I recently started a trial of unraid (13 days remaining) and am pretty sure I want to purchase, but wanted to clarify some things about switching the USB drive and licensing before I go ahead with things.
Everything is working fine, but the server I am using is having problems with the physical distance the USB drive is sticking out of the machine, so it is getting occasionally hit while doing other work nearby. Obviously, I want to eliminate any possible problems with the USB drive getting physically damaged, so I have purchased a small form factor USB drive that hardly sticks out at all.
My questions:
1. Should I be transferring my Trial license to my new USB drive? If so, what is the process for doing this? Would this transfer would be counted towards my 1 per year limit.
2. Is there a suggested best practice for migrating to a new USB drive?
3. Is there a best practice to backup an unraid configuration, for use in the event of a USB drive failure, or is there enough data being stored on the storage array that you don't need to do any sort of backup outside of the array disks contents?
4. As far as licensing, if my current server has 8 drive bays, I obviously need a Plus license for up to 12 storage devices. If I migrate to a 12 bay server, and add a cache drive, is it safe to assume that I would need to upgrade to a Pro license for unlimited drives, to handle the 13th drive?
5. Do external USB drives count as storage devices? I have some data that essentially is just in cold storage that I would want to occasionally mount to add or remove files from. Should I account for these drives in my licensing requirements, even if they would never be part of the storage array?
Thanks in advance.