jonathanm

That's fine IF you know how to use a voltmeter, and confirm pinout consistency. I'm replying here just to warn off folks who might happen on this post and think all modular power supplies with the same connectors are compatible. THEY ARE NOT! If you don't know how to check cables with a voltmeter or power supply tester, DON'T RISK IT. You can easily burn out parts if the harnesses aren't pinned identically.

Yes, it's a holdover from the old unraid philosophy of ease of use being first priority. There are a multitude of modern security concerns with unraid in general, and they are being dealt with as they come up. Since this cause is near and dear to you, I suggest you submit a feature request to modify the default behaviour of a new install to be more secure when it comes to the base SMB shares. Thinking about it, it would probably be a good idea to have ALL shares start out with private as the default setting, and make people choose less security if they want it. Throws ease of first use right out the window, but I think the benefits would outweigh the hassles.

Yes. Do you have an unencrypted backup of the config folder somewhere?

The VM errors were fixed in 6.6.3

Sounds like the USB may be losing connection. Are you using USB 3.0 by any chance? If so, try using USB 2.0

When plex fully supports nvidia, then we will be waiting on unraid. Currently, we are waiting on plex.

Plex. linux + plex doesn't support anything except intel iGPU. Not related to unraid.

Which version of unraid? Some versions have issues keeping track of the status of VM's.

Correct, if you do a clean install with only your license, all your shares will be public, your users gone, and the name will be "tower". Problem is, I'm not sure what has changed in the config files between early 5.0 and now. They are mostly just text files, so my suggestion would be to set up the new install, and open each config file side by side on your screen with a text editor for old and new, and compare. Pretty much anything in the config folder is fair game for at least looking at with a text editor. Many will be ok to simply copy over intact. Even this post is 3 years out of date, but it will give you the links to read. Most of the automatic scripted procedures will no longer be valid. The manual upgrade procedures should work though. The wiki article linked in that post is pretty comprehensive, and lists some config files which should be safe to copy. I would trust but verify by examining and comparing the new and old versions. https://wiki.unraid.net/index.php/Upgrading_to_UnRAID_v6

Exactly correct.

Plug them in to a 1GB port? Sorry I can't be any more helpful. I know circuits at the two ends of the cable perform an interpretive dance to negotiate the actual connection speed, so any modifications to that are going to be hardware driver specific. Can you temporarily put a Gig switch as the first hop out of the machine? Maybe something from the spare parts bin?

I am really unfamiliar with the mechanics of the hardlink process, but I don't think that is going to work. Hopefully someone with a better understanding of the hardlink process can step in here and clarify where hardlinks can be used, but I think you are limited to links referencing files on either the same physical media, or alternatively across the user share space. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think it will work if you mix disks and user shares. The point of a hardlink in my limited understanding is to allow the same set of sectors to have multiple valid names in the file system. That means that the file remains accessible through ANY and ALL of the multiple names, and deleting one doesn't touch the sector data, only the reference. That works as long as you don't link across different physical media. Consider what would happen if the file data were contained on your unassigned device and hardlinked into the share system. The original file would occupy the UD, with a pointer on a user share. What happens when you delete the UD reference? The user share link would lose its data. The file system wouldn't know to move the data to the new physical media, because the point of hardlinks is to NOT have to move the data. User share hardlinks are a special case, only possible through the magic of the merged file system. I'm totally lost when it comes to understanding how that can work. Like I said first, I could be totally wrong here, hopefully someone with a greater understanding of these things will jump in, clarify and correct me.

If that's a Marvell chipset controller (appears to be based on my searches), then it may not play well with V6. LSI chipset HBA's are much preferred.

Not really needed. V6 can read your drives as they are, and since you have a list of which serial number goes where, all you really need to do is backup your USB, build a fresh V6 install on your current USB and restore your current license file to the V6 config folder. Boot V6, assign your drives to the appropriate slots, and start the array. Post back if you have any questions.

My first instinct was to dismiss it because of a super small target audience that would use only 2 or 3 array drives, but then I remembered all the new customers coming on board to only run VM's, and the availability of 10+ TB drives, and suddenly it doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Three 10TB data store drives with combined read speeds in the 500MB/s range, and four 1 or 2TB NVME SSD's for VM vdisks would make a potent little machine.