Jump to content

Upgrade Parity Drive and Data Disk Simultaneously with No Free SATA Slots

Nightstalk3rs

By Nightstalk3rs
in General Support

Recommended Posts

Nightstalk3rs Rookie

Nightstalk3rs

Posted
Posted

Hello all!  As this is something I haven't yet done before, I always look to the helpful community here for advice before proceeding with the unfamiliar.

 

I just posted a thread recently asking for help with replacing a dead data drive, which was a fairly simple process.  Currently, my parity drive is the same type of Seagate 3TB HDD (ST3000DM001) as the data disk that just recently failed.  As this drive model is known to have a high failure rate, I do not trust having it in my system anymore.  I also wanted to use this opportunity to slowly upgrade my drives to 4TB drives over time to increase array capacity.

 

My server is currently at maximum capacity for drives, so I am unable to add anything new without having to replace a drive.  My goal here is the following:

[*]Replace 3TB parity drive with a new, pre-cleared 4TB drive

[*]Also replace a currently in use 3TB data drive with a new, pre-cleared 4TB drive to begin making my array larger

Ultimately I want to pre-clear both drives before adding to my array.  Since I do not have any free slots to add a new drive into my current array to pre-clear, I thought this may be difficult to do.  I would hate to have my old parity and data drives removed (although not at the same time) while the new drives are being pre-cleared and then subsequently rebuilt, even though the array would be stopped.  I feel that might leave me open to issues, but I could be thinking about it incorrectly.  Since I'm out of capacity to add new drives without removing an old one first, what might be the best way to pre-clear both of these drives and replace my parity and a data drive consecutively?

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!  I did try searching the forums and wiki and found some similar situations, but I'm always cautious to do anything before consulting with the experts :)  Thank you so much in advance!

Link to comment
demonmaestro Enthusiast

demonmaestro

Posted
Posted

I would think that one of these would work for you. ???

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005B3VO24

Not sure you can count on getting smart reports from that.

 

Why would you say that. It is just a converter from USB to SATA. I use the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows that does a SMART report on the drives with that device.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=810&sid=3〈=en

 

QUICK TEST - performs SMART drive quick self-test to gather and verify the Data Lifeguard information contained on the drive.

EXTENDED TEST - performs a Full Media Scan to detect bad sectors. Test may take several hours to complete depending on the size of the drive.

WRITE ZEROS - writes zeros to the drive with options of Full Erase and Quick Erase. File system and data will be lost.

VIEW TEST RESULT - displays the latest test results.

 

I have used that device and software on multiple different kind of drives and even an external that was giving me all kinds of issues. It gave me the ability to pull the data off the drive.

Link to comment
trurl Grand Master

trurl

Posted
Posted

You can prepare another flash drive with unRAID v5 and just run it without a key, since you won't be assigning any drives. Then you can boot that on another computer, or on your unRAID server, and use it to preclear the new disks.

 

However, you don't really need to do this anyway. It is not really required that parity or rebuilds be clear, since the purpose of having a clear disk is so parity will be valid when it is added to a new slot.

 

So, you could just test the drives using the manufacturer's diagnostics utilities, which you can probably get from their website.

Link to comment
Nightstalk3rs Rookie

Nightstalk3rs

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thank you both for the suggestions!  It seems to me that the easiest and quickest route for me would be to not pre-clear and use a diagnostics tool in Windows to test the drive.  However, I don't see that Toshiba has any official diagnostics tool for their drives, so I was wondering if you guys or anyone else could suggest another utility that may work?  I see that demonmaestro recommended the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool, but I'm just wondering if it would work with a different manufacturer's drive.  I imagine there may also be 3rd party software in existence, but I'm not 100% familiar with any that may exist.

Link to comment
Nightstalk3rs Rookie

Nightstalk3rs

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thank you both again for your help!  Just an update on my situation.  Last night I installed WD Data Lifeguard on two computers and hooked up each drive to one of the PCs, one via SATA directly and one via an SATA to USB3 adapter (with it's own power source) as demonmaestro had suggested, and of which I actually had purchased a few weeks ago from Tigerdirect.  I ran the extended test on both 5TB drives and it took roughly about 7-8 hours, both passing the test fine.  I only ran it once, but I'm considering running it again if it's recommended to do so, and can't see being a bad thing to do.  I also was considering doing the "write zeros" option, but thought that might be unnecessary to do with the brand new drives.

 

Thank you again to everyone!  Such a helpful community, and it's good to learn about this for the future so I don't have to waste anyone's time, and also for a sense of enlightenment :)

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...