January 31, 20197 yr Hello, until now I was only using Unraid with one single unassigned drive for testing. Now I wanted to upgrade my setup with 3 more drives of the very same type (same producer, same series, same capacity) so that 2 would be parity drives and one would become my initial encrypted data-drive. the contents of the one year "old" drive would then be copied to the array and then afterwards the drive would be added to the array later on. I powered down clean and took out the "old" drive since I wanted to place it to another SATA port. One of the new drives (for parity) is now sitting where the old "drive" used to be. When starting Unraid I cannot start the array. It says to the left side: "Stopped. Invalid expansion." and to the right side I see: "You may not add new disk(s) and also remove existing disk(s).". The "old"disc has a green circle in front and the other three drives have blue squares. Can anybody help me to proceed? How can I install the two drives as parity? Greetings
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert 5 minutes ago, cen said: until now I was only using Unraid with one single unassigned drive for testing. This first sentence is making it hard to understand all the rest of your post. Do you really mean one single assigned drive? You did have a disk assigned to the array right?
January 31, 20197 yr Author sorry, that was misstated. I was using one drive but with data on it and the drive was the array. It was assigned as normal data drive not with parity protection since I only had one drive in the tower.
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert You haven't tried to change the disk assignment of that old disk have you? Post a screenshot.
January 31, 20197 yr Author No the disc has not been touched yet (same xfs fs) except for hooking it to a other SATA port. The drive letter is also still the same (sdb). There is a green circle next to the drive.
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert You can't add parity and data disks at the same time, assign just the data disk, start the array, stop the array, now you can add both parity disks.
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert OK, just wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding something. There is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to do this, since you had no parity to invalidate. But I seem to remember something like this on another thread not long ago. Go to Tools - New Config and Retain All. Then it will let you make any assignments you wish and start the array to begin parity sync.
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert johnnie beat me to it, and of course he has a better idea. Probably the same advice he gave on that other thread I mentioned. Either way would work.
January 31, 20197 yr Author Just wondering: if I now have two data drives (the old one and the new encrypted one) how will Unraid then know which drive to do the parity check on. Won't both be added to the array? Sorry for being so new to Unraid.
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert 1 minute ago, cen said: Just wondering: if I now have two data drives (the old one and the new encrypted one) how will Unraid then know which drive to do the parity check on. Won't both be added to the array? Sorry for being so new to Unraid. There is no concept of doing a parity check on a single drive. Parity is always calculated using ALL the data drives that are in the array. That is one of the reasons you do not want any drives in the array that cannot be read error-free as that is a requirement for calculating parity correctly.
January 31, 20197 yr Author ok but should I then take out the "old" disc which already has data on it since the other one is going to be encrypted or does it not matter because parity check will be done on both discs once the parity drives are set? and should I first start the encryption of the new drive or first start the parity and then format the new drive?
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert Parity doesn't care anything at all about encrypted or formatted or any of that. It works at the bit level and just treats all disks in the array as bits. And whether you encrypt or format before or after it won't matter either because each of those things will maintain parity since parity is realtime and anything you do to a data disk parity will be updated immediately to agree with it.
January 31, 20197 yr Community Expert Note that you cannot encrypt a drive and keep its data intact. To activate encryption you have to format the drive (which wipes any existing data) using an encrypted file system. There is also nothing that says all disks in the array have to be encrypted - you can mix encrypted and unencrypted drives in the same array. Parity does not care whether any disk is encrypted as it simply works on the bits stored on each sector.
January 31, 20197 yr Author ok thank you. Clearly logical of course and I guess I could've thought that one through but it s 1 am over here and past my bedtime but I wanted to get the build started for leaving it running over night.
January 31, 20197 yr Author Array is up and running with formatting the new drive and parity-sync in progress. I guess this will take a while so I'm off to bed. Thank you for the really fast help and keeping the nerves with the tired newbie that I am.
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