unRAID - replacing drive without parity

[puri.danish284]

I've been running my unRAID server for about 6 months now with 2x2tb drives (1 green and 1 red) and a 6 tb green drive. I recently got notified that my green 2tb drive was failing and has multiple SMART errors and bad sectors. I, fortunately, found a 2TB purple drive lying around and decided to replace the green drive with the purple drive. I have no Parity setup on the server yet. 

 

Is there a way to remove all the info from the green drive named (sdb) to the new drive named (sdd) without having to set up a parity disk. the failing driver and the new drive both are 2TB each.

 

the new 2TB purple driver has been precleared and awaiting mounting. 

 

detailed steps are much appreciated.

[landS]

Mount the new drive via Unassigned Devices plugin. 

. 

Use Rsync command, or Midnight Commander Gui, to move all from the old disk to the new one.  I personally think rsync is easier. 

Stop array. 

Remove offending disk from the disk number array assignment, add replacement,

run New Configuration,

start array. 

. 

Consider running Pre-Clear on disc's before adding them to the array in the future to help spot quality issues. 

. 

Strongly consider a parity drive. 

[puri.danish284]

5 minutes ago, landS said:

Mount the new drive via Unassigned Devices plugin. 

. 

Use Rsync command, or Midnight Commander Gui, to move all from the old disk to the new one.  I personally think rsync is easier. 

Stop array. 

Remove offending disk from the disk number array assignment, add replacement,

run New Configuration,

start array. 

. 

Consider running Pre-Clear on disc's before adding them to the array in the future to help spot quality issues. 

. 

Strongly consider a parity drive. 

i have already precleared the disk. yes i am planning on buying a 6tb parity drive. could you help me out with the instructions for rsync?

[tdallen]

Actually you don't need to use Unassigned Devices, you can just add the disk to the array and do a disk to disk copy.  Midnight Commander (mc from the command line in telnet/ssh) can help.  Navigate to diskX and diskY in the two panels, where X is the disk you are pulling out and Y is the new disk.

[SSD]

You also don't need to use a 2T drive as the replacement unless that is your preference. If you are getting 6T parity, why not get a 6T data drive and copy the 2T drive, filling it  1/3. Ultimately this will increase your max capacity and reduce your drive count.

 

When you copy the data over, suggest copy and not move. Copy is read only, move is going to be updating the problem disk, deleting each file as it is transferred to the other disk. Minimizing updates to a failing drive is a good idea. If the files stay on the old disk, you can set it aside as a backup. Better to have a backup on a marginal disk than no backup at all.

[puri.danish284]

2 minutes ago, SSD said:

You also don't need to use a 2T drive as the replacement unless that is your preference. If you are getting 6T parity, why not get a 6T data drive and copy the 2T drive, filling it  1/3. Ultimately this will increase your max capacity and reduce your drive count.

 

When you copy the data over, suggest copy and not move. Copy is read only, move is going to be updating the problem disk, deleting each file as it is transferred to the other disk. Minimizing updates to a failing drive is a good idea. If the files stay on the old disk, you can set it aside as a backup. Better to have a backup on a marginal disk than no backup at all.

i've already got a 6tb red drive as my data drive. because i have a 6tb drive i'm planning to get a 6tb parity drive. 

[landS]

many ways to skin this cat.

...

Add the new disk to the array and MOVE the files from 1 disk to another.

OR 
Add the new disk via Unassigned Devices and COPY the files from 1 disk to another (which leaves a backup of the data on the failing hdd) 

 

from terminal/ssh, screen, etc: 

rsync -arv --progress /mnt/Disk2 /mnt/disks/DiscName/ 

 

use appropriate disk numbers - in this example Disk2 is your failing SBD and DiskName is your new SDD.  
Note that /mnt/disks/ is the *root* of the UD plugin while /mnt/ is the *root* of the unraid

 

then Remove the old disk from the array, run Settings/New Config, Add the new disk

...

 

You could instead add the disk directly to the array and follow the procedure in the rfs to xfs file system conversion in the wiki
https://wiki.lime-technology.com/File_System_Conversion

 

...

side note, my kiddo is rather ill atm and as such my response may be rather slow in coming