Hard drive replacement and data integrity

[richrdh18]

Hi,

I am doing some work with a photographer who has one of these unRaid towers that he uses to backup all his data.  I never installed the system, but now look after it.

 

I just want to make sure that my understanding is correct.  Firstly, one of his hard drives is just about full.  Am i correct in saying that if i remove this drive, and replace it with another, and do not rebuild the drive (ie just format it and carry on), Will i be able to see the data on the removed drive via a normal sata connection ie like a normal external sata drive?

 

My other thought, was to buy and external hdd, copy the data across to it, then format/wipe/delete the content of the unRaid drive.

 

Thanks in advance, i just want to make sure my understanding of this is correct before i dive in boots'n'all.

[jazzysmooth]

Unraid uses reiserfs filesystem, so yes, you could read the contents of the removed drive with a OS that supports reiserfs (like linux).  However, in your first scenario if you don't rebuild the data on the new drive then you lose the parity protection for all the other drives - so not sure why you'd want to do that.

 

In your second scenario, if you moved the data (or copied then deleted it) to the external drive, parity would be updated so you'd still have protection the entire time.  You realize of course you could simply add a new drive to the tower and not have to remove / delete anything?