So, I had a precleared disk laying about and decided to add it to a open slot in my array. No problem there, it formatted and I was off to the races. However, just after (of course), I noticed one of my older disks is showing signs of age. Is there an easy (safe) way to remove that newly added, empty disk and just rebuild the dodgy disk onto it without having to rebuild parity. Nothing has been written to the array since adding the new disk.

Edited March 18, 20197 yr by ratmice

There are only two options to remove an array drive, both described here:

https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array

Thanks. Just one stupid question, where the clear and remove option says "Make sure that the drive you are removing has been removed from any inclusions or exclusions for all shares, including in the global share settings." Does this apply to settings that are set to "all", as well. SO basically just change all the inclusions and exclusions to "none".

39 minutes ago, ratmice said:

Nothing has been written to the array since adding the new disk.

This is not quite true as you said you had formatted it.    Formatting is a write operation that creates file system control structures on the disk (and updates parity to reflect this).   Attempting to simply remove the disk at this stage therefore invalidates parity.    If you had left the disk in its pre-cleared state (I.e. all zeroes) without formatting it then it could have been removed without invalidating parity.

Thanks for the explanation.

 

Also, what happens if I screw up the exclusion/inclusion thing?

8 minutes ago, ratmice said:

Does this apply to settings that are set to "all", as well. SO basically just change all the inclusions and exclusions to "none".

You can leave all and none, for include and exclude respectively, just make sure no writes are going to that disk.

Thanks, Johnnie. You always seem to be around to answer these questions and I really appreciate it. Have a great day.