January 5, 20179 yr I'm making a number of changes to my server and thought I'd ask the experts for what would be the best way to proceed. I'm moving from a 10 drive 17.5TB system to a 4 drive 8TB system. That excludes the Parity Drive which is a 4GB drive and the cache drive which is a small 320GB drive. I've just finished deleting all the items I needed to get below 8TB. So what I would like to also like to get done are the following. Move all files to just 4 drives from the 10 Convert Drives to XFS Convert all blu ray folders (95% of what's currently on my drives) to mkv files. Remove drives from server. Move all equipment to smaller case Just not sure what's the best order to proceed in. Should I first convert all my movies to mkv and move them to the smaller drives, deleting them off the bigger drives? That way I free up as much room on my large drives. Then once done , convert the larger empty drives to XFS. Before converting to XFS do I have to run a preclear or does the preclear automatically convert it to XFS? Then move the files I've converted to mkv back to the larger drives? Any assistance would greatly be appreciated.
January 5, 20179 yr Can you please list the drive sizes and formats for the current layout and the desired end result? From your description, I think the best way would be to use the unbalance plugin to empty off your largest data drive, change the disk format in disk properties to XFS, format it and use it as the destination for your mkv files. When that drive fills up, empty off the next largest drive using unbalance again, lather, rinse, repeat. When all your movies are converted, use unbalance to empty the remainder of your drives slated for removal. Once that is done, set a new config with the desired list of remaining drives and recalculate parity. All this is subject to change when we see a list of your drives, current usage and end result usage.
January 5, 20179 yr Community Expert ... Before converting to XFS do I have to run a preclear or does the preclear automatically convert it to XFS? The only scenario where unRAID requires a clear drive is when the drive will be added to a new slot in an array that already has parity. This is so parity will remain valid. A clear disk is all zeros so has no affect on parity. If you add a disk that isn't clear, unRAID will clear it. It used to take the array offline while clearing, but recent versions will clear a disk while keeping the array accessible. The main reason preclearing was invented was to prevent this period where the array was offline. People still often use preclear to test new disks, but except for the scenario I already mentioned, unRAID doesn't require a clear disk. And since a clear disk is all zeros, obviously it cannot (and does not) have an XFS filesystem on it. Seems like a good time to ask about your backups. Do you have backups of any irreplaceable files?
January 5, 20179 yr Author Here's where I am now. Not totally at 8TB but I may leave some data on some drives and maybe eventually replace a 2TB drive with a 4TB some time down the road. Disk 1 1TB Free = 350GB Disk 2 1TB Free = 290GB Disk 3 2TB Free = 773GB Disk 4 2TB Free = 710GB Disk 5 2TB Free = 1.1TB Disk 6 2TB Free = 1TB Disk 7 2TB Free = 884GB Disk 8 2TB Free = 316GB Disk 9 2TB Free = 960GB Disk 10 2TB Free = 940GB
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