Upgrading cache drives?

[HellDiverUK]

Quick question - I'm currently running a pair of Crucial BX100 SSDs in a cache pool.

 

If I were wanting to upgrade to 1TB drives, how would I go about it?

 

 

[RobJ]

There's no rebuild process for Cache drives, if that was what you were hoping for?!?!   

 

I would think you just unassign the current drives, with the array stopped, and assign the new drives, and let the system prepare them.  Obviously, you will need to backup anything on the current Cache drives you want saved, and restore it to the new drives when they're ready.

[trurl]

I've not tried this, so you should definitely backup before experimenting.

 

Since the data from one drive in the pool is mirrored on the other drive in the pool, and you can mix drive sizes, you should be able to remove one drive and replace it with another then balance, then remove the other drive and replace it and balance.

 

Whether this works like it should may be another question and I have always wanted to find out but haven't needed to yet.

[JP]

I found this through a search because I was curious.  I'm asking this more for unRAID 5.0.6 because I still need to upgrade to 6.0, but with everything else staying the same and you:

 

1> backup your cache data by copying it to the array (this would include things like plugins)

2> shutdown the server

3> remove the cache drive and replace it with a new cache drive

4> boot the server in SAFE MODE so that unRAID does not attempt to run the plugins

5> assign the new cache drive as cache and format it

6> copy all the backed up cache data from the array on to the cache drive

7> reboot, but this time start up with plugins (not in SAFE MODE)

 

Would that even work?  I would think unRAID wouldn't really care what drive the cache was as long as the paths and files were there to run things like the plugins, but I'm sure there might be more going on than I realize.

[JP]

I did some more searching and found the process in the wiki.  I was a little off.

 

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

 

One note is that I found many people stating you should not preclear a SSD so this process could change slightly depending on whether your are moving to a SSD Cache drive or not.