unRAID 6.5 and Advance Format Drives

[mlounsbury]

I've been running unRAID since 2010, back when it was required to install a jumper on the WD EARS drives since unRAID did not support Advanced Format/4K drives, however I know that was corrected way back in January of 2011.  I started with two 2TB EARS drives, and have since expanded my array to three 2TB EARS drives and one 3TB EARS drive.  All four of the drives have the jumper installed on them.  I was planning on buying a WD Easystore 8TB when the price comes back down again (just missed it recently) so I could start replacing my drives with some larger ones.  I was also hoping to get away from requiring the jumper on the drives in my array as well.  Is there a process I can go through to get the drives switched over that's relatively simple?  Or is the process something like copying all of the data off of the array, bringing the array down, removing the jumper, preclearing the disks, and then moving the data back?

[JonathanM]

On 5/4/2018 at 2:23 PM, mlounsbury said:

I was also hoping to get away from requiring the jumper on the drives in my array as well.

Why? It doesn't hurt anything, any new drives you add won't need it, and as soon as you get a couple 8TB drives you can copy the data off of those old 2TB and start removing them from the array completely.

 

Any time you start messing about with moving data and such you stand a chance of human error causing data loss. Much better to add new disks, COPY, not move, the data, and then remove from the array and keep the old drives around for backup.

[mlounsbury]

7 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Why? It doesn't hurt anything, any new drives you add won't need it, and as soon as you get a couple 8TB drives you can copy the data off of those old 2TB and start removing them from the array completely.

 

Any time you start messing about with moving data and such you stand a chance of human error causing data loss. Much better to add new disks, COPY, not move, the data, and then remove from the array and keep the old drives around for backup.

 

Thanks, I wasn't aware until after I made this post that I can have mismatched file systems and can get away without jumpering new drives.  When I added drives a few years ago, someone told me that if my drives were jumpered, I should jumper the newly added ones.  After doing some more research, I found exactly what you said.  Although I'm going to need to get a couple of those 8TB drives, since the first one is going to need to go to parity.  Looks like I might be waiting a while though, the Easystore price went back up to $300.