Currently have 6x 3TB WD Red drives in an 8-bay silverstone ds380 enclosure with single parity for a total of 15 TB (13.6 TB actual).  Running out of space.  Bought a 10 TB WD Red to swap in as new parity drive and that frees the 3 TB to be added to the data drive array.  However, I overlooked the fact that all 6 sata ports on my motherboard are taken.  I then planned to add a PCIE expansion card, but then found that even low profile cards will stick into the hard drive slot, limiting my case to only 7 HDDs (only 1 more than # of mobo SATA connectors).  My next thought is that it would be better to swap the 3TB drives with 10TBs for additional space.

 

1. Is upgrading from 6x 3TB to 2x 10TB / 4x 3TB a solid upgrade plan?  Am I missing any glaring issues of going with this plan?
2. Since my number of SATA connectors are currently all utilized, is a cheap USB HDD enclosure the best way be able to preclear the new HDDs using unRAID?
3. After preclearing both new drives, is the proper HDD swap order:

               -Pull current 3 TB parity drive and install new 10TB parity drive

               -Let it rebuild parity on new 10TB drive

               -Pull one of the current 3 TB parity drives and install new 10TB data drive

               -Let it rebuild data

That's how I do it. Just finished upgrading my parity drives.

 

Replaced 1st, let it rebuild.

Replaced 2nd, let it rebuild.

Now doing the same for 3 data drives.

Perfect, thanks.  Time to order another 10TB.

 

Do you run preclear via USB external enclosure too?

Edited October 20, 20187 yr by dtbingle

22 minutes ago, dtbingle said:

Is upgrading from 6x 3TB to 2x 10TB / 4x 3TB a solid upgrade plan?

Especially in that case, fewer larger capacity hard drives is much better than filling it to capacity with more smaller hard drives.  Beside your MB SATA port limitation and the problems you have found with adding a PCIe controller, think of the heat more drives generate and more possible points of failure. 

 

My last major change to my server was to replace 5 3TB drives with three 8TB drives.  I have a smaller case as well and the overall system temperatures (drives, CPU, MB) dropped a few degrees since it was easier to cool fewer drives and increased case airflow.