June 28, 20179 yr Hi I just replaced my old server with a new one. I am taking the old drives from previous server. I have also bought a 8TB disc. This will be my new parity. At the moment I'm doing a preclear on it. When finished I select the new drive as parity. My old parity will be a new data drive (4TB). I think this is also a good occasion to gradually move over to XFS. What's the best way to proceed? After preclear I format the new parity as XFS. When new parity is selected I do a preclear. Later add the old 4tb disc and format as XFS. I add the drive to the system and tada. All finished? Apparantly there are no issues that you have a mix in file formats. So over time all drives will be XFS when replaced... Am I missing something? Or can I proceed like this.
June 28, 20179 yr Community Expert Parity has no format! I assume that you mean you intend to format the ‘old parity’ drive that you are now going to use as an additional data drive as XFS? If that is not what you meant then you should clarify as doing the wrong step can result in data loss.
June 28, 20179 yr Author Yes. Sorry. Wasn't clear. So the old parity will be used as data drive. But I was thinking to start using xfs for that drive. All others ones are still reiserfs. After beeing used for a few years a preclear on the old parity isn't needed? I think the drive has been tested enough during the parity time. It's a WD red.
June 28, 20179 yr 3 hours ago, Sphinkx said: After beeing used for a few years a preclear on the old parity isn't needed? Preclear has 2 main functions, one being stress testing, which you probably don't need. The other function is writing all zeroes to the drive so it can be added to a parity protected array without changing parity. If you build parity on the new 8TB first, then the 4TB will need to be all zeroes to be added to the array. Whether you use preclear or let unraid clear it when you add it is up to you. It will take less time if you let unraid clear it, it's much less thorough than preclear. Optionally, you could elect to go without easy fault tolerance and add the new 8TB as parity and the old 4TB as a data drive at the same time with a new config, and let the parity build procedure add the old drive without going through clearing. As long as you don't format the old 4TB or write to any of the data disks, it will still be a valid as parity during the build process, albeit with a significant hassle to put it back if you have a different data drive fail during the process. TL;DR If it were me I'd add set a new config and put the 8TB as parity and the 4TB in whatever data slot you wanted and build parity that way, after it's done successfully syncing parity and finished a follow up non-correcting parity check I'd format the 4TB as XFS.
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