Hello.
 
I installed Unraid this weekend and everything worked great.
From my old NAS I had 2x12TB played disks.
Set up one, copied data from the second disk over using Unassigned Devices.
Then I set up the external disk as parity. This also seems to work without problems.
This still hangs externally on the USB3. Would be for me actually no problem.
 
My three questions that I ask myself now are:
 
a) Can I run the Parity disk permanently on the USB port without problems?
 
b) If I want to install the disk internally as a SATA disk, does Unraid recognize it again as the known Parity

    disk, or do I have to set up the Parity again?
 
c) What happens if I remove the external Parity? What if I plug it back in?
    Does it then continue to work normally and synchronize again?

We don't recommend USB for array/pool devices, for multiple reasons, including performance.

 

As to if you can move the disk inside and Unraid will accept it, it depends on the USB bridge used, worst case you can do a new config and check parity.

Okay. Thank you!

 

Performance is not the problem. A Parity for 6TB took 13h...

What are the other reasons?

What does "new config" mean? Will I loose my data? Its 6TB of important data. 

I have a couple of dockers running my homelab also. Will they be persistant?

Edited October 10, 20223 yr by Dominik.W

1 minute ago, Dominik.W said:

What are the other reasons?

Devices can sometimes easily drop offline and USB in general is bad at error handling, also some USB bridges are not transparent, i.e., if you move the disk to a SATA controller it might not be recognized by Unraid because it has a different identifier and/or it might not recognize the partition.

3 minutes ago, Dominik.W said:

What does "new config" mean? Will I loose my data?

No, data disks are not touched, parity might need to be resynced/corrected if the USB bridge is non transparent.

Okay. Thanks for the quick answer. Good explanation!