I tried search, and didn’t find anything so here goes:

It looks like I set my array up wrong.

I started out with a 3TB drive.  Precleared it twice, formatted it, and set up my shares.  Then I foolishly began moving media data from my PC’s to the single drive in the array. 

Then I got an amazing deal on 3 2TB drives, and I added one as a 2nd Data drive.    But since they weren’t bigger than the 3TB I couldn’t add a 2nd as parity.  :'(

I move everything I’d previously put on Data1 (3TB) to Data2 (2TB), and then took the array off-line and tried to designate one of the new 2TB drives as parity, and the other as Data1, but it won’t let me, and says my array is invalid without putting the 3TB back as Data1. 

The 3TB drive is empty, and I could re-format or even re-preclear it, but it appears that my array is expecting that drives serial # to be my Data1 drive.  Is there some way I can clear that setting? Or is there some other trick to doing this?

Anyone? 

 

BTW - I’m just using the 3 drive max, Free version 5 right now, but am looking to update to “Pro” as soon as I get the rest of my media data on the array, and confirm it’s working as I expect with MyMovies and Plex.  However, I’d upgrade now if it will fix my problem.

Go to Settings and do a New Config => set the 3TB as parity and the 2 2TB drives that have your data on them as your data drives.

 

Done :-)

 

... the array will calculate parity when you Start it.    After it completes, you should do a parity check to confirm all is okay.

 

I have 4 1.5TB drives in a RAID 1+0 configuration in my desktop machine that I wanted to add to the array, and I wanted to swap the 3TB for the 4 of them, after I move their data.  This would leave me with 1 2TB drive as parity, and 2 2TB drives as Data1 and Data2 in the unRAID box, and once I move the date from the RAID 10 to the unRAID, I'd add 4 1.5 TB drives as Data3-Data6, and use the 3TB only in the desktop

I guess what I'm asking is how can I exclude the 3TB drive from my unRAID array all together?

The better question would be why would you want to - I'd recommend saving yourself future annoyance and using the 3Tb as parity.  That means when it comes time to expand the array, you can add 3Tb drives straight off the bat, rather than having to upgrade the parity drive.

I'd want to because if I have at least 8 drives, no bigger than 2 TB, and if go with larger capacity HD's in the future I'd expect them to be 4TB, making a 3TB parity drive still unusable.

I have 4 1.5TB drives in a RAID 1+0 configuration in my desktop machine that I wanted to add to the array, and I wanted to swap the 3TB for the 4 of them, after I move their data.  This would leave me with 1 2TB drive as parity, and 2 2TB drives as Data1 and Data2 in the unRAID box, and once I move the date from the RAID 10 to the unRAID, I'd add 4 1.5 TB drives as Data3-Data6, and use the 3TB only in the desktop

I guess what I'm asking is how can I exclude the 3TB drive from my unRAID array all together?

 

Set a new config and assign the desired drives.

Is the settings -> New Config in the Server Management Utility, or is this a unMenu thing?

I'm at work, but will do that as soon as I get home.

Yes -- as I noted it's in the Settings.    And once you select New Config, you can assign whatever drives you want to use.

 

Caution don't assign the drive you put data on as the parity or you will loose all data on that drive.

Actually - I'm on unRAID Server Basic version: 5.0-rc16c, and "New Config" is under "Upgrade Utilities" under the "Utils" tab.

Made sure to assign one of the blank drives to parity, and it worked like a charm.

Thanks to all who lent a hand.

Just for grins, I'd go ahead and upgrade to v5.0

 

All you have to do is copy the bzroot, bzimage, and readme.txt files to the flash drive (you can do this over the network with Windows Explorer);  and then just reboot the server.

 

... if you're going to "experiment" with how UnRAID works, etc., you want to be using the current stable release.