I'm just finishing up the process of migrating my drives from ReiserFX to xFS.  I've shuffled data around and slowly reformatted each drive.  As I final step I assumed I'd have to reformat my parity drive and rebuild it.  However, when I stopped the array and clicked on the drive tab for my parity drive I couldn't find an option for selecting the format of the drive.  

Did my parity drive automatically move to xFS when I moved from unraid 5.x to 6.x or am I not looking in the right place.

Thanks in advance.

 

Parity never has a filesystem format.

Specifically, the contents of the parity drive are the results of a calculation based on the contents of the data drives.  Everytime data is changed on a data drive, the parity drive is also immediately updated to include the effect of the new data on that calculation.  So when you changed the format on the other drives, the parity drive's contents were already adjusted accordingly.    

 

In the event that Unraid needs to recover a drive after a failure, a similar calculation using the parity contents and all the other data drives allows the missing data to be recalculated, regardless of the format that was in use on the failed drive at the time.

 

If you have trhe time, this is a good read...   https://wiki.unraid.net/Parity

 

8 hours ago, S80_UK said:

Specifically, ...

 

If you have trhe time, this is a good read...   https://wiki.unraid.net/Parity

 

I knew "what" the parity drive does but I didn't realize it did this without having an underlying format to the drive.  Honestly I hadn't thought it through this deeply.

Thanks for the link.

You're welcome.

 

As for thinking it through deeply or not...  One beauty of Unraid is that you don't have to.  Another is that for guys like me, I can do exactly that.