December 8, 201510 yr Hi - I have a broken sata connector drive that is functioning for now. The sata cable ripped off the connector on the drive. I have the array functioning well for now by gluing in the sata cable to the hdd broken port. I have a replacement being pre-cleared right now. What is the best way to replace the data on this broken drive without losing parity? My plan: 1. I was thinking about adding the new precleared drive to the array 2. move the data from broken HDD to the new drive 3. delete everything on broken drive 4. remove the old broken drive drive Will my parity be intact during this process? I am not sure about the approach on step 4, I think removing an empty drive will still destroy parity.
December 8, 201510 yr Community Expert Hi - I have a broken sata connector drive that is functioning for now. The sata cable ripped off the connector on the drive. I have the array functioning well for now by gluing in the sata cable to the hdd broken port. I have a replacement being pre-cleared right now. What is the best way to replace the data on this broken drive without losing parity? My plan: 1. I was thinking about adding the new precleared drive to the array 2. move the data from broken HDD to the new drive 3. delete everything on broken drive 4. remove the old broken drive drive Will my parity be intact during this process? I am not sure about the approach on step 4, I think removing an empty drive will still destroy parity. Deleting everything on a drive is not the same as clearing a drive. It will still have the data that you deleted. It will just have its filesystem written to indicate the data is deleted, and it will have the filesystem "data" that indicates an empty filesystem. So removing it will invalidate parity since it is not clear. In any case, this is entirely the wrong way to think about drive replacement. Replacing a broken drive is why you have a parity disk. Just shutdown, replace the broken disk with the new disk, start up and unRAID will rebuild the drive's data to the new drive. Might be a good idea to go to Tools - Diagnostics and post the complete diagnostics zip so we can check your other drives to make sure they aren't likely to interfere with the rebuild. Also, it is technically not required that a replacement disk be clear since it is just going to be overwritten with the old disk's data anyway. A clear disk is only necessary when adding a drive to a new slot. This is so parity will remain valid, since a clear disk has no effect on parity. Preclearing a new disk is still recommended anyway to test it. If you have any questions about any of this just ask.
December 16, 201510 yr Author trurl - I did smart checks for the remaining disks and replaced the bad disk with a new one. The data got rebuilt and I am good. Thank you! Deleting everything on a drive is not the same as clearing a drive. It will still have the data that you deleted. It will just have its filesystem written to indicate the data is deleted, and it will have the filesystem "data" that indicates an empty filesystem. So removing it will invalidate parity since it is not clear. In any case, this is entirely the wrong way to think about drive replacement. Replacing a broken drive is why you have a parity disk. Just shutdown, replace the broken disk with the new disk, start up and unRAID will rebuild the drive's data to the new drive. Might be a good idea to go to Tools - Diagnostics and post the complete diagnostics zip so we can check your other drives to make sure they aren't likely to interfere with the rebuild. Also, it is technically not required that a replacement disk be clear since it is just going to be overwritten with the old disk's data anyway. A clear disk is only necessary when adding a drive to a new slot. This is so parity will remain valid, since a clear disk has no effect on parity. Preclearing a new disk is still recommended anyway to test it. If you have any questions about any of this just ask.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.