Best Practice HDD Change

[GamingGeek]

Hi,

 

now that I have used Unraid several days I realized that I have to upgrade my system and optimize the use cases for some of my hdd/ssd.

 

So what do I have at the moment:

• 3ware 9750-4i with 4 x 2 TB HDD
• 1 x 2 TB parity drive
• 1 x Nvme 2 TB SSD for Cache

 

I have some hardware left here in my office which I want to install in my Unraid Server. After that it should look like this:

• 3ware 9750-8i with 8 x 2 TB HDD
• 2 x 3 TB HDD for parity
• 2 x 1 TB SSD for Cache
• 1 x 2 TB Nvme for my vdisk of my Gaming VM 

 

So I have seen the wiki article of how to change the cache drive. So yesterday I have turned of all my VM and Dockers, switched all shares which had "Cache prefer" or "Cache only" to "Cache yes" and started the mover. It worked all the night now I have all of my Data an the Data Disk in the Array and the Cache Drive empty.

 

So no I will install the other two cache drives and add them to the array as cache drive and unassign the current cache drive. After that I swtich the shares to cache prefer. 

 

But how will the change of the Raid Controller work? Can I just replace the 9750-4i with the 9750-8i and add the addtional disk to it. The current parity drive is not attached to the controller.

 

What is the best practice for this?

 

Thanks Benny

 

[JorgeB]

You can change controller without any issues when they are plain HBAs, with RAID controllers it might not work without doing a new config or even reformatting the disks, though in your case it might work since they are similar controllers.

[GamingGeek]

At the moment the ID of the 3ware attached disk have the controller name in it. So when I change the controller the ID of the disk will also change. 

Could this cause any problems? Or other things to be aware of?

 

Thanks Benny

[bonienl]

It can cause the device-id to change. Unraid will tell the particular device is missing.

When this happens, easiest to solve is doing a "New Config", reassign all disks and check "parity is already valid".