Hi, 

A couple of years ago, I wanted to start with Unraid. Due to moving houses, changing jobs etc, this has never materialised.

Upon reflection, I think the main reason why it did not materialise, is due to the fact that I have a couple of Synology's running, and had no need for other / more storage space.

 

So now, I'm back again and would like to get started but have some specific questions.

An eight bay Synology failed, and I would like to recover / copy / move data from these 8 drives. I would need approx. 54 TB to move all data. As you can imagine, it is not evident to have 8 SATA connections in a common PC. So I have this HP 800 G1 i7 system, to which I added a 6 port sata card. In conjunction with a separate external power supply, I can connect and power all 8 drives + some other drives.

 

Now to my issue:

I would like to use this HP 800 G1 i7 as my (main) Unraid machine. But the hardware is not available yet..

I also have a couple of Promise Pegasus R6's and an R4.

What I'm considering:

Phase 1

- plug the Promise Pegasus R4 into a Intel NUC 8BEB

- put 4x 18 TB drives into the Promise Pegasus, and configure them in passthrough (so all kinds of internal raid disabled)

- I would then like to run Unraid on this Intel NUC and configure the 4x 18 TB as storage

- then move over all rescued data from the HP 800 G1 i7 to the Intel NUC

 

Phase 2

- once the data rescued, disconnect all 8x 8 TB drives from the ex-Synology, move these back to the Synology and set up the Synology as a new virgin system

- move all rescued data from the Intel NUC 4x 18 TB data storage back to the now newly set up Synology

- then move the 4x 18 TB drives to their final destination: in the HP 800 G1 i7 and run Unraid on this system

 

Now my question:

Can I use Unraid in this scenario?

- Unraid would first run on the Intel NUC with 4x 8TB

- the disks and the Unraid stick would then be moved in a later stage to the HP 800 G1 i7

 

Thanks a lot for helping out! 

 

Yes, you can. Since the license of Unraid is tie to USB, you can plug the USB in the NUC, copy data then later move the USB to the HP and run from it. You need to remember the array assignment (just screenshot the array screen with disk serials) and set it as same as the NUC when you move to HP.

Thanks for the info!