Evening all

I'd really appreciate any advice you experts can shine upon my predicament.

So, my NAS is home built (in early 2020). It's a 6 bay, but currently using just 2 WD Red Plus 14TB disks. One for data, one for parity. Obviously I had plans to add more later but never needed to. The array has about 10TB of data on it.

I returned from holiday to find my parity disk has died. Switched the cable, PSU, SATA port etc etc, it just clicks and clicks and isn't even visible to the BIOS anymore. So mad, so sad. It's my first HDD loss in 30 years of working in IT so I can live with it.

However, this thing lives next to my desk where I spend all of my working day. It was built to be SILENT and it's a job the Red Plus disks do well. Only problem is that WD don't sell the 14TB Plus disks anymore. Plus now tops out at 12TB, and Red Pro goes up to 26(?)TB. Thing is that Red Pro is 7200 spin and louder than the Plus disks.

So, if I get a 12TB Plus HD,(or two), can I use that/them in any way? Remember, I only have 10TB of data so far. Will Unraid even accept that as a parity disk for now, or will it flat out deny me saying that I need a 14TB or more?

Failing that, can I somehow put a 12TB as another disk in the array, and use some sort of move function to move my data from the one remaining working 14TB to the 12TB and then put the 14TB as a parity? I could even add a second 12TB to the party and take my storage to 24TB for not too much money.

Thoughts? It's been a while since I've even looked at Unraid - it just... worked, until fate and WD let me down. How can I get back to drive resilience please?

Thanks!

Edited August 24, 2025Aug 24 by TheSJDRising
spolling

10 hours ago, TheSJDRising said:

Failing that, can I somehow put a 12TB as another disk in the array, and use some sort of move function to move my data from the one remaining working 14TB to the 12TB and then put the 14TB as a parity? I could even add a second 12TB to the party and take my storage to 24TB for not too much money.

Yes you could do this. You could then use the any file copying program you like to move (or better use copy) the data across to the other drive - if you do not have a preference then the Dynamix File Manager built into Unraid 7 might be the easiest. Note that while doing this your data is unprotected as you have no parity.

Once all the data is on the 12TB drive you can use the New Config tool to put the 14TB drive as parity and the 12TB drive as disk1. When you start the array after doing this parity will be built to get your array back to a protected state.

10 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Once all the data is on the 12TB drive you can use the New Config tool to put the 14TB drive as parity and the 12TB drive as disk1. When you start the array after doing this parity will be built to get your array back to a protected state.

Thank you so much for replying to this. Just one question - when I use the 'new config' tool will I lose anything? Like shares, data, config/settings etc? Because obviously all my data, SAMBA settings etc are all there at that point.

Thank you!

46 minutes ago, TheSJDRising said:

when I use the 'new config' tool will I lose anything?

No.

You might want to read the description of this tool in the online documentation

Thank you!