Format and duplicate new Cache drive

[gulo]

Hi

 

My array is currently off while I am waiting on repair for few of my failed hard drives and pre-clearing one replacement drive. I would like to use this time to upgrade my EVO 250GB SSD cache drive to a new Crucial 500GB SSD cache drive.

 

I mounted the new drive under Unassigned Devices and turned Destructive mode on, but I don't see any option to format. I would like to format the new drive from NTFS to XFS. How can I do it?

 

Also, I have removed my current cache drive (Samsung EVO 250GB) from "Cache", and it shows up in the "Unassigned Devices" list. I want to make triple sure that if I mount it as unassigned device I will not lose any existing data on it. It's holding all my VMs and Docker information so I am little scared mounting it using UD as I have never done that before. 

 

 

Once I have both the old and the new cache drive mounted, what's the best way to copy everything from EVO to the new SSD? I saw this command on another post: "dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=32M status=progress" ?

 

Is there something else that would work better?

 

Thank you!

 

 

[JorgeB]

It's fine to mount old cache with UD, but you can't use dd to clone it, since it won't expand the partition and Unraid would complain of invalid partition layout, you can format the new one with UD and copy everything from the old one with mc for example, don't copy the docker image, best to recreate it, and if copying vdisks best to use command line to keep them sparse.

 

To format new drive you need to first remove existing partitions, click on + to expand then delete on the red x.

[gulo]

Thanks!

 

What do you mean by "use command line to keep them sparse". Would that be a different process than using midnight commander ?

[JorgeB]

15 hours ago, gulo said:

Would that be a different process than using midnight commander ?

Yes, midnight commander won't keep them sparse, you can use cp:

 

cp --sparse=always /path/to/source/vdisk.img /path/to/dest/vdisk.img