Hey guys,

 

Recently finished my unRAID build and it is going well however I have stumbled across something that I thought would be simple to do..

 

I want to replace one of my disks, a 1.5TB Seagate 7200rpm (disk5) with a 1TB WD Green. The Seagate drive is currently part of a TV share however doesn't appear to have any data on it as yet. I have several reasons for wanting to swap these drives around but it doesn't look as easy as I thought it would be.

 

If I stop the array and remove the disk from the devices list, the webui just shows the disk as "missing" and tells me to replace it with one that is equal or larger in size.

 

Has anyone tried this before? The wiki appears to have plenty of info regarding replacing to larger disks but not to smaller ones (with good reason I guess).

 

Cheers

 

Edit: Running unRAID Pro v4.6-rc2

Hey guys,

 

Recently finished my unRAID build and it is going well however I have stumbled across something that I thought would be simple to do..

 

I want to replace one of my disks, a 1.5TB Seagate 7200rpm (disk5) with a 1TB WD Green. The Seagate drive is currently part of a TV share however doesn't appear to have any data on it as yet. I have several reasons for wanting to swap these drives around but it doesn't look as easy as I thought it would be.

 

If I stop the array and remove the disk from the devices list, the webui just shows the disk as "missing" and tells me to replace it with one that is equal or larger in size.

 

Has anyone tried this before? The wiki appears to have plenty of info regarding replacing to larger disks but not to smaller ones (with good reason I guess).

 

Cheers

 

Edit: Running unRAID Pro v4.6-rc2

Only way to do what you are asking is to set a new initial disk configuration and calculate parity on the new configuration.  Basically you can

un-assign the disk you wish to remove from the array.

Assign the replacement.

Then at the command line issue the

initconfig

command.

All the drive indicators will turn BLUE and when you next start the array a completely new parity calculation will be performed on the new disk configuration.

 

 

Actually, there are a few alternatives.  But I agree this is likely the one Joe L. describes is the most straightforward.  Before doing it, however, you should run a full parity check and carefully review the smart reports to make sure there are no serious drive problems prior to dropping your parity protection.

 

But you could use the zero out the disk method to remove the 1.5T drive (How to remove disk without losing parity protection) and then add the precleared 1T drive.

 

If there was data on the 1.5T drive, you could add the 1T drive to the array (you'd need an extra slot to do this), then copy the data over from old to new, and then follow the zero out the disk process.

 

Would be nice if there was a quicker way to remove a disk, but, alas, nothing comes to mind.