selecting filesystems for new array

a quick googling and forum search didn't reveal anything like what i am going to ask below -- but if someone else *did* ask for this, sorry about the repeat.

 

long story short: i have finally "reincarnated" my old server from a cm centurion 590 mid-tower into a 4u rackmount rosewill rsv-l4500, moving the 3 supermicro 5in3 in the new case, etc.  it will be my "redundancy server" for my really critical data (going from 20 to only 15 drives, no more external sans digital boxes).

 

because i'm recycling my old reiserfs-formatted hard drives, unraid 6.2.4 saw a pile of usable hard drives and wanted to use them more or less "as is" to build a new array.  it appears there's no way to order unraid to format the data drives to xfs when it tries to build a new array (read: the dual parity).  am now on my second pass of blowing partitions and formatting the drives to ntfs before re-inserting them into the case.  i did manage to get about half the disks to format to xfs after blowing the partition tables on all the data drives, but some of them kind of stuck  to reiserfs despite my attempts at forcing a preclear/formatting on all the drives.

 

so, my request is, when recycling old data drives to build a new server, could we please get the option to format all the data drives and to specify the filesystem for the new array?

 

thanks in advance.

 

On the individual drive settings, change the file system from Auto to be XFS.

 

unRaid will prompt you to format them.

Not clear what problems you are having, but you can already specify a default filesystem. And you can format a disk to any of the supported filesystems. And if you preclear a disk, it won't have any filesystem and unRAID will format it to one of its supported filesystem.

 

So everything you are asking for is already there unless I am misunderstanding what you are asking for in some way. Your description of your problems really isn't making any sense given how unRAID already works.

 

Maybe Squid gave the simple answer you were looking for.

I will probably move this thread unless you give us a better idea why there is a feature request here.

thanks to squid's reply, i selected xfs as a filesystem for all my "recycled" drives that somehow kept insisting to be formatted using reiserfs (even after repeatedly blowing partition & reformatting in ntfs, how is this possible?) and unraid is currently formatting them to xfs.

i guess it was not obvious to me, now i can say TIL.

 

so the functionality is there, just not quickly guessed.  maybe this could be considered a ui issue to be addressed later?

anyway, thanks for the help.

 

thanks to squid's reply, i selected xfs as a filesystem for all my "recycled" drives that somehow kept insisting to be formatted using reiserfs (even after repeatedly blowing partition & reformatting in ntfs, how is this possible?)

If you remove a drive from a parity protected array, it will be rebuilt with the same filesystem it had before when you add it back. The only way to force unraid to erase your data (format) is to either set the filesystem manually to what you want, or set a new config and rebuild parity. It really sounds like you were removing the disks one at a time, formatting them to ntfs, then adding them back to the same array. When they are rebuilt with parity, yes, they will have the same data (format) as before. That's what parity protection does.

thanks to squid's reply, i selected xfs as a filesystem for all my "recycled" drives that somehow kept insisting to be formatted using reiserfs (even after repeatedly blowing partition & reformatting in ntfs, how is this possible?)

If you remove a drive from a parity protected array, it will be rebuilt with the same filesystem it had before when you add it back. The only way to force unraid to erase your data (format) is to either set the filesystem manually to what you want, or set a new config and rebuild parity. It really sounds like you were removing the disks one at a time, formatting them to ntfs, then adding them back to the same array. When they are rebuilt with parity, yes, they will have the same data (format) as before. That's what parity protection does.

I hadn't considered that he might be rebuilding them after removing them, etc.

 

In general, it is really better to work with your unRAID disks within unRAID rather than trying whatever you think might be a good idea by plugging them into another system.

what i did: built a new server, re-using as many parts from my *old* server as i could  (includes 15 out of the the 20 old disks).

 

re-formatted old usb key, extracted unraid 6.2.4 zip file onto it, made it bootable.

after powering up the server, assigned all the drives but then didn't see an obvious "select the filesystem you want to use" option.   

 

i was a bit surprised unraid said right away "ah, those are reiserfs drives". i would have thought that because i was reassigning all those drives at once with a new "blank" unraid installation that the os would have asked me right away if i wanted to re-use the filesystem already present on the newly-assigned (data) disks, or not.  i should have dug around,  i'll admit that was somewhat of an EUBF on my part.

 

anyway, after some hesitation, i interrupted the parity rebuild and powered down.

using another machine (windows), blew the partition tables on all the drives, created new partitions & did a quick ntfs format.

re-imaged the usb key to try to make sure previous config would not stick.

reinserted drives in new server, powered up again... and most drives were still viewed as reiserfs.

 

tried a second "cleaning cycle", still traces of reiserfs.  that's when i posted my message.

got my solution from squid and now i have 19tb of xfs goodness.  though one drive as roughly 22gb used (out of 2tb), not sure where that came from -- but that's the topic of another thread.

 

cheers.