whipstaff

I have been running a N100 mini PC and an external hard drive enclosure connected with USB3.1 for a couple of months now without any issues. I know this is not the best way to do it but money was tight so it's what I went with. The current configuration is one 22TB array made up of 4 hard drives, 1 x 10TB parity drive, 1 x 10TB and 2 x 6TB storage drives. 1 x 500GB m.2 SSD (as a cache pool) and the RAM has been upgraded to 1 x 32GB DDR4-3200. I use the cache pool for faster downloads which are then transferred to the hard drives and the appdata is also stored on the SSD. I recently got my hands on an old workstation PC for really cheap. I want to use it to instead of the mini PC but I have a few questions regarding the setup and the implementation. The setup I was thinking of would be to keep the array the same, but instead get 2 x 250GB 2.5inch SSD's (which would be connected via SATA due to the limitations of the motherboard) and create a mirrored pool with them and exclusively use them for appdata. It should be more than enough storage since I currently only have 10GB of appdata data. And then I would get another 1TB SSD, also connected via SATA to allow for increased download speeds as a separate cache pool. The new server would have an intel i7-4790, 4 x 4GB DDR3-1600 RAM and I would need to use a PCIE to SATA convertor so that I can have enough SATA ports. I do plan on increasing the number of hard drives in the future. The new unraid server would probably only give me a slight uplift in performance. The current set up does not have any performance issues except for when downloading and and unzipping a lot of files in sequential order, like a series. So would this be a valid set up? Any improvements I could make? For the implementation part, I would like it to be as smooth as possible without losing any data of course. In other words, can I just move everything to the new system and start it up or is it not that simple? Perhaps assigning the hard drives the same way would not be possible since I would be using a new controller? Would Unraid see the different hard ware and freak out? I could probably just restore all my docker apps with backups? Is it possible to transfer my license to new hardware? Any advice would be appreciated!

I'm looking for some advice on the correct procedure to upgrade my Unraid setup. My current setup is a GMKtec NucBox G3 and two external 6TB hard drives. One hard drive is used as the parity drive of course. I mostly use Unraid as a media server and hosting a website or two. The setup works great and barely sips any power. I am running out of storage so I bought a 10TB hard drive and a 4 bay hard drive dock, and I thought I would upgrade the RAM while I am at it so I got some Crucial DDR5 16GB RAM as well. I also have a 500GB SSD lying around which I might use to replace the existing SSD that I am using for my cache drive (doubling the cache pool), but I am not sure I can do that now as well. All my appdata files are on the cache disk (and backed up to cloud storage). I only have one 2280 slot. I would of course have to use the new 10TB hard drive as the new parity drive and move the old 6TB parity drive to become part of the array. And all of the hard drives will have to be mounted in the dock. I know the external USB storage thing isn't great for Unraid but it's what I have at the moment and has been working very well for a while. In a couple of years with some saving up I'll build a proper Unraid machine. So, can anyone please advise me on the correct procedure to for this upgrade? I have read the documents on this but I am not sure the it still applies with exactly what I am doing, and I'd rather ask here and make sure. Thanks in advance for any advice and guidance!