August 25, 20223 yr I've finally got together all the hardware I need for my new build and from what I've read, Unraid seems to be the right OS for me. There are some other things I'd like to run on it but Plex/Jellyfin will be the main focus. It's taken a while to cobble it all together, and a lot of it was second hand to fit in my budget. Specs, if it matters: Quote New Supermicro 826 Chassis PWS-920P-SQ BPN-SAS2-826EL1 Dell H200 flashed to IT Mode* Gigabyte C246M-WU4 i3-9100 16GB (2x8) 2666MHz DDR4 Unbuffered ECC Kingston NV1 500GBNVMe SSD (for Cache) Old Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS HP ML350 G6 + proprietary mobo/psu Xeon E5645 Dell H200 Flashed to IT Mode* 8GB DDR3 WD Red 1TB 5400RPM for Boot Drive The only Hardware I'm reusing is the Dell H200 card and the data drives - 1x 6TB HGST Deskstar NAS and 1x Shucked 8TB My Book They're both around 70-80% full, formatted as ext4 and "joined" with mergerfs. They're a few years old now but the SMART Data is all good and I'd like to not only keep using them... But keep the data. I've also bought 2x 8TB WD Red Plus drives - one for Parity and the other as a new data drive. What's the best method/software to do this? Obviously at some point I need to wipe those drives to move from ext4 to xfs. I also understand Unraid can group files on a per season/series basis. Currently mergerfs isn't doing that for me, I'd like to get that working if possible but it's not a deal breaker. The new hardware isn't tied to any OS right now but it has no RAID (HBA) card right now. What I'm thinking right now is to first format the 2 new drives as xfs, add them to the old Ubuntu server, copy (mirror) and verify everything. Then move the 2 OG drives to Unraid, do a clear there, copy everything back to them, clear the 2 newer ones and finally add the 2 new drives - one as parity and one as data. It seems pretty convoluted but I don't know how else to make it work. Hopefully I'm missing a real dumb/easy (and quicker) solution. The new drives are bigger/faster than the old ones ((the shucked drive is 5400rpm vs the 7200 new ones) ) so I feel like using one for parity is the best option.
August 25, 20223 yr Community Expert Do you have the USB case from that drive you shucked (or its hardware) so that you can use those two drives with data on them as a USB attached device? Unraid has a plugin --- Unassigned Devices --- which will allow Unraid to copy data off a USB device. As I recall, hard disks that are formatted as XFS are not always recognized by Unraid. You are better off to setup your Unraid array with the two new disks that you have. Then use the Unassigned Devices plugin to copy the data from the 8TB drive. Then add that drive to the array. Then copy the data from the 6TB drive. I would not worry that much about the 5400rpm drive. In day to day use, the rotational speed is not that much of an issue. However, if it is an SMR drive (vs CMR drive) that can have a impact depending on the type of activity that is going on-- writes involving data updates are the big issue. If a SMR drive is in a write_once-read_many environment (i.e., media storage), there is basically no problem. Edited August 25, 20223 yr by Frank1940
August 25, 20223 yr Author I do still have the enclosure. I may be wrong here but I was just anticipating way worse transfer speeds if I put the drive back into it vs the HBA card or even the mobo SATA port. Would the Unassigned Devices plugin allow me to hook them up internally or does it have to be USB? I don't know how rational it is but part of me wants all of that "old data" on the "old drives". It would definitely be quicker and less convoluted to just have the old data on the newer drives...
August 25, 20223 yr Community Expert 2 hours ago, daithi said: Would the Unassigned Devices plugin allow me to hook them up internally ..... ? That should work also...
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