I was trying to remove a drive, one that's clearly flaky, without swapping in a new drive. Obviously, this is far from ideal, but it looks like removing a drive makes for an unprotected array.

 

Is there any way to move a drive's files to other drives in an array, dump the drive and decrease your drive count by one permanently? This presupposes there's space in the array, obviously, but at the moment, there is...

Yes,

 

Move the files.

Stop the array.

Un-assign the drive.

Go back to the main screen and use the button labeled as "restore"  (It is actually a "Set Initial Disk Configuration" button)

 

Then, when you subsequently press "Start" to start the array it will re-calculate parity on the remaining assigned drives.  You will be unprotected from a disk failure from the rime you set a new disk configuration (when you press restore) until parity is fully calculated.

 

Joe L.

Yes you can remove one. Here is how I did it.

Telnet into your unraid server.

Find out which disk you are removing (use "mount" and compare with unraid web)

If you want to remove /mnt/disk2 and you have enough space on /mnt/disk1 (use "df -h" to see free space) then use something like "rsync -r /mnt/disk1/* /mnt/disk2/" to copy all the data to the other disk.

Then power down the array and remove the disk.

Power back up and press "restore" in the web interface.

Thanks folks!