What would happen if you were to remove your hard drives and not put them back on the same controller locations they were before ? ie. disk1 moved to disk 3 and disk3 was moved to disk 1.

 

Would you still be able to see the data on the disks?

As long as you don't swap the parity drive with a data driive, it would work just fine. 

 

Biggest change (if you did not re-assign the data drives on the drive assignment page) would be that data files that used to be at /mnt/disk1 would now be at /mnt/disk3, and files that used to be at /mnt/disk3 would be at /mnt/disk1.  Also, on the main unRaid management page, you would see the old and new drive ID/SerialNumber for the swapped drives.

 

If you did re-assign the physical drives to their original logical slots in the array, nothing would change. The files would be where you wrote them, even though on a different controller/cable and/or Linux device.

 

You can stop the array, power down the machine, swap cables, power up.  If unRaid sees an unworkable array it will not start (If you had swapped parity and a data drive I don't think it will start)  At that point, go to the drive assignment tab, assign the correct drive to the "parity" role, the correct drive to the "data" role, and it should then let you start the array.

 

Easiest way to record where everything is assigned is to print a copy of the drive-assignment page before you move any cabling.

 

Joe L.