A few months ago I migrated my spinning rust array over to a old 2012 build that I had due to hard drive thermal issues occurring during parity checks. I've been going back and forth on trying to find a new case that can both support my newer hardware AND roughly 6-8 platter drives. It seems the only way to get both is to use vintage cases.

 

Anyways, I'm starting to miss the VM and docker functionality (well its not missing, its just silly slow running on a old machine) and that got me thinking can I keep the spinning rust as a "storage" machine and spin up a new Unraid instance that has NO traditional hard drive array, only SSD pool and pass-through nvme's?

 

Thoughts, comments?

Yes you can do this.

 

For best results (ie: Trim Support) you would create cache-pools with the SSD's and only have a single flash drive (any size) as being part of the main array (Currently, the main array does not support Trim, and a disk has to be assigned to it -> hence the flash drive assigned)

Helpful as always @Squid!

 

Just to be clear, it sounds like I must have at minimum a single drive allocated into the array? Since VM's / dockers etc.. require the array to be running, the minimum is that single (basically throw away) drive. Just checking since I have never attempted to run unraid with only a single data drive, no parity drive etc..

 

Yup.  Its a valid configuration.

 

You can assign all the SSDs to the array (and one as parity), but you lose trim support.

 

Assigning them to a pool (or several pools) you'd use them either as a single drive, or BTRFS / ZFS (via plugin) to maintain redundancy and keep trim support

 

2 hours ago, thedudezor said:

Just to be clear, it sounds like I must have at minimum a single drive allocated into the array?

True, but if you are not going to use it for storage could just be small thumb drive to satisfy the requirement of at least 1 drive in the array.