I am a newbie, and I do not have the money for a parity drive, but down the line I will want to replace or remove one of my drives. How would I do this?

I am not sure of the question here.  It should be obvious  that when you remove one of the drives, you lose any data that may have been on that drive from the array.  When you replace a drive, it will have to be formatted before being added to the array and, of course, it will be empty.  

23 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

I am not sure of the question here.  It should be obvious  that when you remove one of the drives, you lose any data that may have been on that drive from the array.  When you replace a drive, it will have to be formatted before being added to the array and, of course, it will be empty.  

I have looked up ways to install replacement drives and they all seem to be used a parity drive. I am asking how I go about putting the files from the last drive on  the new one.

Without parity, there is no ability to swap a device and let unRAID rebuild it as you have already figured out.

 

You could install the new drive as another disk and copy the data over. Copy the files over the network using a PC or use Midnight Commander from the unRAID command line by typing MC. I've found it doesn't take that long to move 1T blocks of data at a time using a PC. For what you are doing, I would copy though. Make sure you copy disk to disk - DO NOT copy using the share or share to disk. Once complete, do a new config to get rid of the old drive.

 

You could also move the old data drive to the cache position and replace the old data drive with the new drive. A new config would be required here. Once setup, you run the mover and it would move the data off the old drive to the new data drive or possibly other data drives depending on the share settings. Then, do another new config to remove the old drive from the cache position.

 

 

Okay that makes sense. Thank you.