JonathanM

You can definitely use the drives you mentioned in Unraid, I was just pointing out the cost of setting up the number of SATA ports, power supply connections, and appropriate case for 14 SATA drives that you listed would probably exceed the cost of a pair of new drives, 16TB is currently the sweet spot in my opinion for $/GB of storage, You can probably put together something that will work for much less, but it's going to use much more electricity on an ongoing basis, and have many more points of failure than new hardware. By all means, throw some used parts together and try the trial of Unraid. I'm not being sarcastic, it will probably do exactly what you want for now. I was just trying to prepare you for the inevitable feature creep. If you put the three 320GB spinner drives in the parity array, and set up two pools, one with the 1TB SSD and another with the 250GB SSD that would be a nice start, you should be able to find an old board with 6 SATA ports. That would give you an entry point to see how Unraid works.

Use the official procedure, https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/parity-swap-procedure/ If you do a new config you will lose data.

Kinda, not all shucked drives act this way, but a good percent of the 8TB WD that were so popular a couple years ago are. Thanks!

Those drives may be the type that won't spin up if they have 3.3V applied on the SATA power cable, did you by any chance change how the power to the drives was routed? 4pin to SATA power adapters will allow the drives to work, regular SATA power may not unless the pins are masked off. This may NOT be the issue, just a possibility since they don't show in BIOS.

Nope. Just be VERY careful not to populate either of the parity slots and you should be fine.

Do the drives show up in BIOS? Attach diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread.

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Maybe NPM is too restrictive in the options offered, perhaps you need to explore a full featured nginx reverse proxy solution like SWAG. That way you can utilize the nginx reverse proxy examples in the meshcentral docs.

Make sure you have a good uncorrupted backup of your config folder, then reformat the stick with https://rufus.ie/ , being sure to select FAT32 as the format type, UNRAID as the disk label. Extract the files from the appropriate zip downloaded from the bottom of this page https://unraid.net/download, overwrite the config file with your backup, run the make bootable as admin, see if it boots.

Does it work if you break it out from behind NPM and expose it directly?

Especially since all the other competitors in this custom NAS space support it!

delete the partition on disks that you want to preclear

Download the latest version of memtest directly from https://www.memtest86.com and create a boot stick with only memtest.

He did. @dlandon said to post here.

My personal preference is to set it up as another pool, and divide the workload however makes the most sense in your specific scenario. Whatever setup you finally choose, be sure to keep a backup routine going, just because you have a redundant device doesn't mean backups aren't needed. Appdata backup to an array disk is a good start.

Does that include only having one at a time plugged in? Having 2 physical ethernet connections requires very specific settings both in Unraid and on the managed switch end. Much easier to just use one port.

Formatting a disk erases it. No way around that. IF you have enough free space on other drives in the array, yes you can move data off of one of the disks, emptying it so formatting doesn't lose data, it's empty after all. This statement is still VERY true.

Depends how much you care if your parity and target data drive are always spun up instead of just the target drive.

It may be too old to transcode the files you are working with. Do you have any h.264 files to try?

Unclear on what you are asking about CPU, Unraid uses linux standard KVM virtual machine stuff, CPU passthrough exposes features of the host CPU and limits usage to the assigned cores, you can also limit the hosts ability to access cores to keep them exclusively for use by VM's. The VM's motherboard is always emulated, you can pass through select PCIe or USB devices, which excludes them from use by the host. Unraid is a single payment up front, no ongoing payments for the OS license. Licenses purchased 10 years ago are still valid for current releases.

No more important than any other file system on Unraid. Unraid runs the entire OS from RAM. ECC theoretically freezes the system if it can't correct an error, limiting damage to files in use at that point. Regular RAM can keep running silently corrupting data in the background. Doesn't much matter which filesystem. If you are ok running Unraid with standard RAM, don't stress over ZFS. 6.12.X added ZFS, either for single member parity array disks, or pools, which can have multiple members.

Each pool is a single entity with regards to file system, so hardlinks don't know or care about the individual disks in a pool. RAID0 with 2 members will give you double the space of the smallest member. Single profile will add the 2 members together. Either will cause a total loss of data on the pool if either member fails. New versions of Unraid allow ZFS as well as BTRFS for multi member pools. ZFS may be more reliable than BTRFS, I haven't had very good luck with BTRFS. Any file system change to the pool requires backing up any content as the format will erase all data. Changes in BTRFS profiles may be able to be done without reformatting, but backups are still recommended.

Not saying it's not dead, it's a real possibility, but before you make the call be sure it's not a port or configuration thing. There are multiple USB stick testing programs designed to weed out poor quality and fake capacity drives, it could be useful to fire up a couple test programs and see what they say. If the drives fail on a different system, return them.

10,000 ft view of what you have presented. None of the IDE drives are worth fooling with, the amount of power to keep them spinning, plus the need for a handful of obsolete controllers... The spinning rust SATA stuff is similar, although you could easily procure a controller with enough ports, it won't come cheap, and once again all those hungry spindle motors... The SSD crop is a little more usable, albeit still a little port hoggy for the amount of total storage. There has been very little usable speed increase perceptible with the last 5 years or so of CPU changes. Most of the gains are in power usage per unit of processing done. Yes, the newer stuff benchmarks much better, but hardly anyone gets their jollies watching benchmarks, and the real world gains are hard to see for most tasks. Transcoding media is a big exception. Intel 6th gen is plenty for a general use rig, if a little more power hungry than the new stuff per unit of work done. The way I see it, you need to make a decision, either put together a case / power supply / SATA controller ports (motherboards can have plenty, depending on your definition of plenty) to support a small menagerie of old drives, or pony up a few hundred bucks on a pair of decent sized modern drives for mass storage and use some of the SSD's as working fast storage that will fit in just about any case. A pair of refurb 16TB drives can be had for around $350 or less. Your total crop of drives comes to what looks like about 4TB, I didn't actually add them up. Theoretically you should be able to change your handle to something more to your liking in your profile preferences. I haven't tested it, but the powers that be said it should be possible.

Diagnostics should show what's going on.