I'm wondering about how some drive replacement scenarios would work out.

 

1. I have a 320GB drive with 150GB of data.  When this drive fails, can I replace it with a:

 

a. 300 GB drive?

b. 400 GB drive if my parity drive is also 400GB?

 

thanks,

David

To automatically reconstruct the data the new drive must be as big or bigger than the original drive.

 

But... you could use either drive IF you copy your 150G of data off the unRaiad to a different PC with sufficient spare space (with unRaid reconstructing data from the 320G drive from parity and the remaining working drives) and then replace the bad 320G drive with the 300G drive, treating it as a new drive, and rebuilding parity with it blank, and then lastly, copying the 150G of data from wherever you put it temporarally back onto the unRaid 300G drive you just installed. (unRaid will re-build parity as you copy the files back)

 

Joe L.

 

Joe L. answer is what you would do if you wanted to replace the bad drive with a smaller one.  What's important is the absolute capacity of the disk, not the amount of storage in files.

 

Other scenario of interest, suppose you wanted to replace with a 500GB drive.  Well this is larger than parity, but is recognized by unRAID as a special upgrade case.  You would use your 400GB parity disk to replace the bad data disk, and install the new 500GB disk in the parity slot.  unRAID will see that you have done this and will copy the contents of the original parity disk (which is now functioning as a data disk) to the new parity disk before any shares are exported.

I was thinking if it is possible to replace a bad Ultra-ATA (PATA) drive with a new SATA drive, plugged in another IDE interface of course (it will appear with a different "name" in Linux). The idea is rebuild data from the old PATA HD into the new SATA drive. This will be more common in the near future when PATA drives will be harder to find, because SATA will dominate the market.