what is the gentle ist way to empty drives?

[kenwshmt]

so after a month of running it on drives that occasionally sound like a chirping bird, I spent some money and have a new drive to take over from those.

 

whats the simplest way short of 'evacute' to reduce and or copy the contents off?

 

Ive unchecked the drives I want emptied in 'unique' only have them for duplicate, and a few of the worse ones are completely deselected. will they empty?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, the "Remove" option would work, but it puts the pool into a read only state (there is an advanced config option to disable that behavior).

 

Otherwise, using the Drive Usage Limiter" balancer is the best way.  Just uncheck the "Duplicated" and "Unduplicated" options in the balancer, for the disk in question, and let the pool silently balance the data off of the disk. Once it's done, you can quickly remove the disk from the pool.