Hi there,

Ive been using unraid for a few years now and love it, but wanted to just sanity check what I need to do to safely do a few upgrades.

Additions/Improvements:

• Add additional HBA Card

• Add 4x HDDs

  • 2x 20TB

  • 1x 18TB

  • 1x 16TB

• Make 2x 20TB Drives into parity drives

• Repurpose current 18tb parity drive into a storage drive

• Remove 1x SSD which is currently a pool cache drive

• Add 1x NVME to replace the SSD

Currently - I have a single 18tb parity drive and 11 HDDs, and then 2x SSDs and a single NVME. These are all connected to the motherboard headers + my HBA card.

What is the right order of operations to do the above upgrades? I assume it is something like this:

• Backup appdata etc etc to ensure everythings safe

• Power down system

• install all new hardware

• power up system, dont start array

• remove parity from array and replace the drive with one of the 20tb drives

• let parity rebuild

• once that parity is done, add second parity drive to the array

• Once both NEW parity drives are done, I can now clear/preclear all drives (including the old 18tb parity drive)

• Once preclears are done, I turn off the array one more time, add ALL disks to the array as applicable, and then turn the array back on

• Done(?)

Does the above look like the correct order of operations? Attaching a screenshot of my current array/layout as well if its helpful. Thank you in advance very much.

If you remove your parity drive the you are rebuilding without parity protection. I would add the second parity first and rebuild and then replace parity one with the larger drive and rebuild it. Then you will be doing both rebuilds with parity protection.