Unraid 6.6.6 on adding drives: Stopped. Invalid expansion.


cen

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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