Hi, I'm still quite new to NAS devices so I hope my post makes sense.

 

I had a 5-drive unRAID setup which was running completely fine. I then had to move overseas and sell my old system. I've since set up a new personal computer and want to do 2 things:

 

1. Verify that my drives aren't broken from me transporting them overseas

2. Downsize my 5-drive system to a 4-drive system (so I don't need to carry so many drives the next time I move overseas again)

 

However, my current setup is a small-form-factor PC with a motherboard with only 4 SATA ports. I have no way of connecting my 5th drive in the setup.

 

My setup had 1 single 4TB parity drive, the other 4 are 4TB data drives. I want to remove some of the 4TB drives and replace them with fewer 8TB drives. (I have not labelled any of the drives so I'm not sure which is the parity and which are data drives.)

 

Do I necessarily need unRAID to check if my drives have failed? I heard unRAID doesn't "stripe" my files across drives, does that mean I can just connect a data drive to my Windows PC and view its contents?

 

I also read that in order to remove a drive, you must first copy the data away from that drive. Does that mean I need to connect 2 data drives to my Windows PC, then move the contents of 1 data drive to the other data drive?

 

Thank you for reading, let me know if any clarification is needed.

Here would be my approach.  Buy enough 8TB drives to hold the current data.  Use those drives as parity and data drives in your new Unraid server.  When you have it setup and working the way you want, move on to the next step.

 

Next step.  Install the Unassigned Devices plugin.  Buy (or scrounge) a USB-to-SATA setup.  (I have actually stripped the electronics out of a schunked drive for the ones I have!)  Mount each drive using Unassigned Devices and USB-to-SATA adapter.  The ones that do not have a file system and won't mount are probably the parity drives.  For the ones with data on them, copy the data to the array. 

 

I would not worry that much about damage to the drives if you packed them well and the outside packing arrived without major damage.   Modern HDs are pretty tough if they are powered off.

 

EDIT:  Think carefully about that 8TB drive size.  With being limited to 4 drives, I would probably be looking at 16 TB.  That way, you would only need two drives to start and have lots of room for growth.

Edited November 15, 20232 yr by Frank1940

Oh, one more thing.  Before you start make a backup of your Unraid boot drive.  You might never need it but there could be situations where it could be a valuable resource!

Edited November 15, 20232 yr by Frank1940

Thanks for the detailed reply! That seems like a good solution, I'll try to get a few drives and finish my setup then try migrating the data. I'll report back in a few days/weeks.