September 22, 20169 yr Hello, I recently had a 6TB drive fail in my UnRaid server. Instead of purchasing a new drive, I was considering using 2 3TB ones I have sitting around just to save the expense. I know I won't be able to simply install it and let it rebuild parity, so what would be the best way to copy the data from the emulated failed drive to the 2 new ones? Could I format the drives as xfs, mount / copy the data over, then rebuild parity with those 2 disks minus the 6TB one? If there's a quicker / easier way to deal with this situation I'd love to know. Thanks!
September 22, 20169 yr No easy way, it's going to be somewhat of a manual process. Which version of unraid are you running? Do you currently have a cache drive? How much free space do you have on the rest of your current array drives?
September 22, 20169 yr Author No problem. Figured it would be a manual thing. Just wanted to check before I started the process! Using Unraid 6.2 currently with a 1TB cache drive. Not really enough space to copy the data to existing array drives unfortunately. Thanks!
September 22, 20169 yr Replicating the precise partitioning and format that unraid wants to see to successfully integrate a foreign disk into the array is apparently too fiddly for me to recommend. I've seen more than one sob story on here about someone spending hours copying data with unassigned devices only to have unraid not want to mount the drive in the array. What I would do if I were you is to remove your cache drive, replace it with the first 3TB drive, and tell unraid to format it XFS. You must only have one cache slot defined, or it won't let you use XFS. After it's formatted, swap it with the other 3TB and repeat. When they are both formatted, you can put your original cache drive back, and mount the 2 3TB drives using the unassigned devices plugin. Then you can use MC or rsync to COPY data, and they should be usable as array drives after you are done. I certainly hope you have backups of your array data, or are OK with possibly losing it, because there are multiple ways for this whole process to go wrong. It would be much safer to get another 6TB drive and rebuild.
September 25, 20169 yr Author Hi again, I tried what was suggested today and it automatically formats the cache drive as btrfs. Is there a setting I need to change so the cache disk gets formated as xfs? Thanks!
September 25, 20169 yr Community Expert Hi again, I tried what was suggested today and it automatically formats the cache drive as btrfs. Is there a setting I need to change so the cache disk gets formated as xfs? Thanks! btrfs is default for cache, but you can reformat any drive to another filesystem by clicking on it to get to its settings page.
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