Do I need to remove a drive?

[abernardi]

I have 9 drives in my server and am maxed out, I can't add another.  There are a few things I want to do and I'm not sure how to do it.  Two of the drives are 250gb and I have a couple of 750gb drives I'd like to replace them with.  Seems easy enough, but I wanted to run Joe L.'s pre-clear script on them and to do that they can't be part of the array.  One of the 250gb drives has no data on it now, so I believe I could remove it as described in this thread:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=6728.0

 

Then I'd use that drive bay to pre-clear each disk.

 

I also have a spare 2TB drive on the shelf in case my parity drive goes, but I was thinking I should pre-clear that too, just to be certain it's good. 

 

Does that sound right?

 

THANSK!

[Rajahal]

You have a few options.  The easiest would be to preclear the 750 GBs and the 2 TB on a separate computer (you can use the free Basic version of unRAID and Joe L.'s script to do this).  While this is happening, run a parity check on your server.  If there are any errors, do not proceed, instead seek help here.  If there are no errors, then just replace each 250 GB drive one at a time and let unRAID reconstruct the data onto each one.

 

Assuming you don't have a spare computer to do this with, you could do the 'remove disk without losing parity' procedure you linked.  It is complicated, but it will work.

 

Lastly, if you don't mind losing parity for a while, you could just remove the empty 250 GB drive and then use the initconfig command (formally the restore button) to make unRAID forget about it.  Then start a parity sync.  Then run a parity check.  At the same time you can use the now empty bay to preclear your other drives, one at a time.  Once they are all precleared, you can replace your 250 GB drives that do have data on them, again one at a time.

[abernardi]

Got it, thanks.

[lionelhutz]

Are the 750gig disks used? If they are used, then just install them (one at a time) and look at the SMART data. If the SMART data looks ok then assign them replace the 250gigs and let the server rebuild.

 

Remember, if one does fail you can force the server to go back to the old configuration.

 

The reason to not worry about used so much is that the previous use has probably stress tested them enough already.

 

Peter

[abernardi]

That's a good point.  I'm thinking that I'm going to add just one of the 750gb drives and keep one slot open for any new drives I may want break in