replacing large defective drivewith two smaller drives?

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

If I have a 6tb drive that fails, can I replace it with two 3tb drives? (or one 3tb and one 4tb?) I have one more slot in my microserver and spare 3 and 4tb drives and would much prefer to use those spare drives than shell out for another 6tb drive if possible 

[trurl]

You would have to copy all the data to the smaller drives yourself and then set a new configuration. unRAID can only replace a single drive with another single drive at least as large as the original.

[SSD]

If I have a 6tb drive that fails, can I replace it with two 3tb drives? (or one 3tb and one 4tb?) I have one more slot in my microserver and spare 3 and 4tb drives and would much prefer to use those spare drives than shell out for another 6tb drive if possible 

 

Is your 6T out of warranty?

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

no, fortunately my 6tbs are not out of warranty nor have they gone bad yet but I am going abroad with my microserver and where I will be in a place which most likely doesn't have large drives (and certainly not for reasonable prices). So that, coupled with the fact that I have a few smaller drives already, prompted me to think about the scenario i posted about.

[SSD]

Moving your files from the 6T drive to 2 3T drives would not be a problem. Just take a bit of time.

 

Another option - look at an inexpensive Areca controller on eBay, like an ARC-1230. With it you can create a RAID0 array of 2 3T drives (6T volume) to rebuild onto should the 6T drive fail. The Areca would give you a way to recover less expensively should you need to.

 

I have an Areca card and use it for my parity drive (2x3T=6T parity). It is faster than a single 6T drive, and I have had good luck with it. I am starting to use Areca cards in my backup server to combine older smaller drives I own (1T and 2T) into larger RAID0 sets that are more useful sizes for doing backups. This also let's me get a more physical disks into the backup server.