How to remove failed drive from array

[aragorn18]

I have a failed drive and it is very small. I would prefer to simply move the data that was on the failed drive to the remaining free space on the array and remove the failed drive. Is there an easy way to do that?

[trurl]

You will have to copy its data to other disks then New Config without the disk and rebuild parity. When moving/copying you must not mix disks and user shares in the move/copy operation. Only copy disk to disk.

 

I usually use mc (Midnight Commander, google it) for file management at the server level, others prefer the Krusader docker.

 

That should give you enough to get started with more questions.

[aragorn18]

I was hoping there was a way without breaking parity.

[JorgeB]

You can write zeros the that disk then remove it and trust parity, though if the disk is really failed you want to use the emulated disk.

[trurl]

13 minutes ago, aragorn18 said:

I was hoping there was a way without breaking parity.

There is

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array

 

but it isn't any faster and is more complicated

[aragorn18]

Thanks everyone. I have the information I need.

[trurl]

2 hours ago, aragorn18 said:

remove the failed drive

 

8 minutes ago, aragorn18 said:

Thanks everyone. I have the information I need.

 

Might be better if you explained to us exactly what you mean by "failed". If you aren't careful you could lose the data.

 

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete diagnostics zip to your next post.

 

[aragorn18]

Full disclosure: This was a hypothetical. I have some old small drives that are likely to fail at some point due to old age and I'm not really interested in replacing them with a new drive because I have so much free space otherwise. But, I didn't want to go into all the details in my first post. Sorry for the subterfuge.

[JonathanM]

When you say "some" old hard drives, that implies more than one. You are risking the data on your whole array by keeping drives that you know to be questionable in service.

 

ALL drives must perform flawlessly to rebuild a failed drive, so if you were to have an unexpected failure on one of your new large disks full of data, you are trusting all your old small drives to be able to be read perfectly.

 

Reduce your drive count to the bare minimum for the capacity you currently need to keep the risk as low as possible.