Hey all, got another "what's the best way to do this" question. I've googled around, and seen various answers to this, and I'm not sure which is the best/safest way to do this.

 

I'm running unRAID 6.8.3, and I want to upgrade several small drives in my server to larger drives. If possible, I'd like to do this all at once, instead of replacing the drives one at a time and rebuilding from parity. My parity disks are 14tb, and so rebuilding a drive generally takes over a day and puts a lot of wear on my other drives.

 

One idea I had was to use unBALANCE to move all the data off the small drives (I have plenty of free space for this), remove the small drives using the "Remove Drives Then Rebuild Parity" method from https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array, pull the small drives from my server, rebuild parity once, and then install the (precleared) larger drives and add them to the array. It seems like this should only cost me one parity rebuild. Before I do it, though, is this going to work the way I think it is?

 

If not, is there a better solution?

 

Thanks!

Edited November 2, 20205 yr by matt31751

I have a few smaller drives too but they are largely unwritten to but i would like to just pull them out and put in one larger drive to "replace" them its not really worth burning up drives on my license for 500 gig drives

Never mind; I answered my own question. I finally stumbled on https://wiki.unraid.net/Replacing_Multiple_Data_Drives_with_a_Single_Larger_Drive, which is essentially what I want to do, if I follow it up by adding additional large drives.

 

@Djinn Maybe this would help you too?