Hi

 

I have one server with quite a bit of extra space and i want free up 3 of my 2tb drives for use in another server project,

 

I found the wiki guide to remove a drive / shrink array which is fine for one drive removal

 

my question is will this work for multiple drives or do i have to rebuild parity for each drive removal at a time.

 

I mean can i just un-assign all three disks from the shares, then use MC to move data to the other drives, pull the three drive the reassign (ensuring i check the parity disk is correctly assigned first) and then rebuild?

 

any help would be appreciated, many thanks in advance 

Not sure what you mean by "un-assign all three disks from the shares". Are you talking about user shares with specific disks included or excluded? I would just do the copy between disks instead of user shares.

 

No need to do this one disk at a time.

 

Use MC to copy from disk to disk to get all data you want from the drives you're going to remove onto other drives.

Shutdown safely and remove disks.

Startup, do New Config, and let parity rebuild.

 

I mean can i just un-assign all three disks from the shares, then use MC to move data to the other drives, pull the three drive the reassign (ensuring i check the parity disk is correctly assigned first) and then rebuild?

Sounds good. You will lose the ability to recover from a failed drive when you set a new config and remove the drives until you rebuild parity, but it appears you know that. Personally I would copy the data instead of move it, that way you have another backup copy until you repurpose the drives.

 

trurl covered the bit about shares, you definitely want to operate only on the /mnt/diskx items in mc, don't even browse into the /mnt/user tree so you don't get crossed up with what data goes where.

Thanks jonathan good point re - the copying rather than moving, I'll do that thank you

Not sure what you mean by "un-assign all three disks from the shares". Are you talking about user shares with specific disks included or excluded?

 

It says to do that in the wiki guide....

 

"On the UnRAID Web Management page for configuring User Shares, remove Disk 2 from inclusion in any shares (eg. change disk1,disk2,disk4 to disk1,disk4). Disk 2 should not be listed in any inclusions or exclusions, because it won't exist any more once we are done."

 

thanks

 

To remove drives from array use these steps.

 

1.  Make sure the drives you want to remove are empty.

2.  Do a parity check to verify that current parity and drives are good.

3.  Run smart report on all drive that are to remain to verify the drive are good and no pending sectors.

4.  Remove drives and create a new config.

5.  Reassign the remaining drives.

6.  Do a parity calculation.

7.  Run a parity check to confirm that new parity calc. is good.

1.  Make sure the drives you want to remove are empty.

They don't have to be empty to be removed. Just make sure that data that's on them is backed up elsewhere.

True.  I what I was getting at is that you should make sure you have your data copied/moved off those drives

You could use the MV command versus using MC.  I have used it to move all of the data from drives before.  Just make sure you destination drive has enough open space to accommodate the moves.

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Transferring_Files_Within_the_unRAID_Server