Hi all,

I've been migrating away from a Synology NAS over to my newly built Unraid server and things have been going well. I currently have 1 Parity Drive and 4 Data Drives in the array. I have 3x 20tb and 1x 12tb Ironwolf Pros in the Synology currently and now that I have fully migrated over to the Unraid server for all of my day to day use, the Synology is finally being decommissioned.

Currently I have 1 20tb drive set up as Parity 1, but since I'll have 4 new disks added to the array, I figured now was the time to just get a 2nd Parity drive set up. My question is, what is the most efficient way to do this? Should I add my 3 new data drives to the array first and then add the 2nd Parity drive and kick off the rebuild, or should I get the 2nd parity drive added in and then add the other 3 disks to the array letting it do the parity calculations from there?

I'll need to preclear all 4 of the drives I'm assuming, so I have a chunk of time to plan this out. The 20tb drives take a couple days to parity check, so I'm sure the preclears will take a while too.

Any advice would be appreciated!

You can add the new drives to the array and they will automatically be cleared in the background. No need to preclear; as for parity2, you can add it before or after that; it will always need to do a sync.