Hi guys, I have outgrown my old dell T20 and am about to upgrade to a T620. The 620 will arrive with a single 6TB disk and 7 spare hot swap bays vs the 4 x 4TB in my T20.

 

My intention, if this is a viable option, is to slot the old disks in the new machine, and rebuild the array using the new disk as parity. I've done the drive fandango a few times with my T20 so I'm fairly familiar with the general process of adding disks to the array, but I'm not familiar with moving unraid to new hardware. I've got a compatible HBA to use in the 620 already so shouldn't be a concern on that side.

 

My current mental process is something like this:

 

1) Test new machine with either trial unraid or an entirely different OS to make sure its functional and the HBA card is ok.

2) Mark the hard disk identifier / positions just in case from the T20.

3) Power down the T20, move the hard disks into the 620.

4) Move the usb stick containing unraid to the new hardware, boot it, upgrade licence level appropriately.

 

This is the bit where I'm unsure of if I'm about to wreck myself. Is this already a bad idea? Should I expect unraid to effectively see my old array + a new disk? That is what I'm expecting based on my prior experience, but did not find too much direct information for this scenario on a google expedition.

 

I'm looking to avoid buying extra disks for the new build immediately so would prefer the cold move vs a hot copy over the network, but if that is the consensus advice I'm willing to adjust the plan if my way is terrible!

In principle if you plug in your existing USB drive plus the disks in the new server it should all ‘just work’.   At that point you can make changes (e.g. use the new drive for parity).

 

the one ‘gotcha’ to look out for is if you run VMs with hardware pass-through.    The device id’s will almost certainly change.

Perfect, that's the kind of reassurance I as looking for thank you, appreciate it!

 

I've got a few VM's with passthrough but not so many that a bit of manual config would be a burden. Possibly time to invest in a separate USB controller card while I'm doing a bit of re-engineering.

 

I was a little concerned there was some aspect of the configuration that was not held on the stick or some other gotcha, sounds like a win.