I plan to swap out two 5TB drives with two 14TB drives. Can I take this opportunity to also ensure the new drives are v5 instead of v4? Can this be done by changing out to the new drives and rebuilding, or do I need to move everything off the soon to be retired 5TB drives prior to replacing them.

thanks

5 hours ago, lovingHDTV said:

Can this be done by changing out to the new drives and rebuilding

Nope, rebuilding would still be v4

thank you

How do I update a drive that is already in my system and not have the rebuild process just revert it back to XFXv4?

I even manually formatted it to v5 and it just reverts as soon as the rebuild happens (automatically).

Also, is there anyway to do this without having to rebuild the array for every drive?

Edited December 6, 2025Dec 6 by lovingHDTV

4 hours ago, lovingHDTV said:

it just reverts as soon as the rebuild happens (automatically).

Yes, a rebuild rebuild the drive exactly as it was including the filesystem structure and version.

Whether you have one or more drives you need to format to v5, you will need to copy all the data each one to another drive, format the target drive to XFS v5 and copy the data back.

If you have enough free space on other array drives in the system you can copy the data to one or more array drives with the Unbalance plugin and then reverse the process to copy the data back to the target drive.

If you do not have enough space on other array drives, you can add another drive as an Unassigned Device and copy the data there then copy it back after the target drive is reformatted to XFS v5. I did this with 5 array drives a few years ago when I reformatted them to XFS to move off reiser FS.

I copied all the data off, following the directions on the Wiki. Stop the array, mark as empty, start array, hit mover, verified the disk has no files.

I stopped the array, removed the drive (because I wanted to upsize it). I precleared the replacement drive, add it to the array and it started a rebuild.

I stopped the array manually formatted with:

mkfs.xfs -m crc=1 /dev/sde -f

start the array and it rebuilds.

Do I have to remove the drive from the array completely, rebuild, then add the new drive?

thanks

1 hour ago, lovingHDTV said:

Do I have to remove the drive from the array completely, rebuild, then add the new drive?

You can use Tools-->New Config and keep all slots as is with current disks and adding the new XFS v5 disk in place of the old drive. This process will let you rebuild parity based on the new disk. You want this so parity knows about the new disk and file system. It will not rebuild the new disk from the old one and you do not want this.

5 hours ago, lovingHDTV said:

mkfs.xfs -m crc=1 /dev/sde -f

Don't do this; the command is not correct, just use the GUI to reformat the drive. You can do that by starting the array in maintenance mode, then clicking the disk you want to format and then "ERASE", then starting in normal mode and reformatting the disk.

The rebuild will finish in 12 hours. I'll try again after that comlpetes.

So I ensure the drive is still empty

stop the array

start the array in maintenance mode

ERASE

Start array in normal mode

Format

<does it now rebuild again?>

19 hours ago, lovingHDTV said:

<does it now rebuild again?>

Nope

It worked. Wouldn't be a bad idea to provide a few more details to the wiki.

I now have one of 8 14TB drives upgraded to v5. It will take several weeks to months to migrate all the files to get them all swapped out. But the first one is important.

thank you for all the help.