Upgrading from 3 drives to 1 for the array

[Greygoose]

I have the following 

 

6tb parity 

Disk 1= 2tb

Disk 2= 2tb 

Disk 3= 1tb

 

I have purchased a 6tb drive to replace disk 1,2 and 3.

 

Whats the best way to do this please. 

[trurl]

Preclear new drive to test it.

Replace the fullest 2TB drive with the new drive and let it rebuild.

Copy other disks files to new drive.

Set New Config without the small drives and let parity rebuild.

[bman]

If you anticipate needing more storage than 6TB in future, you could add the 6TB as another drive in your array (after preclearing) and copy from each 2TB drive using rsync, or your choice of other method.  You could use

rsync -av --progress --remove-source-files /mnt/disk[1-3]/* to /mnt/disk4

to move everything in sequence to disk4.

 

This way your parity is always maintained during the move operation. You can eliminate your 2TB drives from your array after the moving is done without losing parity, if that concerns you; Check https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Shrink_array for details.

 

When I replace a good drive with a larger one I only erase the smaller drive after the rebuild has been successful.  As each drive is its own intact mountable volume in linux you can keep the 2TB drives as backup as long as you need (provided you DO NOT use the --remove-source-files switch I mentioned above, of course).