How to replace a physical disk in a pool without data loss?

[Igor]

I need to take out one disk and put another one in its place, transferring all the data to a new one

[Shawn L]

I'm not 100% sure what your situation is but here is what I do when I replace a hard drive with a larger hard drive.

I have a USB hard drive dock connected to the system. Something that you can stick a hard drive into.

1. Have a 3-2-1 backup setup and verified
2. I turn the system off
3. I remove the old hard drive you want to remove
4. Place the old hard drive into the USB dock
5. Place the new hard drive into the spot the old hard drive was in
6. Turn on the system
7. Verify that the drivepool pool is still working
8. Add new drive to drivepool pool
9. Rebalance the drivepool pool
10. Click remove in Drivepool for old hard drive.

[Sirkassad]

On 1/15/2023 at 2:59 AM, Shawn L said:

I'm not 100% sure what your situation is but here is what I do when I replace a hard drive with a larger hard drive.

I have a USB hard drive dock connected to the system. Something that you can stick a hard drive into.

1. Have a 3-2-1 backup setup and verified
2. I turn the system off
3. I remove the old hard drive you want to remove
4. Place the old hard drive into the USB dock
5. Place the new hard drive into the spot the old hard drive was in
6. Turn on the system
7. Verify that the drivepool pool is still working
8. Add new drive to drivepool pool
9. Rebalance the drivepool pool
10. Click remove in Drivepool for old hard drive.

If you have two drives that are in a pool and you are wanting to repalce both, you only need a docking station if you aren't duplicating the pool right?  I am doing something similar but I don't have a docking station.  My plan is to make sure that both drives getting replaced have all the same folders/files (pool duplication).  My initial thought was to remove the first drive to be replaced from the pool (all folders files still in the 'one-drive pool', power down the computer, physically replace the drive I just removed with the larger one, boot back up, add the new drive to the pool and wait.  After the pool has completed writing to the new drive I'll go throught the same process with the second drive to be replaced.

[ClockerXP]

On 2/15/2023 at 3:37 PM, Sirkassad said:

If you have two drives that are in a pool and you are wanting to repalce both, you only need a docking station if you aren't duplicating the pool right?  I am doing something similar but I don't have a docking station.  My plan is to make sure that both drives getting replaced have all the same folders/files (pool duplication).  My initial thought was to remove the first drive to be replaced from the pool (all folders files still in the 'one-drive pool', power down the computer, physically replace the drive I just removed with the larger one, boot back up, add the new drive to the pool and wait.  After the pool has completed writing to the new drive I'll go throught the same process with the second drive to be replaced.

I was going to use this process to replace my two duplicated drives with new drive.  One at a time I would swap out a drive, add the new drive to the pool, wait for everything to be duplicated to the new drive, and then do it again with the 2nd new drive.  Did this process work for you Sirkassad?

[Shane]

The method would work, though you'd want to ensure the old drives weren't reconnected later to the drivepool computer without either

• stopping the DrivePool service and renaming the hidden poolpart folder (e.g. just put an 'x' in front of 'poolpart') on the drive you plan to swap out before shutting the computer down to physically swap out that drive
• or renaming/removing the hidden poolpart folder on the old drive via another computer after the drive is taken out of the drivepool computer

to avoid any potential issues shoud the old drive(s) be later reconnected to the drivepool computer.