February 1, 201610 yr Hi everyone, Just trying to get my steps clear here and figure out the best way to go about doing a few things. First thing: I am out of available SATA/power ports in my server, as in all of the ports are taken by active drives in the array (and a cache drive). Second: I have two 4TB drives I want to add to my array, but I want them to replace my smallest drives (a 640GB Blue and a 1TB Green, both have more than 60,000 power on hours). Third: My parity drive is only 3TB, so one of those 4TB drives has to become the parity drive. Fourth: I'd like to stop using reiserfs and move to XFS. All of my drives in the array are on one user share and I want the system to basically be identical to what it is now, except using XFS instead. What's the best process I can do to accomplish everything I'd like to accomplish? Being out of free SATA/power ports, I can't just add one of the drives to the server and recalculate parity, then reassign the current parity drive since by adding the drive I'd have to remove one. As of right now this is what I had initially thought to do: 1. Replace parity drive with 4TB drive, let parity recalculate on new drive. 2. Re-add old parity 3TB drive in place of 640gb drive. Let array rebuild on this drive. 3. Copy(rsync?) 1TB green to 3TB drive we just added. Delete 1TB drive from array. 4. With one open space now, add 4TB into system, format as XFS. 5. Copy(rsync?) largest remaining RFS drive to this XFS drive. 6. Repeat step 5 reusing the drives we just synced from by formatting as XFS, all the way down to the smallest drive. 7. Hope everything is fine. Anyone see any better ways I could do this? I do have an SSD cache drive I could remove from the system and free up a SATA and power port. I also have a USB 3 dock which I've been using to preclear the 4TB drives. Not sure if I can assign one of those drives to the array and rebuild parity. Regarding the plan I laid out, it seems like that's going to be extremely time consuming, especially since I don't have hot swap bays and need to disassemble the server each time I add drives. I'm hoping to do this in the fastest time possible, but also with the RFS to XFS switch, the safest and least noticeable way possible. I'm also a bit unclear on the best approach to do the conversion to XFS. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
February 1, 201610 yr As of right now this is what I had initially thought to do: 1. Replace parity drive with 4TB drive, let parity recalculate on new drive. 2. Re-add old parity 3TB drive in place of 640gb drive. Let array rebuild on this drive. 3. Copy(rsync?) 1TB green to 3TB drive we just added. Delete 1TB drive from array. 4. With one open space now, add 4TB into system, format as XFS. 5. Copy(rsync?) largest remaining RFS drive to this XFS drive. 6. Repeat step 5 reusing the drives we just synced from by formatting as XFS, all the way down to the smallest drive. In step 3 you can just stop the array and change the format type to XFS on the 1TB after you are sure the content has been copied. When you start the array again, it will offer to format the drive. Then you can just do a normal drive upgrade to the 4TB in the 1TB slot and the new 4TB will be empty XFS. Copy instead of move when you are migrating, it's quicker, and the source drive will be blank anyway when you change file systems. I know you are out of slots in your unraid tower, but I would strongly recommend figuring out a way to preclear the new 4TB drives to make sure they are perfect. The last thing you want is to get half way through this process and discover one of the new drives is flaky. Either set up a temporary unraid key and use another tower to do the preclears, or something to make sure the drives are good. New does not automatically mean good.
February 1, 201610 yr Author I know you are out of slots in your unraid tower, but I would strongly recommend figuring out a way to preclear the new 4TB drives to make sure they are perfect. The last thing you want is to get half way through this process and discover one of the new drives is flaky. Either set up a temporary unraid key and use another tower to do the preclears, or something to make sure the drives are good. New does not automatically mean good. I've just finished pre clearing both 4TB drives via a USB 3 dock tied to the system. Both checked out perfect. Thanks for the help!
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