I have recently installed unRaid 6.2 and am quite happy.

 

Initially I did not install a parity drive, thinking it would be easy to add later (and I was not sure if I would keep unRaid).

Previously I had a 2Bay SynologyNAS which was not up to my needs anymore.

In total I have 3x4TB disks, 1x WD Blue and 2x WD Green. The greens were in my NAS, the Blue I bought new.

I also have an SSD in my Server for my Docker appdata and cache.

 

My Plan was:

-Copy all data from SynologyNAS to unRaid server (only WD Blue and SSD installed)

-see if I like unraid

-grab one of the disks from my nas and use it as a parity drive

-grab the other disk from my nas and use it as a second data drive.

 

unfortunately the WD Greens are slightly smaller:

User capacity: 4,000,753,476,096 bytes [4.00 TB] (WD Green)

User capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB] (WD Blue)

 

I figured it might be HPA, but I have been unable to confirm that:

hdparm -N /dev/sdc output:  READ_NATIVE_MAX_ADDRESS_EXT failed: Input/output error

The output of grep HPA /var/log/syslog is empty.

 

One of the WD Green disks still holds the NAS data, the other is already precleared.

 

What is the easiest way to proceed?

I do want my data to be on at least 2 drives at a time, to avoid data loss during this quite disk intense transition time.

Unfortunately I have already made quite large changes to the WD Blue disk (moved and renamed a whole bunch of files), so simply copying the NAS data again would be unpractical.

 

I figure that I could clone the WD Blue disk to my WD Green disk, clear the WD Blue disk and then use the WD Blue as Parity? What would be the best way to achieve that?

Manually mounting the disks and using rsync comes to my mind first, but I have never used rsync. Is this a good application?

Or can I somehow shrink the WD Blue disk without loosing data (maybe by writing HPA)?

 

Thanks for any help

I wouldn't try to mess around creating an HPA. I'd use the Blue as parity after first copying its contents to the already empty Green, as you have already decided for yourself. I'd do something like this:

 

1. Assuming the Blue is unRAID disk1, I'd assign the empty Green as disk2.

2. Copy the files from disk1 to disk 2.

3. Check that the copy was successful.

4. Do a New Config, assigning the Green as disk 1 and the Blue as Parity.

5. Start the array and let parity build.

6. Remove the other disk from your old NAS and put it in your unRAID server.

7. Pre-clear the newly added disk.

8. Assign it as disk2.

 

Yes, this is a good application for

rsync

but if you're nervous of using it you could use

mc

(Midnight Commander) which is included with unRAID and gives a more user friendly interface.