Hey all,

 

I recently purchased one of the Supermicro deals from ebay and I am now ready to make the move from my old hardware to my new hardware and wanted to discuss my strategy on how I plan to achieve this migration.

 

Currently I have a 17 disk system that is  a mixture of 2TB, 1.5Tb, 1TB and one 500GB SATA drive. I purchased some more 2TB drives and pre-cleared them (posting results in other section, add link later) and my plan is to first replace the 500GB drive, rebuild onto the new 2TB. Once that is completed I will copy all the data from a 1TB drive onto the 2TB drive, thus eliminating one of the tree drives and then since and repeat with the other 1TB drives, thus reducing my footprint to 15 total drives.

 

My questions comes in after I have copied over the data from the 1TB onto the 2TB drive. Once that data is verified to have copied correctly, how do I go about removing that drive from unRAID? I will shutdown the server, unplug that drive as it is no longer needed, restart... but what will unRAID ask me?

 

Thank you for any pointers, tips, etc...

 

 

There are two ways to do this:

 

1) Remove the drives and recalculate parity - your array will be unprotected during the parity check.

 

2) Zero the drives and then remove them from the array - initiate a "trust my parity procedure"

 

Personally I would do the first, I think the risk of loosing a drive is slight and I think that risk is smaller than making a mistake with dd while zeroing the drives.

 

To get your array to let you recalculate parity you must issue an initconfig command or press the restore button, depending on the version of unRAID you are running (see wiki).

 

http://www.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Restore_array_configuration_.28pre-unRAID_4.5.4.2C_the_Restore_button.2C_on_subsequent_versions.2C_the_.22initconfig.22_command.29

 

1a) Buy a new parity drive and keep the old one on the shelf if a drive fails during parity calculation put the old data drives and parity drive back in to restore the failed drive.

So the time is near for me to move onto my next step... I have just about all the data copied over from the 3 drives that I'm going to pull and that should be done later this evening.

 

So the proper way to do this is to:

 

1. Take Screen shot of unRAID

2. Shut down

3. Pull the 3 drives from the array.

4. Power Up

5. There is no longer a Restore button in 4.5.6, so I will instead telnet into the Tower and follow the wiki steps.

6. Parity rebuilt will occur

 

Sound about right?

So the time is near for me to move onto my next step... I have just about all the data copied over from the 3 drives that I'm going to pull and that should be done later this evening.

 

So the proper way to do this is to:

 

1. Take Screen shot of unRAID

2. Shut down

3. Pull the 3 drives from the array.

4. Power Up

5. There is no longer a Restore button in 4.5.6, so I will instead telnet into the Tower and follow the wiki steps.

6. Parity rebuilt will occur

 

Sound about right?

You left out step 0.

Copy any "critical" files to backup media... (another PC, or the disks you will be un-assigning on the "Devices" page.)

 

Then, stop the array, un-assign the disks you will be removing.

 

Then, continue.

 

Not sure how it will react if the disks are still assigned and you ask it to create a new initial configuration based on three missing disks.

 

Joe L.

Well I have successfully reduced my server to 15 total drives! Yay! Parity is valid and I plan on migrating this to my new hardware. I had another quick question. As I had to disable 3 smaller drives to achieve my wanted results, there are now 2 'Not Installed' disks in disk5 and disk8. How do I go about assigning the drives from disk 15 and disk 16 to those devices? I thought it would be a simple, Stop, Device Page > unassign disk15 > assign  to disk 5, but that did not work.  

 

How would I go about making this happen?

 

THANK YOU

You would need to reassign the drive slots and then use the Trust my parity procedure (search the wiki for Trust). Of course no harm in leaving the gaps.