Hey again, I have a question that hopefully won't come across as dumb 

 

I am moving from the whs world to unraid and I have a question about removing a drive.  In whs, to remove a drive, you tell it what drive to remove and it copies everything off of that drive to the other drives and then you can remove it.

 

Does unraid have such a feature?  By my research, I am assuming no.  What is the best way to accompolish such a task.  Lets say I have a drive that I want to remove from unraid because I want to use it for something else.  I would want whatever contents are on that drive to be copied to one of the other drives before it was removed.  Anyway to do this?

I use MC (midnight commander) built into unRAID to copy from one drive to another.  There are other options that those more knowledgeable might suggest too.

You could use mc aka midnight commander in command line, you could use another machine and copy from drive to drive for example in windows or you could use a command like cp -r /mnt/disk1 /mnt/disk2 using the correct drives and drive paths of course

 

Obviously the fastest would be the most direct route with either mc or cp -r.

 

Are you upgrading your drive or simply removing that drive because you no longer want it in the array? If so you want to do what I list below.

 

After your drive is removed you would need to run in command line "initconfig" to remove parity protection and re-establish a new parity across all your drives. Just keep in mind you are not protected until the parity is rebuilt.

 

 

Removing a drive is actually a slightly risky operation since there is a parity build required at the end. For that reason it is advisable to run a parity check across your entire array to make sure the drives are healthy and parity is accurate before starting the process.

 

There is a less risky way to remove a drive without breaking parity. If you look on the best of the forums link you will find a link. But most people do it the old fashioned way described above.

One thing to keep in mind with unRAID. If you want to get rid of a small drive and install a bigger one you don't remove the small one. You replace the smaller one and unRAID will rebuild the data onto the new drive.

 

There is a risk of a drive failing (any drive) during this process too but if you have the good original drive and have not written to the array you can trick unRAID into re-using the old drive and rebuilding the one that failed.

 

Peter

Lets say I have a drive that I want to remove from unraid because I want to use it for something else.  I would want whatever contents are on that drive to be copied to one of the other drives before it was removed.  Anyway to do this?

 

I think if you want a drive for "something else" you should buy a spare to keep for that very reason. Whilst it is okay to remove a drive I don't think unRAID was designed to remove / replace drives on a frequent basis.

 

Thanks for the replies, it was a bad example.  I won't ever want to remove the drive for another purpose.  I was trying to figure out if I should populate all my drives in unraid at this time.  The reason being is I have about 8 or 9 TB of drives.  I only have about 4 TB of data.  In WHS it was no big deal to use all the drives, because if one failed (or you no longer wanted to use it), then you just 'removed' it from the pool.  Since Unraid doesn't work that way, it probably would be better if I didn't assign all the drives since I don't need them right now and keep 1 or 2 TB as either a cold or warm backup.

 

Exactly Keep at least one that is as large as your parity for a backup. If it dies you can throw in another pretty quick.

 

I have one pre-cleared sitting in a foil bag ready to drop into my machine as an emergency drive.