i got two new 8tb wd drives. one drive was going to be added as a party drive and the other as a disk drive. but when i try to add them it says the disk in the party slot is not the biggest. the layout that i had was one 4tb wd drive as the party drive and 2 2tb Toshiba drive as the disk drive = 4tb. that work without issues and one 1 1tb wd drive as the catch drive. i am using a dell r710 server with 6 3.5 drive slot. i also had some udma crc error but i think i fix it. it was one of the new drives. 

You will first have to upgrade the parity drive to 8TB and have parity built on it before you can add the other 8TB drive as a data drive.

i tried that and i waited for it to finish. but when i try to add the other 8tb drive as a disk it still saying the same thing: Disk in parity slot is not biggest.

 

Go to Tools | Unraid OS | Diagnostics. Click the "Download" button. Post the diagnostics file that you donwloaded. That will help determine what's going on.

tower-diagnostics-20191228-1128.zip here you go

looks like you have a parity drive listed as 4TB and one as 8TB is that correct?

 

 

yes

1 minute ago, RJGamer1002 said:

yes

well i'm certainly no expert but I think that is the problem unRAID is seeing the 4TB as a parity drive therefore your 8TB may be conflicting if I've understood folks on here but they will certainly chime in so don't go by my observation 😉

If you have 2 parity drives then they both need to be at least as large as the largest data drive (although they do not need to be the same size).    With a 4TB and a 8TB parity drives the largest data drive allowed will be 4TB.   You would have to have both oparity drives at 8TB before you could start using 8TB data drives.  
 

the above assumes that you MEANT to to have 2 parity drives!

well i wanted to add the 2 8tb drives (the one in that i circled in the picture) to be added(can not add disk 3). I thought it equal 12tb. so, your saying if i want to add the 8tb drive as a disk drive i would have to upgrade the 4tb drive to a 8tb drive?

Edited December 28, 20196 yr by RJGamer1002

i just realized i could just move the 4tb drive down as a disk drive and leave one in the party 8tb drive and bring the other 8tb one over also as a parity drive. right?

 

Edited December 28, 20196 yr by RJGamer1002

Just now, RJGamer1002 said:

i just realized i could just move the 4tb drive down as a disk drive and leave one in the party 8tb drive and bring the other 8tb one over also as a parity drive

 

Yes.   However I was not sure if you actually wanted two parity drives at this point or only one and had accidentally ended up with two.

true, i might just return the other 8tb drive

think you for the help

You're not the first person to make this mistake, and probably won't be the last.

 

Usually the thought is:

The 8TB drive will act as parity for the other 8TB data drive and the 4TB drive will act as parity for the 4TB and smaller drives.

 

It does make some sense thinking that "8TB of parity plus 4TB of parity is 12TB of parity and that's way larger than any disk I currently have!", unfortunately, that's not how it works. If you read in the wiki on how dual parity works, you'll quickly get a sense of it.

 

29 minutes ago, RJGamer1002 said:

i might just return the other 8tb drive

You can either install the 8TB as a data drive and remove the 4TB from your parity pool, moving it to your data pool, giving you 12TB more data space, or replace the 4TB in your parity pool with the other 8TB, then add the 4TB to your data pool giving you 4 additional TB right now and the ability to go to 8TB data drives at any point in the future when you need more space and/or you find a great sale.

Edited December 28, 20196 yr by FreeMan

I once did what you are and had dual parity but with the number of drives you currently have I question the need you would serve yourself better by making the parity a single 8TB disk and adding the 4TB and 8TB drives to your array the chances of a 2 disk failure at the same time is minimal and of course you should have a backup of any critical data on 2 other sources not connected to your server