My current setup has a mix of 1.5 and 2tb drives for a total of 8.  Back when i was upgrading the space of my NAS a few years ago the 3tb or above drives were really expensive (especially during the flooding months) so i just stuck with the low capacity drives.  Now that the prices have come down somewhat to an affordable range for both the 3tb and 4tb I'm looking at reducing the amount of drives in my case (for maintenance/trouble shooting purposes) while increasing the size of the array.  Is this possible or is having 7 data drives a permanent  thing?  Would i have to remove the data and then copy it back on?

 

Thanks

Since your drives are all pretty small (by today's standards) and are somewhat aging, I'd just relegate all of them for backups; and create a new config for your server with 2 or 3 of the new 6TB WD Reds.  Three of these drives would give you 12TB of protected storage with only 3 drives ... significantly reducing not only your drive count, but also the power your system uses, and the heat it generates.  The drives will also be MUCH faster than your older units.

 

You indicated you have a mix of 1.5 and 2TB drives, with 8 total drives, so with 7 data drives I suspect 12TB is enough to copy all of your data to the new array.

 

If you'd prefer to do this a bit more incrementally, you can first buy a new parity drive;  update to that;  then buy a new high-capacity data drive and replace one of your existing 1.5TB drives with it;  then do the same with another drive; and repeat this until you have enough free space on the drives you want to keep for all the data on the other drives.    HOWEVER, be VERY careful at how you then transfer the data from those drives to the larger ones ... there's a "user share bug" that can result in loss of data if you don't copy data correctly when moving it.    The safest way to avoid that is to copy the data back to the array from your backups (or from a removed drive after a New Config).

 

 

 

My current setup has a mix of 1.5 and 2tb drives for a total of 8.  Back when i was upgrading the space of my NAS a few years ago the 3tb or above drives were really expensive (especially during the flooding months) so i just stuck with the low capacity drives.  Now that the prices have come down somewhat to an affordable range for both the 3tb and 4tb I'm looking at reducing the amount of drives in my case (for maintenance/trouble shooting purposes) while increasing the size of the array.  Is this possible or is having 7 data drives a permanent  thing?  Would i have to remove the data and then copy it back on?

 

Thanks

 

If you are going to upsize all of the disks in the array, you will have to copy the data from the old disks to the new disks. No way around that.

 

But if you are only going to swap out a few, even if you want to reduce the disk count, you would only have to copy data from the disks you want to remove to the new disk(s). All of the data on existing disks that you want to stay in the array is fine.

 

You will have to rebuild parity, unless you want to follow a special procedure to zero a drive and allow it to be swapped out without rebuilding parity. It works well, but I have other ways to maintain array recoverability during this type of procedure, and I prefer not to wipe all of the data off of the drive I am removing as it acts as a backup until the array is parity protected again.

 

Please post what you want to do and I or someone should be able to explain the most straightforward and safest way to do it.

 

Whatever you do, you should run a parity check a few days before, and double check all of the smart reports, so you know that the array is healthy before beginning.

there's a "user share bug" that can result in loss of data if you don't copy data correctly when moving it.

 

Would someone please point me to the thread about this?  I scanned the topics in  "Lime Technology - unRAID Server Community »    unRAID OS version 5.x Support »    unRAID OS Issue List" and didn't find it.

 

 

 

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=34351.msg319716;topicseen#msg319716

there's a "user share bug" that can result in loss of data if you don't copy data correctly when moving it.

 

Would someone please point me to the thread about this?  I scanned the topics in  "Lime Technology - unRAID Server Community »    unRAID OS version 5.x Support »    unRAID OS Issue List" and didn't find it.

 

Brian (bjp999) outlined it here:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=34351.msg319716#msg319716

 

So if, for example, you have a share called "MyDVDs", and want to remove a disk that has some files from that share, if you copied the files from that disk from \\Tower\diskx\MyDVDs  to the share -- i.e. \Tower\MyDVDs -- you could end up with those files being lost.

 

Obviously Brian posted while I was composing that 

[i had written a long paragraph about how to avoid it; but then decided to delete it and just post the basics, so it took me a few minutes]

 

I was momentarily confused when you posted that "Brian" had posted an answer because my name is "Brian"

 

Thanks for the info.

 

-Brian