Hi everyone! I've recently moved over to Unraid from Proxmox (and loving it by the way!), and am setting up my Unraid server to house a lot of my backups and files (Syncthing, Immich, Paperless, etc).

I have a Dell PowerEdge R730 with 16 drive bays, and when I first set up Unraid and was testing it out, I only selected one parity disk and just picked one off the list (they're all the same size). Now, after learning about Drive Location and also now storing more important things on the server, I want to do the following:

• Convert another drive to be a parity drive - Is this achievable? eg. can I just select a disk out of the array and turn it into a parity drive? What would be the process for that? Would it be more beneficial to split the array into two, and have a parity drive for each?..... Or am I fine with just one parity drive for the entire array (I also plan on backing this up to my R630 for extra protection).

• Move my parity drive from bay 5 to bay 16 - I know it doesn't change how everything operates, but I'd like to have my parity drive(s) in the last bay(s). Is it as simple as stopping the array, and swapping the drive positions, or will Unraid see them as new drives? If not, is it possible - and if so, what process would I follow to achieve this?

Any assistance, tips or words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated. Thanks heaps!

You mentioned the number of bays but not the number of drives. With 16 drives you should consider dual parity.

Unraid keeps track of disk assignments by drive serial number, assuming the controller passes that information. RAID controllers or USB may not.

If you want to reassign a data disk as a parity disk you will have to copy the data from it.

Then New Config will let you assign any drives as you wish and build parity on any drives assigned to parity slots.

Thanks for the info @trurl . Sorry for the omission on the drive info. I'm currently using the following drive config:

• 2 x SSD for cache and app data

• 13 x HDD for data

• 1 x HDD for parity

The HDD show name and serial number on the Main tab under Identification, so it looks like the information is being passed through from the controller.

Drives in the array that appear to not be used show 34.5G used of a 1.8TB drive, but the drive shows no data on it when browsing the disk. Is this normal or is there data on there that I can't see?

If they are formatted with XFS it's normal; there's always a few percent overhead.

Thanks for the help @trurl and @JorgeB .

I'm now all sorted.