Hey Everyone,

 

It's an exciting time - I'm about to make some fairly significant upgrades to my unRAID box. Before I begin, I'd like to run the scenario by you all to get some advice on the procedure.

 

Current Rig:

Onboard Intel NIC
6x 2Tb SATA drives connected to motherboard

Parity Style: 5x data and 1x parity

Array Notes: Array is encrypted 

2x 500Gb NVMe drives in use as a striped cache

Final Goal:

Onboard Intel NIC (management)

Daughterboard Dual Broadcomm NIC (some kind of teaming/bonding)

5x 2Tb SATA drives (existing drives minus one)

3x 12Tb SATA drives (brand new)

Parity Style: 6x data (5x2Tb, 1x12Tb) and 2x 12Tb parity.

8-port LSI RAID card (brand new)

Break the cache striping and continue with one NVMe as cache (single profile) and the other to be used for playing around with the iSCSI integration.

 

 

Here is the procedure I've concocted, but I'm very open to correction or advice:

 

Phase 1 - MOAR DATA

 

Pre-step: Run a full parity check.

 

1/ Install the LSI Card and connect the existing 6x2Tb array - confirm all is OK

 

The rest should just be a matter of stepping through the Replacing a Data Drive guide, correct?.

2/ Connect one 12Tb drive and pre-clear it.

3/ Remove the existing parity drive and replace with the pre-cleared 12Tb from Step 2.

4/ Allow the parity drive to be built up.

5/ Add the second 12Tb drive and pre-clear it

6/ Pick out a 2Tb data drive that has seen the most reads/writes and replace with the pre-cleared drive from Step 5.

7/ Allow the new data drive to be built up. (How do I know when that's complete?)

8/ Repeat steps 5-7 for the third new 12Tb drive.

 

Situation Report

• By this point I should have 8 drives connected to the LSI and one leftover 2Tb drive.
• I should now have moved from ~10Tb usable to ~22Tb usable

 

Phase 2 - BREAK THE CACHE

According to this thread, I need to:

1/ Stop the array

2/ Unassign pool disk to remove

3/ Spin up the array and wait for the device delete to complete

4/ Once the Stop button is available again, I'll know that the rebuild is done

 

Situation Report

• I should now still have a 500Gb cache, but made up of only one drive
• I should now have a spare 500Gb NVMe ready to be assigned? I guess I might need to pre-clear it or something first.

 

 

Phase 3 - UNRELATED / ADD DUAL NIC

While I've got the beast in pieces, I might as well install the dual Broadcomm NIC that's been sitting on the tower for a while. The plan here is to play with teaming/bonding configurations and reduce some network bottleneck. 

 

 

As I've mentioned - this is what I've come up with through reading the various wiki pages (and Reddit posts). I am very open to correction or trout-slapping as required.

 

Many thanks in advance! 

 

5 hours ago, siege801 said:

8-port LSI RAID card (brand new)

Unraid is not RAID and as such, RAID controllers are not recommended.