I have an UGreen DXP2800 NAS drive running Unraid. I have the OS and cache set up on an 2xNVME drives. All my media is on 2xHDD. One is an 8GB WD Red HDD and the second drive is a 10TB Seagate Ironwolf. The WD drive is getting on and I have bought another Irongate to replace it. The majority of my data is held on the WD. My question is how can replace the drive and move the data. Do I simply move it all across to the current 10TB drive, or do I remove the current 10TB and then replace it with the new 10TB drive before moving data across and replacing the 8TB WD with my original 10TB drive? I don't want to have a RAID Array....I like to live dangerously 🤣

I have attached a screenshot of how I have things currently set up. I hope this makes sense? I'm fairly new to Unraid and never had to do this before, so please try to be sympathetic to this 61yr old PC tinkerer.

Edited September 9Sep 9 by cdproject
mistake in text. Appdata is not on the hdd but on my cache drive

Unraid IS NOT RAID. If you had parity you could just replace the drive and rebuild. Since you don't you will have to copy the data from it. You will have to New Config to make the new assignments. You could do the new assignments before copying the data if you make the old drive an Unassigned Device.

Also your appdata should be on cache.

22 minutes ago, trurl said:

Unraid IS NOT RAID. If you had parity you could just replace the drive and rebuild. Since you don't you will have to copy the data from it. You will have to New Config to make the new assignments. You could do the new assignments before copying the data if you make the old drive an Unassigned Device.

Also your appdata should be on cache.

I realise Unraid IS NOT RAID, I just didn't want people to suggest installing as a RAID array. Thanks for mentioning about my appdata, my mistake it is on the cache drive and not the array. So going from what you say I can unassign the old drive, remove the current 10TB drive and install the new one. Then copy from the unassiagned device to the replacement . Then remove the unassiagned and install the original 10TB drive, then make a New Config? All this disk juggling, is confusing lol

Would it not be easier to copy all data from Disk 1 to Disk 2 , as there is space available. Then remove Disk 1 and replace with the new 10TB drive and then New Config?

29 minutes ago, cdproject said:

Would it not be easier to copy all data from Disk 1 to Disk 2 , as there is space available. Then remove Disk 1 and replace with the new 10TB drive and then New Config?

That is your only option you will have to move all data and simply replace the disk.

Also I noticed you dedicated the whole 500GB drive for boot purposes. at most unraid itself currently only takes up a maximum of 6GB that leaves you 484GB of useless dead drive space.

You should have made a boot mirror using the "boot + data option" then I would have selected to use 16GB for boot and that would have left you with about 1.5TB of usable space for pool purposes.

If you want the data from the old disk to be on the new disk, then the Unassigned Device method is a way to do that. The New Config would be done first to assign the new disk to the array as disk1, then format it, then copy the data from the old disk as Unassigned Device.

Or you could assign the new disk as disk3, format it, copy the data from disk1 to disk3, then New Config to remove the old disk1 and reassign disk3 as disk1.

1 hour ago, MowMdown said:

You should have made a boot mirror using the "boot + data option" then I would have selected to use 16GB for boot and that would have left you with about 1.5TB of usable space for pool purposes.

Would it be possible to do this after the event?

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Or you could assign the new disk as disk3, format it, copy the data from disk1 to disk3, then New Config to remove the old disk1 and reassign disk3 as disk1.

With it only being a 2 bay drive this isn't an option, sadly.

4 hours ago, cdproject said:

Would it be possible to do this after the event?

Yes but first you will want to move all your existing pool data too the array. As both disks will be formatted in the process. After all data has been moved to the array and you’ve backed up the boots config folder:

1. Boot from the USB again, once booted I think you have to click on the internal boot pool and click on “remove pool”.

2. Re-run the onboarding wizard from the tools menu and you will choose 2 disks and then boot + data mode and you only ideally should select between 8GB and 16GB for the boot partition.

3. Once that’s done reboot so you boot from the internal pool

4. You will now have an unformatted partition on your boot pool that you can create back into your “cache” pool and you can choose single or mirror(raid1) or stripe(raid0) (I would personally choose single which is more safe than stripe(raid0) and will give you a combined 1.5TB usable cache pool space. Since these drives aren’t the same size a mirror doesn’t make much sense.