I have a HDD which is giving an increasing number of errors, so I'm changing it. At the same time, I'll increase its size from 2TB to 4TB.

 

Note that my unRAID box can't take any more drives, so I have to remove the 2TB from the array, before I can replace with the 4TB one.

 

What's the proper procedure to do it, including preclear? I'm in latest version of unRAID with one parity drive.

2 minutes ago, Ulvan said:

I have a HDD which is giving an increasing number of errors, so I'm changing it. At the same time, I'll increase its size from 2TB to 4TB.

 

Note that my unRAID box can't take any more drives, so I have to remove the 2TB from the array, before I can replace with the 4TB one.

 

What's the proper procedure to do it, including preclear? I'm in latest version of unRAID with one parity drive.

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and post the complete zip so we can see why you're getting the errors.

 

unRAID doesn't need a clear drive in this scenario, but people often use preclear just to test a new drive. If you don't have room to preclear in your server, you can run the diagnostic software from the drive manufacturer on another machine as an initial test. Then rebuilding and parity check could be a further test.

 

Before attempting the replacement, you might do a parity check if you haven't recently, and also check that all other drives have good SMART.

 

To replace a drive, shut down, connect the new drive, check connections of all drives, boot up, select the new drive in the slot of the old one, and start the array to rebuild.

 

The drive with errors has had that issue for well over a year, and the errors are increasing, so I'm moving it to my desktop as a scratch drive just to be safe. Good excuse to increase the size of my array as well

 

So there's no way to do a preclear in this scenario? I used to do that, but sounds like that might not be in fashion anymore?

I use the Western Digital Data Lifeguard tools (got the recommendation from garycase) to test out a drive in my Windows machine when I receive it.  That's half of what pre-clear does - exercise the drive and test for infant mortality.  If you want to do a full pre-clear you could stand up another unRAID server using a trial key... otherwise you need room in your primary server.

I'll have to go without preclear then.

 

When I booted up with the new HDD in place, I get "Wrong" when assigning it to the empty slot. This is not very informative... I get Start will start Parity-Sync and/or Data-Rebuild prompt at the bottom of the screen where to start the array, so should be OK to proceed?

1 minute ago, Ulvan said:

so should be OK to proceed?

 

Yes

Thank you, chugging along nicely!