn't wise.

 

If I were you, I'd scrounge a second USB stick, install the trial version of unraid, add screen and preclear, unhook ALL your current drives, and preclear the new drive all by itself. Or, use another tower to preclear it, once again by doing the second USB stick thing if you can't down your server for an extended period of time.

 

Before you do ANYTHING with the current configuration, I would run a NON correcting parity check, and smart reports on all your current drives. The last thing you want is to lose one of your other drives right in the middle of a drive rebuild (upgrade).