Replacing all disks in array, best way to accomplish this?

[flexage]

Over the summer there was some extreme heat that I didn't mitigate very well, and every single one of my drives in my home unraid server experienced some form of damage.

 

Some of them failed instantly, others have been slowly failing in the time since then.

 

So far, I've already decommissioned a few storage array drives, and had to ditch the SSD cache drives as they also too suffered heat damage.

 

Surprisingly, I haven't lost very much data at all - just a few precious memories that I fortunately have on an offsite backup.

 

I've been trying to free up some time to replace the entire array and install a new cache drive, and as of this weekend I have a few days to make it happen.

 

I've got a bunch of WD drives arriving tomorrow for shucking, along with a single 512GB SSD for the cache drive.

 

I have some data on the storage array that I'd like to move across to the new drives, there's also some VM's and docker apps that I'd like to move across. I wanted to put all appdata on the faster cache drive, and possibly the docker/vm bits.

 

My first thought on how to do this is just remove to my failing drives from the array, and use the Unmounted Devices plugin to access the data in them for copying to the new array. This sounds like a straight-forward method to migrate the data from what I've learned about unraid so far.

 

Still thought I'd ask here on the forums to see if anyone thinks this method would be ok?

 

Is there any other preferred way to accomplish this migration?

 

TIA

Edited October 31, 2019 by flexage