External Drive to Internal

[Johann]

Hi Everyone!

 

I'm new to Unraid and I'm using the trial at the moment. I made the mistake of adding an external drive as Disk1 and I moved data to it. When I take it out and put it into the computer with a sata cable, it changes the identifier and Unraid marks it as missing. Is there anyway to fix this without having to pull the disk and rebuild it using parity?

[trurl]

Possibly other things will be different than just the identifier so it may not be in sync with parity. 

 

Rebuild it. 

[Johann]

Ok thank you for the very quick reply.

[Johann]

Will it be safer if I just took the drive out and replaced it with a different drive and save the one with the data just in case something goes wrong, or should I be able to just use the same write and rebuild over all the current data?

[Johann]

And how long is a rebuild for a 8tb drive?

[itimpi]

Just now, Johann said:

And how long is a rebuild for a 8tb drive?

I would say it is typically in the range of 2-3 hours per TB (depending on your exact hardware configuration) for a rebuild.   You should expect the time to be similar to a parity check/sync for a disk of equivalent size as both of them involve reading or writing to every sector on the drive.

 

any other array activity running at the same time will slow down the process noticeably.

[trurl]

33 minutes ago, Johann said:

Will it be safer if I just took the drive out and replaced it with a different drive and save the one with the data just in case something goes wrong

Yes, even with more "standard" rebuilding situations, if you can rebuild to another disk then you will have the original if there are problems during rebuild.

 

Assuming all other drives are OK the most frequent cause of a rebuild problem is disturbed connections during replacement.

[Johann]

Ok awesome! Is it possible to move the data in disk1 into disk2 so that there's nothing that needs to rebuild in disk1 after I replace it?

 

 

[Johann]

13 hours ago, itimpi said:

I would say it is typically in the range of 2-3 hours per TB (depending on your exact hardware configuration) for a rebuild.   You should expect the time to be similar to a parity check/sync for a disk of equivalent size as both of them involve reading or writing to every sector on the drive.

 

any other array activity running at the same time will slow down the process noticeably.

Oh ok thanks for the reply. Its not too bad I guess. And I only have a 10tb spare and disk1 is a 8tb, can I replace the 8tb with the 10tb? My parity is already a 10tb

[itimpi]

4 hours ago, Johann said:

Oh ok thanks for the reply. Its not too bad I guess. And I only have a 10tb spare and disk1 is a 8tb, can I replace the 8tb with the 10tb? My parity is already a 10tb

When doing a rebuild one can always use a larger disk than the one being replaced (as long as the new disk is not larger than any parity drives).  In fact this is the standard way to upsize drives in the array.

[trurl]

7 hours ago, Johann said:

Is it possible to move the data in disk1 into disk2 so that there's nothing that needs to rebuild in disk1 after I replace it?

Perhaps you don't need this answer anymore but here it is anyway.

 

No.

 

It doesn't matter if the drive is empty or not. Parity doesn't know or care about files or filesystems. It is going to rebuild the entire disk bit for bit.

[Johann]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Perhaps you don't need this answer anymore but here it is anyway.

 

No.

 

It doesn't matter if the drive is empty or not. Parity doesn't know or care about files or filesystems. It is going to rebuild the entire disk bit for bit.

Thank you for the answer, I wasn't 100% sure.

[Johann]

3 hours ago, itimpi said:

When doing a rebuild one can always use a larger disk than the one being replaced (as long as the new disk is not larger than any parity drives).  In fact this is the standard way to upsize drives in the array.

Ok thank you for the answer!