If you don't see the option you want, post it in a comment and I'll add it.  I'm sure I didn't think of everything.  If you did migrate from one of the other NAS systems (WHS, Synology, etc.) please post a comment and tell us which system you came from and how the migration went.  If you use unRAID alongside another system, please let us know how that works, and what you do and don't like about each system.

 

Edit: You can now vote for more than one option!

 

Also feel free to tell the story of your data collection and how it ultimately lead you to unRAID.  I'll start:

 

It all started back in the dorms at Cal Poly, SLO in '03/'04.  My neighbor built his own desktop computer and introduced me to the idea that I could do the same.  I started my digital collection of primarily music by filling up the 40 GB internal drive in my Sony Vaio laptop.  I also had a 60 GB Creative Zen.  I wanted a Mac, so I bought a cheap used iBook with a 20 GB HDD.  I clearly needed more space, so I purchased my first true external storage device - a 250 GB external HDD with USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 ports.  A few months later I built my first desktop computer which booted off a 250 GB drive.  Over time I added more drives - another 250 GB, a 320 GB, and eventually a couple 500 GB drives.  Eventually I maxed out the computer's internal drive bays with 500 GB drives.  I believe my total storage was around 3 TB at that point.  1 TB drives were available, but I was afraid to expand past 500 GB drives because I didn't want to lose that much data if a single drive died.  However, I was becoming increasingly annoyed with constantly having to shuffle and reorganize data to make it fit on the drives I had.  That's when I started looking into concatenation and RAID systems....and that eventually lead to my discovery of unRAID.

 

My first unRAID system was built from the same parts as my first desktop computer (I bought new parts for the desktop...it made more sense to have a faster desktop and a slower server than the other way around).  At first I used all the 500 GB drives and a few of the smaller ones.  Then, empowered by unRAID's drive recovery abilities, I started venturing into larger drives...640 GB, 1 TB, and eventually 1.5 TB.  My server underwent several hardware overhauls.  My first motherboard I replaced after discovering HPA issues.  The second board I replaced because because I wanted it for another build.  I also switched cases once or twice, finally settling on an Antec p180. At about the time I was regularly buying 1.5 TB drives I decided to upgrade my server's capacity.  I went all-out on a new build - a Norco 4220 (the 4224 wasn't available at the time).  Within a few months of use I realized that it was complete and total overkill for me.  The most I ever used was 11 of the drive bays.  I then decided to downgrade again.  I sold off the 4220 and built my first truly nice server - one in which I actually gave some thought to aesthetics as well as functionality.  I decided that 9 drives was just right for my needs, so I built a 9 drive server almost identical to my 9 Drive Budget Box design.  The only significant difference is that I use an Antec 902 V2 case.  I originally built it using a C2SEE, but later downgraded to the Biostar A760G M2+ because I wanted to free up the C2SEE for a 20 drive build for someone else.  I expect this current iteration will last quite some time.  I will be moving into a smaller living space in the near future, so I might build myself a smaller server so as to take up less space if I get antsy again.

My progression:

 

1. Buffalo Gigabit LinkStation 300GB

2. Buffalo LinkStation Live 500GB

3. Buffalo LinkStation Pro 750GB (running this and the Live together)

3a. Customising Linkstations to support more than 2 USB external drives

3b. Working out how to run SABnzbd and nzbget on LinkStations and writing the first "howto"s

4. Gradually buying more and more USB hard drives (500GB - 1TB)

5. Attaching up to 14 USB hard drives to the PCH A-110

5a. Deciding that was ridiculous

6. Losing 750GB of Music when a drive died (no backup)

7. Pushing the button on unRAID

7a. Building a 9 drive unRAID server

7b. Upgrading to 16 drives

8. Building a second server (9 drives)

7c. Upgrading first server to 22 drives (see sig)

9. Retiring second server and replacing it with a smaller box (see sig)

 

And now, here we are today...UCD!

Well, I had a Drobo V2 (the 4-Bay Version), that quickly filled up, then, in a moment of desperately needing somewhat redundant storage but knowing nothing about any sort of RAID, I got a DroboPro. Then discovered the downsides of their proprietary nature - no syslogs for me to read and troubleshoot (encryption). So unRAID, here I come!

unRAID in conjunction with NAS:

Synology DS-210j

Synology DS-411j

 

Well - my path to unRAID started with collecting CDs back in the mid 90s.  I have over 2000 CDs stored away in a closet now.  I started with DVDs somewhere around 2001 and was an avid DirecTV user.  I was beta testing the HR-20/21/22 series receivers back in 2006-8, and remember everyone was adding these 1TB external hard drives to their receiver.  I remember thinking "why do I need that?" and "where do you purchase a 1TB drive?"  There is a 250GB? drive in the HR-21. 

 

Fast forward to early 2009, and I had a 8GB and 60GB Zune.  I was storing everything on my laptop and quickly running out of space.  During this time, I also found dvddecrypter to rip many of the music DVDs, and started storing my home videos to DVD.  I had plenty of coasters and was quickly becoming unorganized.  I had saved some of these to my laptop, but was out of space again.....Enter a 1TB Cavalry USB Drive.  Voila - I had massive storage and so much ripping to do. Of course I had no way of playing them on a large screen TV yet.

 

Fall 2009:

Now I had plenty of CDs ripped to the external USB drive, and some movies as well. I was still using the external drive as a storage device only to transfer music onto the 8/60 and now 80G Zunes. I had moved recently and was tired of paying the outrageous Directv bills.  This is when I first started to connect my laptop to the TV.  What a revelation!    I can watch everything I could possible want (or so I thought at the time).  Wondering "how can I play my movies to the TV?"

 

By the end of the year (Dec 2009) I was tired of connecting my VGA cable to the TV every time I wanted to watch a crappy resolution show.  Enter the WDTV Live - now I am ready to rip my DVD collection and buy a  blu-ray player.  BUT- I have no good software to decrypt my collection.  I spend some time researching my options and start my quest with AnyDVD.  Again - a revelation!

 

The 1TB drive is filled ~400GB at the beginning (early 2010) of my DVD ripping mission and quickly realize I need "more of these external hard drives things".  While researching my options I find smallnetbuilder.com and am introduced to a whole new world of gadgetry and technology.  I spend waaay too much time looking for just the right NAS and find the Synology DS-210j (March 2010).  Don't know if I could have chosen a better product at the time.  Very satisfied with my fancy new NAS, WDTV Live, WDLXtv custom firmware, and new Play-On media server I start ripping DVDs by the 10s on the week-end.  Back to ripping DVDs and wonder "how can I rip these 2 blu-ray discs I have?". 

 

So... I remember a "ripping to Zune" tutorial posted on the Handbrake forum and start there.  This is where I found the mkv format.  Well...what can I use to rip to mkv?  Enter MakeMKV.  Nirvana - Fast, easy, no more DVDs for me, blu-ray all the way....STOP.

 

I had added (2) 1.5TBs Samsung drive when I bought the Syno DS-210j.  Plenty of storage - Right?.not for unencrypted blu-ray!  Less than 3 months after purchasing the Syno, I am already "managing" my storage space, by swapping files between my PC, external hard drive and the 1.5TB Syno drive.  Eliminating my limited backups as well.

 

Now what?  (August 2010)

Various forum searches I kept seeing this repeated: unRAID

in particular this build:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=18972452#post18972452

 

A quick progression, a long time build, but now I feel fully comfortable in unRAID mode.  I found the Azza 910 and some excellent suggestions by Raj and off I go to unRAID bliss -   http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7620.msg73681#msg73681

 

Winter 2010 I upgraded from the WDTV Live to the Boxee Box to increase my media playing pleasure.

March 2011 - purchase DS-411j

 

I'm at 8 drives now in the unRAID system, and could possible add 2 more drives in my current configuration. 

 

But I think I'll leave it at 8 and build another unRAID! ;D

 

in 1997 I bought my first 17GB drive to start storing all of my music cd's to hard drive because i kept scratching them

 

2001 bought my first DVD burner and started burning everything to disk

 

2008 realized it was time to switch over to blue ray and it was very expensive to burn to disk so I started adding hard drives to my windows machine and copying them over to a WD TV box, the original one, to watch them on the TV in the living room

 

2009 Decided it was time to invest in a flat screen and upgrade my home theater so found the AVS forums and found unRaid.  I had 12 HD's in my windows machine at the time. 

 

Didn't hold back and went straight for a RPC-4020 from the get go and haven't looked back sense.  Recently upgraded the 4020 to a 4224 and am about to start working on another 24 drive machine in the next two months.  I do hope this one will take 3 years to fill up though

 

Josh

First off I used Redhat on an old p120 with as many drives I could fit in it. Needless to say it was old and it was slow, but honestly it did exactly what I needed to do. It served files on a couple of old 40gig drives. LOL

 

Later I upgraded to a p350 and ran Slackware uh 6 or 7 I don't recall honestly with a few larger drives and ended up using Optical CD's for things that would not fit.

 

Later I started using Portable USB drives and removable IDE drives with a USB->IDE cable I found on ebay.

 

Finally I started using a couple of DNS-323 NAS's and when they got full I started swapping out drives and making copies which was a real pain in the butt.

 

Needless to say I tried FreeNAS, but something about it just didn't stick. I didn't have a real problem with it, but for some odd reason I just didn't like it and wandered around for 8 or so months and saw a few mentions on XBMC.org. I finally said why not, what do I have to loose? Fought with the creating a Bootable USB stick for a few days and finally decided to get serious and well here I am.

My migration was from a WinOS (XP/2003/2008) based RAID-5 Array that housed 8 250GB PATA drives (including parity).

 

I currently have 40% used in my unRAID Array that houses 6 2TB SATA drives (including parity).

I wanna know who migrated from floppies 

 

Myself from CDs and DVDs

A long long time ago, in a land far far away....

 

I remember the day I got my first 10MB (yes megabyte) hard drive. For about the last ten years I have been running various servers here at home, 1U domain controllers to IBM DS4000 storage systems, a Dell Poweredge cube monster, Compaq 5000 and 6000's systems, a Dell CX SAN and even a Netapp Filer. More recently HP DL and ML systems and IBM xSeries. Problem being all these units use a ton of power, generate gobs of heat and lets face it, short of putting them in the shed, you're going to hear those fans running. Then with SCSI going the way of the dinasaur, I had to come up with a good solution for all this data I had accumulated and needed to share and store. Massing 300GB SCSI drives is just way to expensive and I just don't have the sheer space needed scale to mutiple TB's. About three years ago I started using WHS v1 as it seemed to be a good alternative, I could use a bunch of old disks lying around and for me, was free.

 

Check forward two and a half years and three WHS systems running to keep up with streaming demands in the house and I knew I needed something better. Vail was no option as they got rid of the only good thing about WHS, drive extender. I looked at Freenas, flexraid, unraid and a few other things floating around. Tried a few and in the end came to embrace the way of unRaid. Couldn't be happier and runs like a dream.

 

Shawn

 

2 computers with inter raid chips each 6 drives in raid 5 and various external hdd's

still have a raid 5 in my main computer since i have unraid upgrade issues in not finding the necessary hardware here in thailand for a decent price

thinking my next step forward will be a second unraid

might not be green but hell cheaper then getting the hardware i need here

I migrated from a Thecus NAS which got a tremendous 5 Mo/s write speed.

 

Before that, a huge collection of burned DVD ans Cds (scratches included).

From:

A basic proprietary NAS (LG, HP, Netgear, etc.) ReadyNas.

A well-featured proprietary NAS (Synology, Buffalo, Thecus, etc.) Thecus 5200BR.

Multiple external hard drives - NDAS drives and USB drives.

A desktop computer with multiple internal hard drives - Linux sw raid.

 

To:

I use unRAID alongside one of these other systems (please specify in a thread comment) Main file server now.

A desktop computer with multiple internal hard drives - Linux sw raid. (Main work station or secondary servers).

 

I moved many of the ancillary data storage drives from my other servers to the unRAID server.

Thus reducing spindles where I had raid 1 environments for data.

My main workstation is still SW raid 1, but all the extra drives are networked from unRAID via NFS or Samba.

For some of my servers, I switched the OS to SSD and access the data via NFS.

I wanna know who migrated from floppies 

 

Me too   I primarily put that as a joke, but I figure it isn't inconceivable.

 

By the way, I just edited the poll to allow people to vote for more than one option, as it seems that many people came from multiple of the listed systems.  This also means that you can vote for one thing more than once, so....use honor system people

Don't forget online backup solutions. Amazon, iDrive etc. Someone may have lost trust in "the cloud" after the recent problems with dataloss at the providers

Good point, I added cloud backup as an option.

I migrated from a Debian RAID-1 server, took me a couple of days of experimentation to figure out how to install Debian to a RAID-1 pair and then actually run tests to make sure I knew how to replace and rebuild a failed drive.  I ran that for a few years and when it was time to increase the storage space I found unRAID.  Much nicer, nearly zero install time and much easier procedure for replacing failed drives.

 

Stephen

I migrated from ubuntu server.

Well, I have migrated several times, from several platforms.

 

1) When I got a brand new shiny DP G5 Mac, I relegated my old 8500 (with OS X server shoe-horned on) to my house server. Stuck several drives inside. Worked well, but was very slow. Never crashed, but was, well, limited.

 

2) Next, A PC made from salvaged parts and several loose hard drives floating around, running an older version of Linux. Can't remember which flavor. The drives were set up in a soft-raid.  The RAID failed. So I moved to...

 

3) A PC that was a friends former gaming machine, running Ubuntu (7? 8? can't really remember). Software raid. The RAID failed. Soft raids always failed for me. *sigh*

 

The hardware was fine for the most part, although I did have a RAID card fry on me, taking the RAID with it. *sigh*.

 

4) Gave up on servers for the time being, and just purchased USB hard Drives. Hung them on local computers, off my router, anywhere I could. Worked but what a mess. (Now where was that file?....)

 

5) Local storage. The servers were so unreliable that users were storing files locally, not trusting the servers. At the same time, I was making DVD's of shows on TV that I recorded. Hundreds of them. I would strip-out the commercials and group them in 'sets'. It reached the point where I could not easily store then anymore. They were all over the house. I had shelves full of them. What a mess. Still recovering from that one. I have the lions share converted onto my unRAID server, nice and organized. It is still a work in progress.

 

Then I discovered the reliability and the expandability of unRAID.

 

I started with 4 data disks, that should last me a year at least, right? But the server has worked out so well that it has released a pent-up need for storage in my house. Users are willing to use this server, and feel safe. Data started migrating a prodigious rate. I am up to 7 data disks, and looking for an 8th. I am the worst culprit. Once I saw that unRAID was working out, I started moving all my DVD's onto the server. That sucked up a lot of room, but my house is a lot neater.

 

Bruce

My Progression :-

 

From 90's to about 2005 : Big Windows servers with pretty much any disks I could find lying around and a lot of CD-R

From about 2005 to 2008 : Lots of USB hard drives and lots of DVD-R

2008 - 2009 : FreeNAS RAID-5

2009 - ? : unRAID!

Where's the option for "I didn't waste any time with other less superior options and made a great educated decision on the first go" . But seriously, I didn't have a need for anything like this until I started getting into the HTPC world.

Where's the option for "I didn't waste any time with other less superior options and made a great educated decision on the first go" . But seriously, I didn't have a need for anything like this until I started getting into the HTPC world.

 

Added!

 

At first I put in your phrase exactly, but it was too long so I had to shorten it....and remove the sass. 

Where's the option for "I didn't waste any time with other less superior options and made a great educated decision on the first go" . But seriously, I didn't have a need for anything like this until I started getting into the HTPC world.

 

My thoughts exactly.

I wanna know who migrated from floppies 

 

Hey, I started off with cassette tape storage!  Actually, when I first learned to program, the code, with associated data, was held on hand-punched hollerith cards.  I've migrated through 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppies.  My first hard drive was a massive 5MB.

 

However, my recent, personal, requirements for filestorage came about with my acquisition of a couple of Slim Devices Squeezeboxes for playing music files.  Initially, everything was on a Qnap TS-101 with one 400GB disk (which currently serves as my unRAID cache drive).  That box soon ran out of steam and I moved to an ubuntu box.

 

Then, more recently, I acquired a Popcorn Hour C200, which I ordered with a 1TB drive installed.  That drive soon filled up and I concluded that moving the file storage out of the player seemed like a good idea, and would also facilitate the use of a second player.  So, my interest in unRAID began ... that 1TB drive was moved into the unRAID server and was supplemented by a further 1TB drive, plus the 400GB drive from the Qnap.

 

I then moved SqueezeBoxServer onto the unRAID box, which released the ubuntu machine for more general use.

 

Even more recently, I've moved all my email storage onto unRAID, managed by a mailserver running on unRAID.  I also plan to move all of my digital photos and home videos onto unRAID, in the fullness of time.

after accumulating a metric tonne of optical discs (cd-roms, then dvd-roms) and keeping too many files on my "main" drives, i built a windows machine with two pairs of 500GB drives, two mirrored pairs (sata soft-mirroring using the silicon image drivers), accessible via iscsi.  this to start to centralize (sp?) all those files i'd accumulated over the years.

 

and i thought that 1 GB of storage would be enough.

yeah, right.

 

i used mirroring in that initial ersatz of a nas because i was too aware of drive failures (working in production support makes you paranoid).   iscsi because i felt smb was not efficient enough, amongst other things.  but with gigabit ethernet, who cares if you're using smb?

 

after exploring the idea of linux-based software raid, a colleague at the office saw this unraid thread on redflagdeals... and it all went downhill from there.