Trying to use a new drive as the main drive and the old one as the parity as quickly as possible

[ztheoz]

Hi,

I was running my Unraid server with just one drive, but bought a second one to have a parity drive. The old drive is an IronWolf 4TB and the newest one a WD Red 4TB. As the IronWolf is quite loud, I'd like to use it as the parity drive, so it will only be running when data is written, but it is the drive where all my data is. I was wondering if, instead of copying IronWolf's content to the WD Red drive and then set the IronWolf as the parity drive, I could set the WD as the parity drive, build it and then set the IronWolf as the parity and the WD as the main drive, because as there would only be 2 drives of the same size, the parity and main drive should be identical, reducing the time needed to get the array back online?

Thanks

[JorgeB]

*Should* be fine, as long as parity1 slot is used, when sync is done do a new config and check "parity is already valid" before starting the array.

 

Alternatively clone the disk with dd then do a new config and also trust parity.

[ztheoz]

Ok thanks ! If I choose to go with dd, it will make an exact copy of my drive, keeping hardlinks and drive's encryption?

If so I'm going to go with dd, should be a better solution.

[JorgeB]

2 minutes ago, ztheoz said:

If I choose to go with dd, it will make an exact copy of my drive, keeping hardlinks and drive's encryption?

Yep.