February 28, 201511 yr Long story short, I need to swap a data disk. What's the easiest/safest way in unRAID6? The existing drive is working fine, and parity is running and synced.
February 28, 201511 yr Community Expert Long story short, I need to swap a data disk. What's the easiest/safest way in unRAID6? The existing drive is working fine, and parity is running and synced. Just for interest why do you want to swap it? I would guess it is to change it for a larger drive (smaller is not allowed) but that is supposition. The typical process is: Stop the array. At this point it can be a good idea to back up the contents of the flash drive so that it is easy to revert to the previous configuration in the unlikely event of something going wrong. Unassign the disk Start the array. The disk should now show as mising Stop the array Assign the replacement disk. Unraid should now tell you that starting the array will cause a rebuild (and if necessary file system expansion to fill the disk). Click the check box to confirm this is what is wanted Start the array and the new disk should be rebuilt with the old drives contents. Not sure if steps 2 and 3 are necessary if you are changing the disk for a larger one - they are needed if you want to rebuild a disk onto itself and will not do any harm in this scenario. It is a good idea to keep the disk that is being replaced around untouched until the rebuild completes OK just in case things go wrong as then you can revert to the old configuration.
February 28, 201511 yr Author I'm replacing the Reds for Toshibas, both are 5TB. I got a great deal on the Toshibas, and I'm going to sell on the Reds (bizarrely a better resale value on them). I'll give that a spin, I assume I'll have to preclear the new drives?
February 28, 201511 yr Community Expert I'm replacing the Reds for Toshibas, both are 5TB. I got a great deal on the Toshibas, and I'm going to sell on the Reds (bizarrely a better resale value on them). I'll give that a spin, I assume I'll have to preclear the new drives? Strictly speaking it is not necessary to pre-clear drives before doing a rebuild. However it is a good idea to do it as a confidence check of the drives.
February 28, 201511 yr Long story short, I need to swap a data disk. What's the easiest/safest way in unRAID6? The existing drive is working fine, and parity is running and synced. itimpi gave you the easiest and quickest way. Safest would be to preclear the new drive(s) and add them to the array if you have the slots available. Parity is maintained the entire time during an add operation, so recovery from one of your existing data drives failing is easier. After the drives are added, rsync the data with verification from disk to disk, then after all data is duplicated, pull all the old drives and rebuild parity with a new config on only the new drives. Parity is maintained the entire operation until the new config, at which point you have verified copies of all the data anyway on the old disks. Slightly longer and more complicated, but safer. Also requires extra drive slots to be available, which may be an issue.
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