Hi guys,

 

I have several disks (reiserfs) on my array that I was long planning to convert to "xfs" and was able to successfully convert the first disk (disk1) as follows

using an external USB drive (14TB) which I pre-cleared successfully beforehand:

 

1. Mounted the external USB disk as an "Unassigned Device" and formatted it to xfs.

2. Copied all data from disk1 into the Unassigned Disk using "rsync -avPX /mnt/disk1/ /mnt/disks/WD_easystore../". 

3. Stopped the array. Change the disk1 format to "xfs" and start the array.

4. Copy data from the unassigned USB device back to disk1 using  reverse command "rsync -avPX /mnt/disks/WD_easystore../ /mnt/disk1/"

   so that disk1 is now in "xfs" format.

 

This seems to have worked well and my question is do I need to pre-clear the external unassigned device again before attempting to repeat the above process for the next disk in array?

 

 

There seems to be a missing step 3.5 where after changing the format of the array disk to XFS and restarting the array you carried out the format step to create an empty XFS file system on disk1 before copying the data back to it.   I assume this happened?
 

-Rez-clear is never REQUIRED with Unraid, only use it if you intend to stress test a drive.   if you want to empty the external disk again ready for the next array drive you can format the external drive again (fastest) or simply delete all files/folders on it.

3 hours ago, itimpi said:

There seems to be a missing step 3.5 where after changing the format of the array disk to XFS and restarting the array you carried out the format step to create an empty XFS file system on disk1 before copying the data back to it.   I assume this happened?
 

-Rez-clear is never REQUIRED with Unraid, only use it if you intend to stress test a drive.   if you want to empty the external disk again ready for the next array drive you can format the external drive again (fastest) or simply delete all files/folders on it.

Thanks! Yes I did format Disk1 to xfs before copying data back. Looks like I'm going to simply format the external disk and move to the next array drive then.

Thank you!

Ended up removing all data on the external drive using "rm -rf *" because I couldn't find the "format".