Hi everyone! Looking forward to joining the unraid community - been watching a ton of videos and doing a fair bit of reading - I've been on TrueNAS for a few months and was generally unhappy with how convoluted everything was - after doing the research unraid seems perfect for me!
So here's my story. Once my data finishes copying over to a USB drive I am rebuilding my server with unraid. I have 3x 12TB WD Elements drives that I will be shucking and installing (1x parity, 2x data). I also have a 500GB NVMe SSD for a cache drive. When I start the build I will have approx 9TB of data on 1 of the WD drives (NTFS). So which way is the best to go, to juggle the data onto the array and then wipe the drive, and finally add it to the array? It is worth noting that all of this data is media that is replaceable and not vital. I wouldn't want to have to download it again of course, but there's nothing critical. The server is mainly going to be Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, nzb, deluge etc. Anything critial is already stored on a separate server & backed up regularly to the cloud so this is not a major concern.
Is this correct (once unraid USB is running, basic plugins installed etc):
1) shuck drives and add 1x data, 1x parity to a new array. add the NVMe as cache at this point.
2) use unassigned devices plugin to mount NTFS disk full of data (also shucked at this point)
3) use Krusader in docker to copy the data from the NTFS disk to the array to avoid copying thru network again
4) zero that drive and add it to the existing array.
5) Job Done, start setting up dockers etc and enjoy fiddling with it.
Questions:
Should I wait until all the data transfers are done, and the array is ready BEFORE adding the cache drive?
Should I add the 2 drives into a new array WITHOUT a parity drive, then add the 3rd drive as a parity afterwards?
Is there a better way around to do what I am trying to do?
I have read around a bit but haven't been able to pin this down specifically. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I think it comes down to the question of do I add 2x data or 1x data + 1x parity at the start. Copying the data across using unassigned devices/krusader seems like the best way to go either way. My understanding of the cache drive is that me copying 9TB of data directly to a media share won't affect the cache at all, unless I have set that share to do so (and being media storage I wouldn't do that)
Anyway that's what I think - what say you all?