March 22Mar 22 Community Expert I didn't manage to find an existing topic, so I hope you can help me.I run a tiny unraid server at my parent's place as an offsite backup. Against best practise, because I am limited to two USB external drives (worst-of-the-worst, I know) it has an unproteced Array with 2 Data drives.Currently both drives are 2TB and I need to replace them with 3TB drives.Since I don't have a paritity drive, I can't do the normal replacement procedure. I don't care about losing my current offsite backup, but there's some other shares on those drives I'd like to transfer if possible.My idea: Use a dumb cloning stattion to clone the 2 TB drive to a 3TB drive and then expand the partition. that's something I've donw under Windows a few times.Question: Does Unraid by chance automatically expand the storage, if drive capacity is larger than the current partition? If not, how do I best achieve this?
March 22Mar 22 Community Expert For an array without Parity, most of what you asked is of no concern.All that is needed to do is add a drive, assign it to the array, then start the array. It doesn't even matter if the drive is larger or smaller than any drive, as this is only a function to how Parity works (you cannot parity protect a drive that is bigger than your Parity drive).If you have a third USB interface for the new drive, you could do a direct copy the old 2TB to the new 3TB. Or just now have 3 drives for 7TB in the array.
March 22Mar 22 Author Community Expert 22 minutes ago, ConnerVT said:All that is needed to do is add a drive, assign it to the array, then start the array.If you have a third USB interface for the new drive, you could do a direct copy the old 2TB to the new 3TB. Or just now have 3 drives for 7TB in the array.Sadly not an option here, the laptop motherboard only has 3 USB 2 (flash drive + 2 USB HDDs). so I do need to move the data through some external method onto the new drives. I guess I could delete my backups, mopve all remaining shares onto one drive, replace number 2, move shares to new one and then replace that other drive. I'm mostly looking for other methods because... USB 2. copying the 800 or so GB twice would be paaaaain. Edited March 22Mar 22 by IanDresarie
March 22Mar 22 Community Expert The easiest thing that occurs to me is to plug a USB hub (borrow one if necessary) into one of the USB sockets so you can temporarily have more than 2 drives attached.You can then use the Unassigned Devices plugin to copy data from the 2TB drives to the 3TB ones.
March 22Mar 22 Author Community Expert 1 minute ago, itimpi said:The easiest thing that occurs to me is to plug a USB hub (borrow one if necessary) into one of the USB sockets so you can temporarily have more than 2 drives attached.You can then use the Unassigned Devices plugin to copy data from the 2TB drives to the 3TB ones.I have been sceptical of that option due to past experiences with flaky hubs, especially in combination with USB2 speeds. do you happen to have a positive experience to alleviate my fears? :D Assuming no connection hickups during the copy, it does seem like this would be the easiest solution Edited March 22Mar 22 by IanDresarie
June 9Jun 9 Author Community Expert Solution update: I started with the USb hub option, which seems to have been stable despite my concerns about weak ahrdware and usb 2. Though i'll admit, Ultimately I jsut deleted my current offsite backup, reducing the amount to copy to about 500GB total which meant I could ditch the USB hub and just swap my disks one at a time by using the "mc" command to move everything to disk 1, thens wapping disk 2 and vice versa
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