October 1, 20187 yr I've just brought 3 new HDDs (3x6.0TB) WD REDs, installed unRAID and I don't know what to do first, I assigned one drive for parity and two for data, now.....I auto formatted the drives to xfs, and the parity disk is invalid because I haven't initiated it yet. I have 8 TB of data on other drives that I want to move unRAID. so...should I move the data first then initiate the parity sync or should I initiate the parity disk first and then move the data ? also, should I use xfs or btrfs ? can I initiate the parity disk and then change the file system without having to go through the parity sync that will take a lot of time ?
October 1, 20187 yr Community Expert Personally, I would stick with xfs on data drives. It would be faster to load the data onto the drives before you assign the Parity Drive. However, to do this, you would have to unassign the Parity Drive as I seem to recall that parity will be built as soon as you start the array. If you allow parity to built first, your data on the array will be parity protected as soon as you copy it to the array A second reason to built parity first is that the drives will be 'tested' during the parity built by having every used sector on the disks read. Brand new disks will have a higher failure rate in the first few hours of use (Infant Morality) and this parity built could reveal such a failure before you start the data load. (For the same reason, I would keep those old data disks intact for a week or two...)
October 1, 20187 yr Community Expert For initial load many suggest starting without the parity disk assigned as it will faster. Since at that point you still have the data on the source location resilience is not as important. Formatting the data disks will update parity (if it is assigned). A key point is that parity works at the physical sector level so is independent of the file system in use on a data disk. Whether you go with XFS is really up to you. Many prefer XFS as the more mature (and thus more stable) file system. Others go with BTRFS as it includes more advanced features such as built-in checksumming of data.
October 1, 20187 yr Author thanks for the reply guys, this was really helpful. I guess I'll build the parity first, since it will test the drives( I don't want to go through the hassle of replacing the drives after moving the data in case the fail after moving the data), I'll look into an advanced comparison between both file systems and decide later Edited October 1, 20187 yr by sadeq
October 1, 20187 yr Community Expert 6 minutes ago, sadeq said: thanks for the reply guys, this was really helpful. I guess I'll build the parity first, since it will test the drives( I don't want to go through the hassle of replacing the drives after moving the data in case the fail after moving the data), I'll look into an advanced comparison between both file systems and decide later You need to decide on the file system format before you start copying any data. You cannot change the file system on a disk without losing any current content on that disk.
October 1, 20187 yr Community Expert 3 minutes ago, sadeq said: I'll look into an advanced comparison between both file systems and decide later Changing the file system from one format to another is NOT a trivial matter. The data has to copied off of the disk to be reformatted and then copied back on to it as formatting effectively erases the disk. you can read about doing that here: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/54769-format-xfs-on-replacement-drive-convert-from-rfs-to-xfs/ While this discussion is about converting from rfs to xfs, the same procedure would be followed to convert from xfs to btrfs. (The reason for conversion to xfs from rfs is that rfs is not longer supported and it has some issues with the high capacity drives that are available today.)
October 1, 20187 yr Author I've decided to use xfs, all I hear about in discussions is that btrfs is not stable yet, and about file corruption after dirty shutdowns (even though my server probably won't have dirty shutdowns because I have a big backup ups), but still, all I'm going to store on the server is my personal media and the files will mostly sit in there untouched so I don't really care about btrfs features.
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