Novice here that gets confused easy, spent hours reading on how to handle my situation so here goes. Server is used as media server, home movies/pics are backed up offsite.

several weeks ago upgraded to 6.2.4 installed a 2nd parity drive - all had been working fine.

This left me with

P1 3TB

P2 4TB

D1 through D9 collection of 1TB to 3TB drives.

Read some forums decided it was time to switch to xfs from reiser

As I moved data around disks and changed file systems D9 came up with current pending sector 441, offline uncorrectable 192 and Reallocated sector count 0.

I have moved all data from D9 to other drives, reformated by changing its file system to btrfs to force a format, everything appears to be functioning.

 

I have a 4TB  drive to arrive in a couple days I plan to install as P1, and will use the old 3TB parity as my D9.

1)Can I, just preclear the 4TB, install as P1, let it rebuild, then take the old P1 3TB drive and swap out with D9. I read cautions about rebuilding arrays if any data disks has pending sectors.

2) Should I do this: (The "Clear Drive Then Remove Drive" Method) referenced here (https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Shrink_array) to shrink the array first, removing D9, then just adding back in later with a good disk.

 

Is thier something else I should do, i read about preclearing a drive with pending sectors to get them to reallocate, but not sure if i should do that with a drive that is part of the array.

Thanks,

 

Since you have 2 parities you can run without that disk and still be protected. I think if you unassign the disk and start without it you should be able to run preclear on it.

There was also a procedure known as a parity-swap.  You can read about it here

 

    https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/The_parity_swap_procedure

 

But I wouldn't try it until some more folks have weighed in.  (With dual parity, you still have plenty of protection.)