New WD RED Drives - replacing smaller 2 TB WD Caviar Green - process?

[pixelgraft]

I currently have 1 WD 4TB RED as my parity. All my data drives are 2TB WD Caviar Greens. I'll be ordering 2 more 4TB REDs to replace the greens so that I can get the greens OUT of the NAS entirely. With that in mind, do I have this process correct below?

• pre-clear new 4TB RED drives
  
• stop the array
  
• add new drives into the array
  
• start the array
  
• format new drives and expand the array
  
• use midnight commander via telnet putty to move files off of the smaller discs and onto the new 4TB REDs
  
• once all data is copied off 2TB Greens, stop the array
  
• remove 2TB Greens from from the array
  
• Go to Tools > New Config > Apply
  
• remove 2TB greens from tower (will pre-clear these first to ensure all clear)
  
• start the array
  
• do parity sync
  
• DONE - rejoice & do happy dance?
  

 

 

[garycase]

What you've outlined is one way to do that.

 

Another alternative is to replace (one-at-a-time) the 2TB drives with a 4TB drive and let the system rebuild the drives onto the new, larger drives.  After you've replaced two of them, you could then copy data from other drives to the new drives and then, if you have drives you want to remove, you could do a New Config without those drives.