lux

Oh wow. Yeah I absolutely missed that in my research. Ok firstly thank you for sharing your knowledge, genuinely appreciate it. You e most likely saved me a huge amount of money and time, really appreciate you taking the time to respond to my posts. If I may, a follow up question: If I can’t find the chasis I need, I can get a 5 port HBA controller (one port for each disk) in a 1U chasis with 4 bays / disks, and then a cable goes to the expander in the next chasis. But the next chasis does *not* require a controller, as it’s being controlled from the first chasis. Assuming the chasis is another 1U 4 bay, then all 4 disks will share the bandwidth of the single port from the controller. Actually thinking / talking about all this out loud, I don’t need a 5 port controller do I? I can do a 2 port controller, as each port has a 6gb bandwidth, and if I only have 4 disks in a chassis with max 250mb/s read or write, then I won’t even come close to saturating the controller with 4 disks on one port.

Basically I’ve no where to put it. I have a small utility room, it houses a comms cabinet with my unifi router / switch, patch panel, PS5, Denon amp. The utility room has a lot of human ‘traffic’ - it has the washing machine, tumble dryer, and is the route to the downstairs bath room. As such, I don’t want the tower on the floor where it could be kicked, hit by accident with the hoover, or otherwise by close the washing machine in case that breaks / floods. Ideally I want a dumb 8 bay / 12 bay NAS, and then a separate 1u application server. What I don’t understand is unraids approach to server expansion. If you have a 2U 8 bay NAS and want to expand, you have to ditch the whole thing and get a 3U. You can’t just buy a 1U ‘expansion’ server, and connect the 2 NAS together to form one storage pool.

Hello, Is it possible to have 2 separate 1u servers, and have unraid treat it as one massive storage pool? The challenge that I have is that I can’t find any short depth 2U 8 bay servers in the UK. So I’m thinking it would be easier to have 2 sets of 1U servers, and combine them. Ive spent the last few hours researching, but it seems that it’s only possible to create multiple arrays in a single chassis. Thank you, Lux

Th That’s useful, saves the whole array from failing. Thank you @itimpi

I live in the UK. Is anyone aware of a 3U 12 bay shortdepth chassis? I’m trying to transition from an 8Bay QNAP to a brand new 12bay unraid solution. But trying to find a shortdepth chassis is a nightmare. At this point, I’d even settle for an 8 bay shortdepth 2U. My thoughts here is that I will have a separate 1U chassis as the application server (plex, radarr, sonarr, tidarr, overseerr, sabnzbd etc). I assuming also that the best way to connect all of this is via the switch (I’m reading things about SAS and backplanes).

Hello, My grandmother recently passed away. My family have decided to keep her home abroad and use it as a holiday home / weekend escape. Currently I have an 8 bay QNAP at home (UK) in a raid 6 array, which I use for my media collection. How would the forum advise me to proceed if I wanted to have my media collection *also* in my family home abroad (Spain), so that everyone who used it would be able to enjoy my media? On one hand, the super easy solution would be to just have an Nvidia shield at the home abroad point to my plex server at home. However, whenever I have tested this travelling (US / EU), the quality was always quite poor (probably hotel WiFi, but still). I feel like this would be a great opportunity to get a brand new 12 bay 3U chassis, use unraid, and then somehow use my QNAP in Spain as the backup device. That way those using the family home abroad will be able to use the media locally. And if anything ever went wrong with my ‘main’ server, I have an offsite backup. From what I’ve read, unraid doesn’t support hot standby disks, so if there was a disk parity failure, or data disk failure, it may be several weeks before I got the opportunity to get out the house and fix it. So I feel that the best overall solution would be unraid at UK home, QNAP raid 6 abroad, with rtrr between the two to sync data. But I’ve zero experience with unraid, hence looking for advice! What’s the forums thoughts?

@Frank1940 Thank you for your response. Just reading up on the forum that the sensible limit for the number of parity drives is 2, in other words you don’t increase the number of parity drives for x number of additional disks. Whether you have 24 bay or 8 bay, you’d still only have 2 parity disks (or one, if you were brave enough!). Thank you for your help everyone. Lux

Ha ha ha! Damn auto correct! Though I think parrot drives has a nice ring to it. Thanks for the response @itimpi!

@Frank1940 Thank you for your reply and for the link. If I may, it’s not quite clear in the documentation whether you can add a parrot drive after you’ve setup a few JBOD’s…? Use case here would be I would only need to buy 2 new drives initially. Transfer the 12TB of data on to them from my QNAP, and then power down the QNAP and one by one transition the drives from inside the qnap to the unraid.

That will make for a very tense transfer! Thank you for your response. In your experience, creating an unraid with 8 x 8TB disks, how long will it take to format the disks ready for unraid?

No. But I can buy a 14tb single drive, whip it in to an enclosure, and backup everything to that simple enough. is that the thought process? Make multiple backups, and then simply put all 8 drives in to the new unraid? Restore from backup? lux

Hello, I have a QNAP TS-853 pro. How do I make the transition from QNAP to a brand new 4U server, without having to buy all new disks to migrate the data? I have about 12TB of data. Lux