Ok im not quite sure if this will mess stuff up or not.  I have 15 disks. 1 parity, 14 data.  They are all mix matched as far as size from 500 gig to 1.5 tb.  I am wondering if i can take them all out(except the parity),  rearrange them by size (1.5 tbs at the top, 500 at the bottom, etc.),  so i know what is what when i go to replace the drives with bigger ones, without losing data?  Can i just put them in as i see fit, start the array and have the parity do its thing? 

 

thanks guys

Ok im not quite sure if this will mess stuff up or not.  I have 15 disks. 1 parity, 14 data.  They are all mix matched as far as size from 500 gig to 1.5 tb.  I am wondering if i can take them all out(except the parity),  rearrange them by size (1.5 tbs at the top, 500 at the bottom, etc.),  so i know what is what when i go to replace the drives with bigger ones, without losing data?  Can i just put them in as i see fit, start the array and have the parity do its thing? 

 

thanks guys

Odds are very high that unless you end up using a new port on a disk controller that unRAID will just make a not of the new positions of the disks and not need to re-calculate parity at all.

 

Just be careful to leave the parity drive as the parity drive, and don't add or remove drives from the array at the same time you swap all the positions.

 

ALso, any User-Share permissions that are specific to disks might need to be re-done, at they will otherwise refer to a different disk than originally intended.

 

What do you mean buy new?  I dont have any unused ports.  Do you mean i cant move the wires around either, because that was a big part of my plan to help organize the ridiculous birds nest of wires i have.  Trust me you wouldnt wanna see it in the pimp your rig thread.  its not pretty.

 

Thanks for the input

First, before you go moving things around, I'd verify that all your drives were healthy (long smart test), then do a parity check.

 

Next, go into the devices page and do a screenshot, so you can put the virtual drives back in the original slots, if you needed to later for any reason.

 

Personally, I have my drives ordered both physically and logically exactly as you describe, parity being the largest goes up top, and descending from there.

Are you wanting to change both physical and logical connections, or just clean up the physical wires and drive arrangements? If physical only, then after

you boot it up, you should be able to put the logical drives back in the original order on the devices page, and start the array with no further complications.

If you want to also switch the logical assignments, you might end up having to do a "trust parity" cheat after all the drives are reassigned.

 

In any case, I wouldn't do both physical and logical switches at the same time, I'd do the physical swaps and reverify health and parity before doing the

software reassignments.