I finally decided to ditch my Drobo and bought unRAID. Currently working on transferring my media elsewhere to empty out my Drobo. My question is this:

 

I have currently in my test setup (that I would rather not delete) a 1tb parity drive and a 600gb data drive. My Drobo has 5 3tb drives in it. What is the best way to switch out these drives. There are a few posts I read that if I understand correctly tell me to switch out the Parity drive first, after it rebuilds, swap out the data drive. After this is done, I should be able to add the other 3 drives into the array.

 

Thanks for the input.

If you are comfortable with your backups, the quickest way to do what you want is to set a new config and assign all the drives as you want but leave the parity spot empty. Then you can assign the parity drive after all your data is transferred. This avoids all the downtime for rebuilds and clearing.

 

Are all the drives involved well tested with clean smart reports? Do you keep complete backups of all your data? Unraid (or any flavor of RAID) is not a replacement for backups.

Well my backups were all kept on my drobo, right now they are on a bunch of scattered drives till I can rebuild my array, I do not have an unRAID backup as of now due to all my spare drives holding my drobo data. I have not figured out how to backup my Dockers/VMs yet for that. I let a friend use a VM to setup a game server so I'd like to not delete that, the only other thing I have is an Emby docker, but I will probably reset that anyways.