I am a newbie to Unraid. I tried looking this up on the Unraid forums and on Reddit but couldn't find a definitive answer. I am transferring all of my data to a new Unraid server which was in 4 drive external USB or SATA cases. I learned that it is unwise to do this since it will decrease the speed of transfers and parity checks. There are also problems with SMART information and the reliability of the connections. When I tried to connect some of the drives to motherboard SATA ports they were identified as different drives by Unraid. I read this is due to the ESATA or USB board in the enclosure telling Unraid they are different drives. Is getting this to work as simple as using new config? I will need to select the correct drive for parity and place the data drives in their correct disk slots. After that the parity will be rewritten. The data disks should retain their information and I will not lose any data. Is all of this correct? Help would be greatly appreciated.

2 minutes ago, structured-cooker1437 said:

Is getting this to work as simple as using new config?

Depends on the USB bridge(s) used, you can first try to see if the disks mount with UD, if you have valid parity and want to keep it valid use the read-only option, if they mount with UD they should also mount on the array, if they don't it won't damage the existing data, as long as you don't format them.

Thanks.  I’ll try that.

I was able to connect the external USB and E-SATA drives to the internal SATA connections by doing a new config and matching the drives up to their correct slots.  I did try one drive first and I mounted it through unassigned devices first to see if it would work.  The only warning about this success story is that my drives were in Mediasonic Proboxes so YMMV.