csimpson

Not really, I just didn't know if the cache drive was tied to the parity drive at all. Almost like if I have the 8TB parity, two 4TB spinning discs and then another 120GB SSD, would the entire array be 8,120TB including the SSD.

That makes sense. Gotcha. My 8TB is nearly done the post check for preclearing. The other two drives (4TB) that I took from from Windows system have data on them, but there wasn't an option to preclear them? Is preclearing only necessary for the parity drive? Also, if I have an SSD as the cache drive (or as understand it, now a pool) does that also get tied to the parity drive? Or do I need a second cache drive to be the parity drive.

So then, moving forward, an additional 8TB drive would give me a total of 16TB of storage (two 4TB and an 8TB), and the parity drive will protect against a single drive failure. With the current setup, I suppose then that if the two 4TB data drives failed, the parity drive wouldn't be able to rebuild the data. I suppose the risk with Unraid is that if the SATA controller decides to flip out and error up all the data drives, that's when the NTFS backup or APFS backup is good to have. Another question (thank-you by the way). I have Unraid running off a 16GB USB stick currently. If I wanted to have a Plex server, etc, does it make sense to have a larger USB key, or does the data get stored on the spinning disk?

Good to know! I already have the unassigned devices plugin installed. I'll be looking into that. One question I have and am having a hard time wrapping my head around despite reading tutorials. If I have an 8TB parity drive and two 4TB drives, I believe that I'll have 8TB of data storage available and it'll be protected by the parity drive. However, if I add another 4TB drive, (not parity) would I then have 12TB of protected data? The math doesn't add up for me. Also, does unraid have some sort of "recycle bin" for accidentally deleted items? I really like Apple's Time Machine and how it functions to restore older data. Would love it if something like that was available for unraid?

TLDR; Moving from a Windows 10 fileserver to Unraid and I'm nervous about data loss, accidentally clicking something wrong and wiping out my data. ---- First time poster here and I am looking to move from my Windows 10 server to an Unraid setup. I've built PC's since the mid 90's back during DOS and a 386SX33 without even so much as a math coprocessor. I used to play and tinker all day long. I had the time. But I don't have as much time anymore and back then, if I lost my data, I'd just take a floppy disk, Iomega Zip or Jazz disc, CD-R/DVD-R or whatever I had used to back up my stuff and rebuild.. Disaster recovery was pretty easy and straight forward. But now I have decades of accumulated digital treasures. Hours and hours of tinkering with DMAs and IRQs and swapping jumpers has been replaced with being a dad, a husband, working full-time and just being a grown-up. And in the process, I've managed to collect thousands of hours of video content and tens of thousands of photos. Additionally and less fulfilling, but very important, financial documents and statements that are necessary to keep. My current setup is a Windows 10 box with a 120GB SSD with the OS and a few apps installed on it. Apps such as Plex and DisqueTV. The system also has two 4TB internal spinning drives. One drive is a media/storage drive and the other is a nightly sync using Syncback. From there, I have an external 4TB drive that I sync to once a month(ish) and store offsite. There are multiple levels of simple redundancy. OS Drive fails, replace it without affecting the media. Media drive fails? It can be replaced and then copied from the sync drive. Both drives fail? restore from the external drive. And it's easy. I can take any of the three hard drives and connect it to pretty much any computer and have access to my files. Peace of mind. This system has been running for over 10 years with periodic hard drive upgrades.. So far, it's worked very well, however, Windows 10 is getting long in the tooth and the old video card is less than reliable. Additionally, I'm at the point where I'm 95% full on the internal drives and am finding that I'm deleting files to free up more space. So I went out and purchased an 8TB drive and a 14TB external drive. The idea was that I'd replace the main 4TB media/storage drive with the new 8TB drive. I'd take the two existing 4TB drives, span them together in Windows and use that as the sync drive. The 14TB external drive would replace the existing backup. Essentially, same system, double the storage. But then I started thinking, wait, should I do this as a proper NAS not running Windows Home? Enter Unraid. I've got Unraid on a 16GB USB stick and it's currently preclearing the 8TB drive. Once that's done, as I understand it I should make the new 8TB drive the parity drive and then the two 4TB drives will become disk 1 and disk 2. And then once I'm comfortable with that, I'll take my 120GB SSD and turn it into a cache drive. But I'm almost terrified. Even though I have an external backup of my windows 10 drive, I wonder "how do I sync a drive to my external drive using Unraid but then connect to my mac and access the files if the Unraid system fails?" or that I've read about people who have a drive failure and then they rebuild their system and because the wrong button was clicked, POOF! Data is gone. I'm very comfortable with Windows. I can reliably get my piceless files back with various levels of redundancy. Unraid is making me nervous but so far, everyone who's moved from Windows to unraid loves it! I'm hopeful that horror stories are isolated, but I'd love to have a more robust system than what Windows can offer. Anyways, that's my intro!