Disk replacement process

[FreeMan]

It's time to retire some old drives so I've purchased and am testing out a new 8TB drive. Once I feel it's good to go, it will go into the server and I plan on moving the data from 3 1TB drives and 2 2TB drives onto it.

 

I looked at the wiki for drive replacement, and there doesn't seem to be anything in particular there for this scenario, though it doesn't seem overly complex.

 

I believe that I my process should be:

1. Copy all the data to the new 8TB drive (probably using the unbalance plugin)
2. Confirm that all the data moved correctly
3. Stop the array
4. Perform "New Config", leaving out all the old drives
5. Power down the server to physically remove all the old drives
6. Power up the server and allow the parity build to run

 

Have I missed anything? Is anything out of order? Anything additional I should check on?

[JonathanM]

Why complicate things?

 

Replace the drive with the most data on it that you wish to remove with the 8TB.

Copy the contents of the rest of the drives to it, then do the new config and rebuild parity.

 

Moving from drive to drive in the parity protected array is ALWAYS slower than copying, plus if you copy instead of move you can verify the copy was successful, and you still have the data on the old drive if something goes wrong.

[FreeMan]

Just to be sure I follow you, you're saying to do a single drive swap and let it rebuild that one, then copy the rest of the data over?

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[JonathanM]

Sure. That way you have one less drive to copy.

[FreeMan]

Sounds good. Thanks for the suggestion.

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[FreeMan]

Thanks for the suggestion @jonathanm. The initial 2TB->8TB rebuild completed in about a day and all the rest of the copies completed in the next day.

 

Old drives have been removed, I'm wrapping my head around new drive assignments, and the parity rebuild is starting. I've removed 6 drives from this box in the last couple of months!