I have three old PATA drives in my array on 4.7 and I would like to move the data off of them and remove them from the array.

 

These three drives are included in multiple shares (documents, movies, music...) so when I export the disk shares and browse the folder structure, I see lots of folders on them.  when i drill down into the folders only some of them have data in them because obviously some of the data for these shares are on the other dives included in those shares.

 

So do I have to browse through the whole folder structure on each of the disk shares and manually move the files off of them off of the three disks or is there an easier way?

 

What happens if I go into the shares and remove these disks from the shares?  will the data on them automotacally be moved over to the other drives in those shares?

I don't know about 4.7, but in 5RC11 (haven't had time to go to 12 yet) you can connect to the disk as well as the shares.  I have chosen not to export the disk shares, but can still connect to them remotely and move files among my drives.  I connect by browsing to \\tower\diskx IIRC, but I'm not at my machine to check.

 

Additionally you could use mc to move files from disk to disk using that.

I have three old PATA drives in my array on 4.7 and I would like to move the data off of them and remove them from the array.

 

These three drives are included in multiple shares (documents, movies, music...) so when I export the disk shares and browse the folder structure, I see lots of folders on them.  when i drill down into the folders only some of them have data in them because obviously some of the data for these shares are on the other dives included in those shares.

 

So do I have to browse through the whole folder structure on each of the disk shares and manually move the files off of them off of the three disks or is there an easier way?

 

What happens if I go into the shares and remove these disks from the shares?  will the data on them automotacally be moved over to the other drives in those shares?

Unraid never automatically moves data from one data drive to another data drive. If you have a cache drive you could copy the contents of the drive there, then let the mover put it on the correct disk. I think if you exclude the disk you want to remove from the share, the mover should pick the next available disk that fits your split level and space allocation method.

thanks for the reply  - I have worked out the process for moving data off of the PATA drives... used the process found here.  went into the user shares and removed disk 4 from all of the user shares it was included in.  then set it to export disk shares.  then went into telnet and used midnight command to copy the data from the disk folders back to the user shares.

 

so I'm good to go there.

 

So I believe that I have to remove one drive from the array at a time right?

 

so correct me if I am wrong here but next steps are:

1) stop the array

2) unassign the first of my three drives

3) log in via telnet and issue a initconfig command

4) bring the array back online via the web gui and allow it to do a parity sync.

 

then repeat steps 1-4 for the second and then the third drive.

 

is that about right?

 

I am in the process of the first parity rebuild now and I noticed that it lists the missing disk (disk4) as "not installed" (see attached screenshot).  I assumed that the missing disk would just not be listed.  hopefully that is not an indication that i did something wrong.

So I believe that I have to remove one drive from the array at a time right?

Nope. You can remove all the drives at once, and the initconfig will rebuild parity based on all remaining assigned drives. Since you are rebuilding parity, it really doesn't matter which slot is which as long as you reallocate the desired share includes and excludes, so you could remove all your empty drives, reassign all the drives you are keeping to contiguous slots and be done after a successful parity generation and subsequent check. The reason slot 4 shows as not installed is that you unassigned it. You could have just as easily unassigned your last drive slot, assigned it to slot 4, and generated parity from there.