The best way to add new drives to the pool, move existing data to them and remove old drives?

ahoegh

Hi.

Tuesday, if all goes as planned, I will receive two ned Western Digital Red 3tb drives. Then, in a hurry, I need to:

- add them to my pool, perhaps one at a time

- transfer 3tb existing data from 3 completely full Samsung SpinPoint F1 1tb drives

- remove the old drives from the pool and format them entirely, then ship them to a buyer

What is the best way to achieve this? Time is an issue, since I need to ship the drives to the buyer thursday. I am asking because I haven't tried removing drives from my pool yet.

Best regards.

Shane

Hi ahoegh. Read carefully the following steps, and as always remember to power down your server when physically changing drives if it does not support hot-swapping. This how-to assumes all of the drives are used solely by DrivePool.

1. Turn off real-time duplication in DrivePool's Settings (if you use it).

2. Add the first 3 TB drive to the pool - both if you have the room.

3. From your pool tab, remove the first 1 TB drive, selecting the quick remove option.

4. If you couldn't add the second 3 TB drive before, swap it with the first 1 TB drive now.

5. From your pool tab, remove the second 1 TB drive, selecting the quick remove option.

6. From your pool tab, remove the third 1 TB drive, selecting the quick remove option.

7. Turn real-time duplication back on (if you use it). You could turn it on earlier, after step 4.

8. Format the three 1 TB drives. You should be able to do this in parallel. You can pull one of the 3 TB drives to do this; DrivePool will complain about a missing drive, but you can safely ignore this while you do the formatting. When all are formatted, pull them (and put the 3 TB drive back in if necessary).

Formatting the drives: At the very least, if you're just using the built-in Windows format tool, make sure you're NOT doing a Quick format. You may wish to use CCleaner (with its drive wiper option) or similar software under Windows, or if you're familiar with linux, boot from a GParted live CD and use the Secure Erase utility (for when you want that "factory fresh" feeling), or just keep it simple and use Windows format.

If you're REALLY in a hurry and every second counts (warning hard-hat zone), basically you'd need to take DrivePool offline and use a good bulk copying utility to copy the hidden poolpart folders in parallel from the three 1 TB drives to the two 3 TB drives (two into one and one into the other), but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're sure you know what you're doing.

ahoegh

Thanks a lot for the thorough guide. It was a great help, albeit I had to do some of the steps in another order, due to the lack of available SATA ports on my motherboard. Also, I had to empty four drives instead of three.