What is the best way to upgrade my entire array?


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Hello forum,

 

Been using UnRaid for years now and loving it, but I'm at the point where my current array is starting to show age and I'd rather replace parts before they fail.

 

Right now my Array is as follows on UnRaid 6.2

Parity 1: Toshiba 3 TB (1 year)

Parity 2: Toshiba 3 TB (1 year)

Data 1: Seagate 2 TB (3 years)

Data 2: Seagate 2 TB (5 years)

Data 3: Seagate 2 TB (3 years)

Data 4: Seagate 2 TB (1.5 years)

Data 5: Seagate 1.5 TB (2.5 years)

Data 6: Seagate 1.5 TB (2.5 years)

Cache 1: PNY 480 GB (< 1 year)

Cache 2: PNY 480 GB (< 1 year)

 

Running full time on the box:

- Plex Docker

- 3x Windows 7 VM's (3 gamers, 1 PC)

- 1x Windows 2012 VM (Game server)

- 1x Ubuntu VM (Web server, Teamspeak3, etc.)

 

This is running on a EVGA FTW K X99 board with an i7-5830k.  The drives are plugged in to the 10 on-board motherboard ports and all the PCIe slots are being used by either GPU's or Intel Quad-NIC cards.

 

So right now I am using all the SATA ports on the motherboard.

 

 

 

What I want to do is upgrade the 6-disk Data drive portion to 4x Toshiba 3 TB drives, same as the parity drives.  What would be the best way to accomplish this?

- Using all 10 SATA ports currently as listed above

- Have data on all Data drives, currently using 9.36 TB of the 11.0 TB (Lost of movies, TV, music, documents)

- Have data on Cache drives (Main VM OS drives for faster access, Docker Image)

 

My initial thoughts are:

- temporarily disable Dockers and VMs completely

- unnassign parity drives and mark those physically (these will have to rebuild completely later anyway right?)

- unnassign cache drives temporarily (this should keep data on them in tact and they can easily be re-added later again right?)

- Shutdown system

- Unplug Cache drives

- Unplug Parity Drives

- Plug in the 4 new drives

- Copy all the data from the existing 6 drives to the new 4 drives from within command line of UnRaid

- reassign drives and rebuild parity as required

 

Another option I was thinking was to just add the 4 new drives to the array after removing the parity and cache drives, renaming the old shares and creating new shares that only have the new disks selected and moving everything from old share to new share so Unraid can allocate files as required.  After that, remove the old data drives, re-add the Cache and Parity drives, and re-parity the whole thing.

 

 

 

Alternative would be to purchase 9.3 TB worth of external hard drives and backing everything up on to those in the mean time, re-do the data side of the array completely and re-copy everything back over.

Edited by axipher
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One of the nice things about unRAID, well a few nice things actually, is the ability to use drives of different sizes and the ability to upgrade to larger drives easily. As Trurl says, just replace each drive one at time with a larger one and let unRAID rebuild your data, easy peasy.

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So going from 6 DATA drives down to 4 drives would be just the following:

 

- Unassign Data Drive 1

- Shutdown

- Unplug Data Drive 1 and Plug in new Drive

- Reboot

- Assign new Data Drive 1

- Let it do something???

 

Repeat for Data Drive 2, 3, 4

 

Then what about Drives 5 and 6, just unassign and unplug them and then let it rebuild the data on to the drives 1 through 4?  Or would I need to stay with 6 data drives now?

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10 minutes ago, axipher said:

Then what about Drives 5 and 6, just unassign and unplug them and then let it rebuild the data on to the drives 1 through 4?

Unraid will not rebuild data to a different drive slot. Before you remove them and set a new config to rebuild parity, you will need to copy the contents of disk5 and disk6 to the free space available on disk1-4. The unBalance plugin provides a fairly hassle free way to do that.

 

First get the others upgraded one at a time, then when that is done in a few days you can worry about how to remove the other two.

 

One of the benefits of upgrading one at a time is that the original drives will be unaltered, so they can be backups for now.

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On 5/5/2017 at 8:25 AM, axipher said:

So going from 6 DATA drives down to 4 drives would be just the following:

 

- Unassign Data Drive 1

- Shutdown

- Unplug Data Drive 1 and Plug in new Drive

- Reboot

- Assign new Data Drive 1

- Let it do something???

 

Repeat for Data Drive 2, 3, 4

 

Then what about Drives 5 and 6, just unassign and unplug them and then let it rebuild the data on to the drives 1 through 4?  Or would I need to stay with 6 data drives now?

For drive 5 and 6 (or 3 and 4) 

At the end you will need to change the config and rebuild parity.

Edited by c3
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Thanks for all the tips and advice everyone, drives should be arriving early tomorrow then I will start changing them out one by one.  Then I will have a look at the UnBalance Plugin, or I might just order 2 more drives and just to a full 6 drive replacement.

  • Like 1
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3 hours ago, axipher said:

I might just order 2 more drives and just to a full 6 drive replacement.

That's the easy way, but I'd recommend not doing it that way. Extra spindles you don't need in the array are just another failure point. It would be better to consolidate as much as possible and only add drives as you need them. An empty drive that fails puts your remaining data at risk just as much as a full drive.

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  • 7 months later...

Just a update back, UnBalance proved to be way more valuable than originally thought.  I had a drive start to show SMART errors only 1 month in to it's life and was able to use UnBalance to quickly move everything off that drive and verify the files before replacing it.

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I am in the middle of replace most of my drives with larger ones. I am not replacing one by one and letting it rebuild though. My drives are 4-6 years old and formatted with reiserfs. I want my new drives to be xfs so adding a new drive then using unbalance to move a few drives over and doing a parity rebuild. Takes a little extra time but worth it in the end. I am running with 5 less drives now.

 

Something to think about if your drives are formatted with the old reiserfs.

 

Edited by mgworek
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26 minutes ago, mgworek said:

I want my new drives to be reiserfs

I hope you just have that backwards.  Reiserfs is a deprecated file system and no longer recommended, for a variety of reasons.  And XFS is the defacto standard for unRAID.  If you don't wan to use XFS then you should give BTRFS a try, but not Reiserfs.

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  • 1 year later...
On 5/5/2017 at 11:06 AM, trurl said:

No, no, no.

 

Just replace each drive one at a time and let it rebuild to a new larger disk. This is what unRAID is designed to do.

Sorry for thread necropsy...

 

But I am migrating 4 x 4tb data disks to 4 x 10tb data disks.  Parity is almost done rebuilding on new 12tb disk.

 

I was planning on just copying Disk 1 to new disk 1 10tb and so on for each disk.  swap the drives.  enter new config and begin parity sync...

 

This is a major no-no?

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7 hours ago, J.Nerdy said:

This is a major no-no?

Yes. Too much trouble and too easy to make mistakes. Also, unless you have enough ports to allow you to have all the disks in at the same time then you would have to New Config and rebuild parity more than once. And, having so many disks installed at once actually increases the risk of one of them giving problems.

 

The standard way to do what you want to do is to replace each disk one at a time and let it rebuild from the parity calculation. Since you don't have any actual failed disks (as far as we know), rebuilding is even less risky since the original disks can serve as a backup in case there is any problems.

 

So, what you quoted (from me) is what I just repeated. Why do you question it?

 

It would make sense to do something else if the original disks are ReiserFS and you want the new disks to have another filesystem, such as XFS. But you don't mention anything like that.

 

It would make sense to do something else if you intended to decrease the number of disks because the smaller disks would fit on fewer disk. But you specifically said that is not what your are doing.

 

If you want more specific consideration of your actual situation, post Diagnostics and give us more details.

  • Upvote 1
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1 hour ago, trurl said:

 

So, what you quoted (from me) is what I just repeated. Why do you question it?

 

 

To better understand the risks of time saving vs fault tolerance.

 

I appreciate your response, thank you!

 

Edit: also, since I am on 6.7.2 I am noticing a degrade in array performance when experiencing large writes (as noted by @johnnie.black in bug thread).

 

Again, thanks!  I am going rebuild one disk at a time.

Edited by J.Nerdy
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