Evening all,

 

i have just had a drive fail in my system.

 

Parity - 6tb

2 - 4tb

3 - 4tb - failed

4 - 4tb

 

as i have a drive failed i can't upgrade the parity drive and i was going to buy a 10tb next.

 

Can i just replace the failed 4tb with a 10tb for now and upgrade the parity later?

 

the system can only hold a max of 4 drives as it's a microserver gen8

 

thanks

You can do parity swap:

 

https://wiki.lime-technology.com/The_parity_swap_procedure

i've done a parity swap before when the array was healthy but how does this work with a failed drive? 

Parity swap only needs to be done with a failed drive, just check the link and follow the instructions.

Stop the array.

Power down the unit.

Replace the parity disk with the new bigger one. 

Replace the failed disk with your old parity disk.

Power up the unit.

Start the array.

When you start the array, the system will first copy the parity information to the new parity disk, and then reconstruct the contents of the failed disk.

 

Replace the parity disk with the new bigger one. - if i did this my array would be missing data as one of the drives is already dead?

 

¿Que?

 

The procedure is done especially for when there's a failed drive and the replacement is larger than current parity.

 

 

sorry if i'm not understanding i just really can't afford to lose any data

 

so replace the failed disk with the new bigger one and the system will build that into being the new parity drive and the old parity drive will come online as a normal disk?

 

 

so replace the failed disk with the new bigger one and the system will build that into being the new parity drive and the old parity drive will come online as a normal disk?

No, follow the instructions, replace parity with new larger disk and the failed disk with old parity, it's a 2 step process, 1st parity will be copyed from the old parity drive to the new drive then the failed disk is rebuilt to the old parity, it's all explained in the link above. 

 

 

 

Also, if you can't afford to lose any data you need a backup, unRAID by itself is not that, and any time you rebuild a disk there's added risk as the array will be unprotected against another disk failure.