Sandwich

Ok, so an update (also in the hopes of getting some replies here): My Drobo's 6Tb drive got ejected from the array, but still being under warranty, I took it to the store I purchased it from. They ran it through a thorough test and it came out clean, so perhaps the Drobo had a glitch. Anyway, in the meantime I got an 8Tb replacement drive. I ran it through a vigorous badblocks test which took about a week. When it passed that, I plugged it into the unRaid box as a single device share, and I have been using rsync to copy over all 6Tb of data from the Drobo to the unRaid share. When that's done, I guess I'll be installing a Plex docker container, but that's where I need help. I don't want to lose any Plex watch history, so all that needs to come over from the Drobo. However, I also need to somehow make sure the paths are correct, and I don't know how to do that. Finally, I'd appreciate some advice on how to handle my data all being on one drive: Do I plug in all the other drives from the Drobo, set them up as a separate share with drive redundancy (parity?) and whatnot, and then copy the data from the 8Tb to the multi-drive share to get it to be stored with parity/redundancy? Or can I just add the drives from the Drobo to the existing single-drive share? My understanding is that the largest drive(s) should be the parity drive(s), but the largest drive would have all the data stored on it, so how do I go about it? If I mark a drive that has data on it as a parity drive, will unRaid intelligently and transparently transfer data from that drive to the other drives in the share?

Hi all! I currently have a Drobo5N that's (thankfully) still running fine after ~5 years of use or so. The only two "apps" running on it are Plex Media Server, and Transmission. It has a full 5 drive bays, with 4x 3Tb HDDs and 1x 6Tb HDD. It's set up for dual-drive redundancy, and I have a grand total of just under 6Tb of data on there. It's connected directly to my router via a 1 gigabit LAN cable. I'd like to essentially swap out the Drobo with a custom Unraid box. What I have so far is a Fractal Design Node 804 with space for 8 HDDs, and a Gigabyte GA-Z97mx-Gaming5 motherboard with 6 SATA connections, an Intel Core i5-4690k CPU, and 16 Gb RAM. I have my main PC available on the same network in case it's needed, and can perhaps fit 1Tb of data on there if need be. I'm essentially a complete noob WRT Linux, although I have a passing familiarity with the basic bash commands (due to being a web developer), so go easy on me? My general line of thought is to remove the 6Tb drive from the Drobo and let it rebuild itself (a 24 hour process or so) with single drive redundancy (can that be done?). Then I'd format the 6Tb drive, plug it into the Unraid box, and....? I had been thinking I'd copy all the data from the Drobo to the 6Tb drive, and then begin adding the other 3Tb drives to Unraid, but I'm not sure if that's possible (starting with one full drive only). Any advice, guidance, or recommendations?