[Solved] Pre-clearing a replacement drive with no free SATA ports.

[3605481mah]

One advice:  get rid of Seagates 3TB. I ditched 4 of them in a short time. Search for reliability rate of the model you have.

 

[trurl]

Upgrade complete. Thanks for the initial suggestions folks. I replaced the 500 GB drive with the pre-cleared 3TB drive, having pre-cleared it on the old server I had laying around. It took around 46 hours to pre-clear, but my array was up during that time since I didn't do it on the unRAID box.

 

The only other note is that I ran a parity check beforehand. I wanted to know I had 0 parity errors before swapping drives. With 0 errors, I was fully confident in pulling that 500 GB and it went great. unRAID was only down for about 10 minutes while it came online with the new drive, then it proceeded to restore the data to the 3TB drive for me while everything was up. During that process, we watched a 720p movie on Plex without a single skip, so I was pleased 

 

Thanks again!

Robbie

Glad it all worked out.

 

Just thought I would mention in case you or anyone else reading this wasn't aware. A disk added to a new slot must be clear so it will not invalidate parity, but a rebuild does not actually require a cleared disk.

 

It is still a very good idea to preclear any new disks so they will be thoroughly tested. All of your disks must be trustworthy because they are all required when one of them fails.

[SSD]

Glad all went smoothly and now you have 2.5G to grow!

Heh. I use 2.5GB for half a movie. 

 

Ain't it a bitch being so old that a MB seems big and a GB is huge and a TB is unfathomable? Speaking of RAM in GB and storage in TB is quite a contrast to 256K SIPPs and 20MB full height HDDs.

 

Guilty!  Obviously that was 2500G, not 2.5G.