JP

Just to balance data across the drives. I think the school of thought some time ago was that having something like 50% - 60% of data drives filled was sort of the sweet spot. If a drive got somewhere around 75% filled, then you needed to add more drive space. Evenly distributing that data out could help with that. BUT now that you mention it, I think I read somewhere recently that is no longer the case. Drives being unbalanced isn't really the end of the world. So, I guess I shouldn't worry about it.

I'm new to unbalanced and I could be missing something, but I'm not seeing it. That is, I would have thought there was an option to basically select a number of drives and then have the app disperse the data evenly amongst those drives. What I'm seeing instead is that this is a very manual process where you need to specifically point at what data you want to go where...right? I'm not trying to "dink" the app, just trying to understand. Also, I'm assuming this doesn't exist so I thought I would ask to be sure. It sure would be nice to have an option to select multiple folders at once (like a SHIFT - LEFT CLICK option) instead of manually having to click each and every folder you want to have moved. Again, maybe I'm missing something.

I just wanted to thank @JorgeB as well as the Unraid developers for how much easier they made this format change compared to other guides. I struggled with some of the earlier guides, but "emptying disks" and leveraging Mover to help automate this process really helped. Now all my drives are XFS and I think everything is working fine again (at least from what I can tell). Thanks again.

Thanks everyone. I'm sensing that amongst even the two of you (experts), this sort of diversity is not something to put a great deal of emphasis on. It seems as though if you have personal preference, it can outweigh the need for any need for diversity (outside of the exception Itimpi mentioned, which isn't my case). Thanks again. I'll buy what I like.

Understood. But in my case this isn't what is happening. I bought one of these drives 4 years ago. Another 2 years ago. Now looking to buy another now. Basically, that is one risk I don't have. I think originally this school of thought surfaced because if there was a conflict between Unraid and a specific drive, your problem was only segregated to a small subset of drive(s) on the array instead of it being all of the array. Again, I understand the logic in that, but when I've successfully used the same drive for 4 years now, it feels like that risk has been lowered at least some, but again, not certain about that and is why I'm asking. I've also not kept up with the new builds people put together nowadays. Do they care about this type of thing or are they just buying all the same drives? Back when I first built my Unraid server (can't even remember how long ago that was, 15 years?, crazy), this school of thought seemed pretty significant, so I made a point to have a huge diversity amongst my drives. No two drives were the same. Again, just wondering if this is something people are really concerned at all about now. Not sure myself.

I know many years ago there was a "school of thought" that you should mix up your data drive manufacturers and not lean on the same hdd for every data drive. I somewhat understood the logic, but I'm wondering if that "school of thought" has possibly dwindled down at all? The reason I'm asking is because over the years I've become very fond of a Seagate NAS drive (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084ZV8YW8?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1&th=1) with a 5-year warranty on them. They seem fast, I haven't had one fail yet, and they run cool. You can certainly pay less for another drive, but I feel this is sort of an area where you get what you pay for. So, as I need to replace drives now and upgrade size, does this "school of thought" still exist and I should deviate away from this drive or is there really no harm done nowadays in piling up on one drive?

I've tried to wrap my head around doing this a couple times now and I never seem to get a full understanding enough to be confident to move forward. I just upgraded UNRAID to 7.2.2 and I got the banner letting me know how urgent it is to upgrade the format on my RESERFS drives to something like XFS. So, I really need to force myself to do it now. I think the good news is, Unraid appears to now have something built-in that appears to make this conversion easier (or at least I think so). The MIGRATION GUIDE it points to seems a little more straight forward than the directions I was attempting to understand in the past. My first question is, "Can I follow this migration guide given the limited amount of space I have on my Unraid Server? Here is a screenshot of the space I have available: I do have an extra 4TB drive available. Should I maybe switch it out with the 2TB drive first to give me more space? The migration guide is as follows. If I do have enough space and can follow these steps, can I really not do step 3 and just leave the files where they are once I've completed the format change on all 3 drives? Thank you for any help. tower-diagnostics-20251212-1327.zip

Thank you. I've added those steps to the instructions. Is it possible to comment on the rest of the instructions? I know there might be different ways of accomplishing this, but I'm most interested in, "Will this work?" As always, thank you for your help. Converting REISERFS to XFS (5).pdf

Of course. Thank you. tower-diagnostics-20250625-1519.zip

Weird. Same thing happened to me, but I hit the "Try again" button and it downloaded ok. Maybe something with the parentheses in the name is causing a problem. I should have cleaned that up.

Sorry, I do have a cache. All dockers and one VM are on the cache. They'll all be disabled for this entire process.

I've been reading quite a bit on this forum to try and understand how to do this conversion. Much of it is over my head, but I think I've gotten the gist and the steps I need to walk through to get this done. Could someone please take a look at the attached and see if I have any glaring mistakes and whether this process will work or not? I recognize that there might be other ways to do this, but I'm mostly interested in whether this will work or not since it is something that makes some sense to me. Thanks in advance for any guidance. Converting REISERFS to XFS (4) (2).pdf

I've got to get this done. I've put it off because I really need a "REISERFS to XFS for Dummies" to get me through this. I almost never touch my unraid server. It just works and that's a testimony to those who developed it. Anyway, I saw a summary of this process in this thread and one thing is throwing me. We copy data from the REISERFS drive to the new XFS Drive, but we do it while the array is still enabled. I'm confused how Unraid doesn't see those files as duplicates and the Dockers sort of attempt to try and use both. I guess I should just stick to the instructions and just do it, but I thought I would ask.

Let me start by apologizing since I know this question is going to be obvious to plenty of people on here. But thankfully, I have UNRAID to thank for either my laziness or my inability to know the answer to this question. UNRAID has just worked for me for so long that I not only don't have to think about it, but end up forgetting everything I did to set it up. So, thank you UNRAID for giving me one less thing to think about in my life. I have a simple setup with a six drive array and one 500 GB cache drive. The cache drive has about six dockers on it and that is about all I use it for. I did tinker with VMs at one time, but don't use them. It only uses about 70 GBs of space. The cache drive is 5 years old now and I'm starting to get nervous it might fail. Early on this wasn't a big deal since I could easily setup everything again. Now, it would take more work than I would like to admit (refer to laziness above). I did try to do some research in this space to see if an obvious answer exists, but was met with more things that I didn't understand because UNRAID has continued to advance even though I haven't. Ultimately, my question is, what would be the easiest way to safeguard against my cache drive failing? Is it possible to write an image of it onto the array? Is there something that possibly automates this every day / week? Is maybe the only solution to run duplicate cache drives? Again, when it comes to "easiest" I suspect there is an obvious answer here, but I'm not sure what it is. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Solved my own issue here and I should have thought this through better. The issue stemmed from the new router selecting an IP Address range that wasn't the same as the previous router. Once I selected the same range everything started working as it did.