I have physically re-ordered my drives the way I like and I have arranged them on the controllers/SATA ports as I'd like and I've colour coded my cables the way I want - - there's one thing remaining:

 

I'm waiting for a drive to come back from RMA, so I'd like to leave a free slot for it when it arrives. I'd also like to leave 3 slots free for future expansion.

 

When I unassign my current last disk and try to reassign it further down the list I get: "You may not add new disks when there exists missing, wrong, or disabled disk(s)." The drive in the new position is blue balled and where it used to live says Missing. There is no option to start the array. Would I head over and do "new config" and spread the drives out as I like then rebuild parity? 

 

I'm still running 5.0rc8a and want to make sure I don't do something wrong.

 

Thanks in advance. 

 

Edit: I've gone ahead with the "New Config". I've added the empty slots the way I'd like and am ready to start the array. I notice there's a "Parity is already valid" option. Should I use that in this case, when drives are no longer in their respective slots? Seems like the quicker option, but seems safer to not check that box and start a new parity sync.

 

Ideally, if my guess is to how this might work is correct, I'd like to check "Parity is already valid" then start a parity check so it's just checking, not writing parity for all the disks, unprotected.

 

Edit 2: I did a bit of reading on how parity works and figured that by moving the slots my disks were assigned to would invalidate the parity so I opted to not check the "parity is already valid" box and just started the array. All of my drives appear green balled except for parity. Parity is invalid is reported. So I've started a parity sync and my array is unprotected but I didn't see another way about it. Once this is done I'm done with the hardware side of my upgrades. Finally!

I have physically re-ordered my drives the way I like and I have arranged them on the controllers/SATA ports as I'd like and I've colour coded my cables the way I want - - there's one thing remaining:

 

I'm waiting for a drive to come back from RMA, so I'd like to leave a free slot for it when it arrives. I'd also like to leave 3 slots free for future expansion.

 

When I unassign my current last disk and try to reassign it further down the list I get: "You may not add new disks when there exists missing, wrong, or disabled disk(s)." The drive in the new position is blue balled and where it used to live says Missing. There is no option to start the array. Would I head over and do "new config" and spread the drives out as I like then rebuild parity? 

 

I'm still running 5.0rc8a and want to make sure I don't do something wrong.

 

Thanks in advance. 

 

Edit: I've gone ahead with the "New Config". I've added the empty slots the way I'd like and am ready to start the array. I notice there's a "Parity is already valid" option. Should I use that in this case, when drives are no longer in their respective slots? Seems like the quicker option, but seems safer to not check that box and start a new parity sync.

 

Ideally, if my guess is to how this might work is correct, I'd like to check "Parity is already valid" then start a parity check so it's just checking, not writing parity for all the disks, unprotected.

 

Edit 2: I did a bit of reading on how parity works and figured that by moving the slots my disks were assigned to would invalidate the parity so I opted to not check the "parity is already valid" box and just started the array. All of my drives appear green balled except for parity. Parity is invalid is reported. So I've started a parity sync and my array is unprotected but I didn't see another way about it. Once this is done I'm done with the hardware side of my upgrades. Finally!

You could have checked the box.  Since the specific disks did not change, and you did not add or delete any disks, the parity would be correct regardless of the slot you assign them.

 

Joe L.

Good to know. I hoped as much but couldn't afford to learn the hard way if it wasn't the case. Maybe this thread will help someone else wondering the same.

 

Thanks again Joe.

Joe, looks like the Trust My Array wiki page could use some updating!  Do you know in which version this new "Parity is already valid" option was added?