Ok.  I had a drive die on my recently.  Bummer it was one of my newer 8T drives! (grrr...)  But I had a spare and I'm up and running again.

But it got me motivated to  clean some things up and do some drive upgrades.

 

Right now I have a single 8T parity drive.  I want to go with 2 parity drives.  That's the first upgrade.  I have a 10T precleared and ready to go.

I also have 3x 2T drive I'd like to get rid of.  I have a precleared 8T drive ready for that!

 

I'd like to remain as parity protected at possible.

 

Should I add the second parity drive first?  This way when I can replace one of the 2T's with the 8T and it can re-build and I'm still protected if another drive dies while this is going on.  But then when I empty the other 2 2T drives and removed them from my system (shrink the array using dd), will it have to rebuild the second parity anyway?  Even if I do the dd and zero out the other drive and then do a trust parity?

 

Or do I stay single parity and add the new 8T to the array and copy everything off the 2T's to the 8T and then zero out the 2Ts one at a time and remove and trust parity.

 

I thought I read somewhere that with 2 parity drives you can't shuffle disk numbers around?

 

Long term plan is to add another 10T to replace the first 8T.  I also want to add another NVME SSD cache drive.  But the NVME takes up two sata ports so I have to consolidate some drives to free up ports.  Right now I only have 2 free sata ports.  I like to keep on always free for a spare and then another to keep for a pre-clear spot? 

 

I feel like such a noob!  I don't usually muck with my unraid as it just works! (Thanks limetech!)  So I have to relearn every time I have to do something with the system! 🙂

 

Thanks!

 

Jim

Edited March 9, 20206 yr by jbuszkie
Change can to can't

17 minutes ago, jbuszkie said:

Or do I stay single parity and add the new 8T to the array and copy everything off the 2T's to the 8T and then zero out the 2Ts one at a time and remove and trust parity.

This is probably the way to go if you want to remain parity protested throughout.

 

18 minutes ago, jbuszkie said:

I thought I read somewhere that with 2 parity drives you can shuffle disk numbers around?

You have got that backwards   If you only have parity1 present then you can reorder the disks without affecting parity.   This is not true if parity2 is present as the calculations for parity2 take disk position as one of the inputs.

5 minutes ago, itimpi said:

This is probably the way to go if you want to remain parity protested throughout.

 

You have got that backwards   If you only have parity1 present then you can reorder the disks without affecting parity.   This is not true if parity2 is present as the calculations for parity2 take disk position as one of the inputs.

Crap..  That was a typo..  It should have said "I thought I read somewhere that with 2 parity drives you can't shuffle disk numbers around?"  I will correct the original post! 🙂

Edited March 9, 20206 yr by jbuszkie