June 24, 201313 yr Hi all, I have populated all onboard SATA spots on my motherboard and nearly filled my server. My next step is up replace my parity drive with a larger capacity one so I can begin replacing data drives. However, I have nowhere to plug my new drive in to preclear it before using it as parity! What are my options?
June 24, 201313 yr Preclear it on a different system is the best solution. Otherwise you could shut down the server, back up your flash drive, disconnect 1 or more of your drives, preclear the new drive, then bring it back up with the new drive in (replacing the parity, and then rebuild parity).
June 24, 201313 yr What is your tolerance for downtime on the server? If can stand being down for a couple days, you could prepare a spare flash with the free basic version of unraid and use that to preclear on your existing server, just remove a drive and make sure you preclear the correct drive and don't accidentally blow away one of your array drives. Or, use that spare flash with unraid to do the preclear on pretty much any PC that can boot from USB and has a SATA connection. If using a spare PC, I'd recommend disconnecting the existing drive to eliminate the chance of preclearing the wrong drive. Hah sureguy beat me to it.
June 24, 201313 yr A. different PC or motherboard... (Just don't assign any of the existing boot or data disks in it to the array or they will be re-partitioned) B. an eSATA port (if you have one available) C. (for clearing only, as it cannot be used assigned t the array) A USB adapter or case to convert USB to SATA. This is likely to take FOREVER on USB-1 or USB-2, but it is possible. D. An add-in SATA card. (even if in a PCI slot, this would work fine for a single drive) PCI version http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132007 or PCIe version http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132008 I've linked to these as examples, I've never used either, but I do have equivalent cards in my servers to add additional ports. If you post in the hard-disk and controllers forum, you'll get responses from people with specific cards.
June 24, 201313 yr How big is your array? How old are your drives? How critical is the data? Sometimes I ask myself.... Have our arrays gotten so big or untrustworthy that we cannot take the parity out. boot up with a safe unRAID key Preclear a new one in a couple days, then recreate parity? Granted, I would go with a add on card that has an eSATA port and some form of trayless slot load unit. There are many of them. It pays to have these around as spares in the event you need to do surgery. I.E. boot unRAID on another machine and work on a drive, migrate a drive live on unRAID, dd rescue it or preclear a drive for an upgrade.
June 25, 201313 yr I threw a trayless 5.25 inch to 3.5 inch drive cage in an old low power small form factor PC and threw the basic version of unraid on a thumb drive and use it as a dedicated preclear box. Works great. Also doubles as storage for a spare precleared disk waiting to replace a disk when one dies.
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