New User from QNAP to Unraid - Try to Transfer Data

[Ming233]

I am new Unraid user. After looking at some Youtube videos, I feel Unraid is the best option for me and decide to move from QNAP to Unraid

 

I used an old PC and old HDD (some may broken). I am trying to reuse them if possible. I managed to setup one 4TB HDD as parity and one 2TB HDD as disk1. Then I am trying to add two more 4TB HDD. The START button disable and message "You may not add new disk(s) and also remove existing disk(s)." 

 

Does this mean these two 4TB HDD are totally fail disks and I should just throw it away?

 

Solution(Edit): I erase the existing array and start from scratch. I put one 4TB HDD as parity and all other drives as disks. This time works perfectly for me. Now I have 9TB free space.

 

Diagnostics is attached.

 

I am planning to move the QNAP HDD & Data to Unraid. The QNAP machine is broken, but the disks are good. How to move the data from the QNAP disks to Unraid disks.

 

 

nas-diagnostics-20220509-1902.zip

Edited May 10, 2022 by Ming233

[trurl]

Do you plan to have fast pool (cache)? Dockers/VMs won't perform as well on the parity array, and will keep array disks spunup since they always have open files.

[Ming233]

Yes, I do. My idea plan is:

One 16 TB HDD drive use as Parity

One 16 TB HDD drive use as disk 1

Rest (3 * 2~4TB old) HDD drives use as other disks

Buy one (256~512GB) SSD drives use as cache.

 

The problem is the current two 16 TB HDD drives stored data using QNAP and my QNAP NAS is dead:(

 

So I need to transfer those data to somewhere, and free up these two 16 TB HDD drives to build my ideal Unraid.

 

I am new to Unread, so I am learning how to use it by watching YouTube.

 

Also, looking for some suggestion and recommendation from the community.

[wgstarks]

You can setup an array without parity using smaller disks and transfer the data from the 16TB disks straight to the array and then add each 16TB drive after the data is transferred. The initial size of the array will need to be large enough to hold all the data from one 16TB drive so it’s possible you may need to purchase more smaller drives.

 

Assuming the QNAP drives are ext4 you can use the Unassigned Devices plugin to mount the drives directly and transfer the data. Just need an external enclosure you can attach to the unRAID server.

[JonathanM]

I don't like the idea of trusting your data to old "may be broken" hard drives. Unraid requires the entire capacity of all drives in the parity array to be read without error to reconstruct a failed drive, so it's never a good idea to use questionable drives on purpose. That bit me and caused data loss over 10 years ago, and I've never forgotten how bad it felt to have an old empty drive fail during the rebuild of one of my "good" drives that unexpectedly died.

 

You really need to figure out a way to keep those qnap drives as backup, so that if something happens you can just redo the copy.

 

Unraid or any RAID is not a replacement for proper backups.

[trurl]

On 5/9/2022 at 10:36 PM, Ming233 said:

Buy one (256~512GB) SSD drives use as cache.

Let us know if you need help when you are ready to work through getting dockers/VMs moved to fast pool. Mover can take care of this, but nothing can move open files, so you have to disable Docker and VM Manager in Settings to get those cache-prefer shares appdata, domains, system moved to cache.