Help building a Unraid server to move 7TB of data from a normal PC without RAID

[metalduck42]

Hi folks!!

 

It may be a newbie question, but I would like to get some help designing a small media server with Unraid. Currently, I use my home PC with 4 SATA drives without RAID as both my home pc, gaming machine and Plex server. With the growth of my library, I decided to build a dedicated media server that can be up 24/7, because my gaming PC chugs electricity like there's no tomorrow.

 

But I have no familiarity with RAID or Unraid. I plan to buy 3 new 4TB SATA drives for storage, add one of my own 4TB HDDs, leaving one of the new HDDs as a parity drive. I understand, from the docs, that a 4TB parity drive limits my upgrades to 4TB parity drives, right? Then I have a few questions:

 

• Do I need to wipe clean my 4TB HDD to include it on the array? Or can I set up an array with 2 clean HDDs + 1 parity drive and then include my filled-up HDD to the array without data loss?
  • Would it be better to just start the array with 2+1 drives, copy my data to the array, and then wiping the HDD to add it cleanly to the array?
• Is it possible to upgrade the parity drive in the future to a, let's say, 12TB drive and then add another 10TB disk to the array?

 

I consider myself pretty tech savvy, and I'm familiar with the linux command line. This, however, is waaay out of my league, I've never done anything similar.

[itimpi]

Any drive you add to Unraid needs to be formatted by Unraid (thus wiping its contents).    In your case you would need to initially use the 4th filled drive as an Unassigned Device so you can copy its contents onto the array.   When that completes you can add it to the array to get extra space.

 

You can always upgrade the size of the parity drive(s).  The only rule is that no data drives can be larger than the smallest parity drive you currently have.

[metalduck42]

I haven't realized that I could access data from an unassigned device! Do these work as normal storage in a computer? So under unraid, it's like the system has two different kinds of storage, the array and the common (unassigned) drives?

 

Thanks for the quick response

[trurl]

6 minutes ago, metalduck42 said:

two different kinds of storage

Three kinds

 

Parity array 

Pool(s) of (fast) disk(s)

Unassigned disks 

[metalduck42]

Got it. Thanks people! I can mark this topic as solved then

 

[itimpi]

26 minutes ago, metalduck42 said:

common (unassigned) drives?

There is also the fact that if you have the Unassigned Devices (UD) plugin installed then all common disk formats can be read - not just the ones supported for the main array or pools.