manofoz

That's a good idea. Can you rebuild on a disk that is a different size? Right now I have a range of sizes from 4TB - 20TB and I may eventually get to the point where everything is the same size and speed but to start it'll be a bit of a potluck... If I was to have a spare on hand I'd like to be able to just have a spare of the largest size drive I have which would hopefully cover any that needed to be rebuilt.

OK sounds like I should definitely preclear the used drives and maybe even the new ones for a "smoke test" before adding them to the array. Does this apply when starting empty? Pre-clear my bran new drives before setting anything up?

Thanks. I do have some WD disks, I believe my externals are WD, so I will look into monitoring those SMART attributes. My other disks are Seagate but there could be others, I haven't taken inventory in a while. This all makes sense, I will tun that test before adding anything I own to the array and try pre-clear on the mystery drives I may be getting from my friend. I do and will continue to have my photos backed. The rest of my media I have catalogued, a lot of it came from MakeMKV on disks I have in my attic now. That would suck to have to do again but in a way they are also backed up. I also wrote a program that fetches exports of all library's using Tautulli's RESTFUL API. It then uploads the exports to google drive. I was going to run this nightly just to keep a record of what I have in the could. It's not a backup, much smaller, but would be a good start in the case of a catastrophic failure.

Thanks for the heads up. I will research how to disable the cache before doing the initial migration of data and then enable it once things are all settled. I was under the mindset that the cache filling up would be handled gracefully and things would just go right to the array after. I don't have any reason to write certain files to certain disks so I don't think I will configure that. However it may still be worth using a user share to partition each type of data. There are some things I can imagine this to be valuable for, for example I'd like more control over who can access my photos than who can access movies & TV shows. I will explore these more, could these be created after the fact or is this something that will be a pain if I don't decide upfront? Not sure I have any reason to disable Parity while doing the initial migration. I was going to set up all my empty drives first and have parity in place. I don't mind waiting the extra time it would put on the transfer. Finally, I will check out Dynamix File Manager. Have not heard that mentioned but I'd like to be able to queue up large transfers and let it run overnight.

Thanks! That is a good call. Should I always preclear or let Unraid do a Clear and Format when setting up the initial Array and then Preclear when I add additional disks? Reading the documentation it sounded like preclear was optional and unraid would just do a clear if you didn't do that so I didn't really get why it was better than just doing a clear. Also said the array would still be usable while unraid cleared and formatted the new disk so I didn't see a downside that preclear solved. I'm sure I missed something, lot of people mention it. I should have plenty of capacity with what I have now before getting the mystery disks from my buddy at work. He used them for some crypto thing so they are a bit mysterious but will be a great deal. He's just looking to get rid of them as he stopped doing the crypto thing a while back, it never really net him anything.

Good to know, thank you! I will probably just use the HBA as the cables are a bit smaller. I picked up this guy https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BVVDT4F1?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details after reading this:

Yes I believe I am going to be writing a script to move all my Movies into folders with the same name. I can also have the same script append the resolution onto the file it places into the folder. However because my movies of different resolution are on different drives this solution will still create conflicts if I try to mass migrate. The only solution there would be to recursive search all media folders and match files with the same name. Then make one folder with that name, use my lookup table to find the resolution of each, and move them into the same folder. However one will be moved from one drive to another. I may not have enough space on any given drive to consolidate all of the files. Worth a shot though that would make the final migration way easier. I will start plugging away at a move/rename script that parses my path to resolution file I exported from Tautulli's API. I could even link the code that calls the API to the move/rename script but it's probably faster to just use an offline dump of the data from Tautulli's

I have IT Mode HBAs I misspoke by calling them raid controllers. I got one from here which does use the term controller:

I had read that article a while back but it's a good refresher. Every disk except for the 4x20TB will not be new. I wanted to get a large Parity drive so I didn't have to worry about it constraining future expansion. I will have 9 drives for certain and the used ones there are running in my current Plex server and work file. Two are external because that server ran out of space (it's 14 years old running a first gen i7 975 processor that can't HW transcode). I don't know how many drives my friend has, probably around 5 since I don't want any below 4TB. I read 2 parity allows 2 drives to fail before you are screwed, not sure if 14 drives - parity ones is enough to justify that. I guess I can always convert a second 20 TB drive to parity if I learn that I need it. Is it easy to use unRAID to test the drives before installing them? I can plug them in via USB as unassigned drives if that is helpful. I can also plug them in via USB to a Windows machine and just see that they show up and can be written to.

Yes I have been using Plex for 6 years without a problem. I use it locally had have 7 remote users who are close friends and family who also use the server. The problem lies with how my media is currently organized. I have 5 disks and each have Media/Moves and Media/TV Shows folders and in those folders is just a dump of media. It works fine but I will be moving to a RAID array and will now have the problem 1080p media collides with 4k media etc. TV Shows won't be a problem, I don't have multiple formats there yet but movies will need some pre-organizing before I migrate them to the array. I was thinking going with a folder per movie and then "- 1080p", "- 4k" etc appended before the file extension for different formats. This will be either labor intensive or require writing a script to handle so I want to get it right before I take the time to do so.

Plex documentation does recommend movies in their own folders. That's going to be a bit of a headache. Plus my file paths will get a bit longer but still shouldn't be anything Windows couldn't handle. Now I'm thinking maybe I should put each version of the movie in the movie folder, so have "- 1080p" and a " - 4k" appended to the name of the files after the year. I could further break it up by having the a folder per letter like "A", "B", "C" so that the number of subfolders doesn't grow too large. Maybe that isn't necessary.

Hello! I am building a new server for unRAID with plenty of storage and I will be starting off by using it as a Plex server. I will be using whatever the latest version of unraid is when I purchase it next week. I tried to make this as brief as possible and only ask the questions that are keeping me up at night. I made a longer post on Reddit, going into more detail, and didn't get much of a response: Relevant information about the server: Unraid Version: 6.12.4 (unless a new one comes out before next week) Disks: HDD: 4 x 20TB, 1 x 4 TB. 2 x 6 TB, 1 x 8 TB, 1 x 14 TB + misc others I am purchasing from my friend next week. SSD: 4x 2TB M.2 Media: 22 TB of Movies 3 TB of TV Shows 1 TB of Photos / Home Video (Camera Backup) I will be migrating the data by plugging the occupied drives in via USB 3.0 and using the unassigned drives feature to copy files to the array. Once all are copied I will open the case and install the drives and then clean and format them so they can be added into the main array. 1. Should I be using 1 or 2 disks for Parity? My research tells me that you can't tell exactly which disk failed with only one because you won't know if it was in the array or the parity disk itself. I think this is enough motivation to use 2 but that would be 2x20TB disks, lot of storage but no worry about replacing parity as I add/replace disks. 2. Should my Parity drives be plugged directly into my motherboards SATA ports or is the HBA fine? In my research I see people preferring to plug Parity drives into the mobo and use HBA for the rest. I can go either way. 2. Should I pre-organize my data before the transfer? My organizational structure per disk right now, no RAID, starting with Media/<Movies,Photos,TV Shows>/ and the rest is a bit messy. I was thinking for the new server I will organize the media by resolution so Media/<Movies,Photos,TV Shows>/<4kHDR, 4kDV, 1080p, 720p, PooPoo> but maybe that will be simplified to SHARE/Resolution/ in a following question. 3. Should each video file be in it's own folder? I don't do this right now. I see people saying they do this. I don't know why you would do this. If it's a good idea I will need to write a script to copy all the files into folders with the same name which frightens me a bit. My media is not backed up and moving 30TBs of files with a script seems scary. 4. How much do I need to worry about User Shares and Split Level configurations? I read the manual on this and since I don't yet have the server built I'm lacking some hands on learning. I understand a User Share as a logical drive which you can configure to map to specific drives and put files on those drive using split levels. People seem to either create one Media folder on the array or have multiple Shares for each Media type. They say they can better configure each share depending on the type of media. I guess this makes sense for permissions and if you didn't want everything on every disk. I feel like for my use case I can just trust unRAID to manage and balance the media across drives but I don't want to have to move things around down the road if I'm mistaken here. 5. Will using Krusader to copy files unbalance the drives? Should I use Midnight Commander instead? I'm familiar with a linux command prompt from my job but for a transfer this large I'd rather use something with a UI. However I have read that Krusader creates little folders for everything it plans to copy first and then does the copy which throws off any balancing or split level settings (such as the high watermark setting). It sounded like you could transfer from Krusader in batches to avoid this but I'm not sure, it's a confusing problem. I could also transfer over the network but two of my drives are already external and using unassigned drives cuts the risk of a computer crashing mid transfer in half vs. the network (I have a 2.5 Gbps wired network so it would not bottleneck). 6. Is having two 2x2TB Raid 1 Cache Pools a bad idea? I want a 2TB (raid 1) cache which allows high speed transfer over the network and then copies to the array at night or when close to full. I also want a 2TB (raid 1) cache that Plex and other containers can store configuration and appsettings on. Also if I create a VM I'd use this to give it some storage. I am going with Raid 1 just so they aren't single points of failures. My mobo supports 4 M.2 drives and they are cheap right now so I figured I'd get 4 of them. Thank you for the help! Hopefully I can change my name on the forum after making this post...

Very impressive build. Are the Noctua 40mm fans 3 or 4 pin? There looks to be a 3 pin connector on the raid controller, can you plug a fan into that? Or do you just plug the fans into the 9 x 4pin fan hub that comes with the case?