Hi,

 

actually I'm planning to upgrade my array with two new 6 TB drives (the drivres are already precleared on a different computer). I plan to replace the existing 4 TB parity drive with one of the new drives and then step by step replace two old 1.5 TB drives with the old parity drive (4 TB) and the second 6 TB drive. So far so good. I'm runing a Linux Based VM on unRAID where my home automation system is running. The VM is placed on the Cache Drive only. Is it possible to maintain the VM operation during the several rebuild processes? Thanks a lot.

 

greetings

Frank

I tried something similar when testing a while back. Basically the VM would only be down whenever the array is down.

 

When the array is up, as long as the VM vdisk is on cache (and that the VM doesn't try to query something essential from the in-flux array) then the moving-things-around on the array is completely transparent to the VM.

 

A small tip, if you can live with the risk of not having parity during the moving-around, then don't add the parity until you have finished moving all the data. unRAID will complain that it doesn't have parity but the 2+x increase in speed is well worth it in my personal experience.

I was even able to move things in parallel with double the double speed (disk 1 to disk 3, disk 2 to disk 4).

Nice tip, but I have to rebuild both new data drives because every slot and sata port is used  . Maybe it is possible to hang up one of the cache drives (array of two 256 GB SSD) to have a free port available?