Beginner / Rookie - Old PC to UnRAID Home Server

[kazkazkkaasuur]

Hi,

(See below for my questions / help needed)

Currently I'm doing some research on how to prepare myself, my PC, my wallet and my current mental state on switching my current PC to a UnRAID home server.
Currently, for a long time I've been using a Synology NAS, but now I want to get a little bit more power and the Synology NAS is not keeping up.
E.g; watching a movie on Plex is currently impossible due to the fact the NAS doesn't have enough juice to properly encode the movies / series for even my own use at home (let alone if a family member wants to watch as well).

The PC I have is an old gaming PC I've used for the last 10 years. I did some small updates here and there, but I'm quitting gaming and want to have a laptop for some small uses here and there. But not anything "power hungry".

The PC consist out of a Intel i5 6th gen (will try to find a i7 or a little bit more heavy CPU 2nd hand so I have more CPU cores for the option to run a few VM's).
It has 2 SSD drives and an HDD drive.
Has a GTX 980, which I would like to use for GPU acceleration when encoding movies for streaming, but maybe as well to convert video's using Tdarr.
It also has 16gb of RAM, but would - again as the CPU - try to find something 2nd hand to give it some extra power.

I'm fully aware that this is not a power efficient machine. For me this is less of an issue where we have solar panels and a lot of electricity we don't really use atm.

Now I have the following things I'm curious about:

1. I have a lot of data on my Synology NAS I don't want to lose (movies, pictures, etc). How easy / hard is it to transfer the drives over from 1 machine to another? Will it be picked up according by UnRAID?
2. Is there anything I should reconsider if I want to keep using UnRAID or is this with my basic understanding not a great move forward?
3. Are there other things I definitly should consider before upgrading my PC to UnRAID Home Server and maybe something I should invest in before I make the jump towards it?

Thanks in advance!

[Frank1940]

Since you already have hardware that will work just fine with Unraid, why don't you just setup a test server using the Trial License.  You can find instructions here:

 

       https://unraid.net/getting-started

 

Once you have the server running, Start to set it up to do what you want to do.  (You may find that you don't even need that i7...) 

 

If you have questions as you go forward, come back and ask.  I would recommend a new thread for each question.  Remember that there is a manual and the link for it can be found in the bottom-right corner of the GUI and in the header for the Forum under 'DOCS'. 

Edited July 30 by Frank1940

[Frank1940]

Let me suggest that you install the three Unassigned Devices plugins and the Dynamix File Manager Plugin.  These will be three plugins that you will need as you move from your  Synology NAS to Unraid.  With them you will be able to transfer your data from the Synology NAS. 

[kazkazkkaasuur]

@Frank1940 thanks for your reply.
Currently, I'm mostly wondering if it would be possible to take the physical HDD's from the Synology NAS and transfer them into my PC / UnRAID machine.

1. Would this work without data loss?
2. Is there a manual for it that could guide me through the step-by-step proces?
3. Is there another, more safer method of doing this?

I currently have on the PC 2 TB of HDD storage.
While on the NAS I have 48 TB of storage (which currently ~8TB is utilized from), from which ~3TB is crucial and cannot be "replaced". Like family pictures e.g.

Thanks!

[KillerK]

So I not long ago completed a Synology migration to unraid.

 

Taking the drives out of Synology and popping them into an unraid server **might** work but this depends on whether you have a more vanilla raid configuration on the drives or not.  In my case I'd had my Synology for years and had upgraded disks over time and ended up utilising Synology's Hybrid Raid tech (SHR I think its called) which is not going to work in unraid.  The other factor here is that even if you did do this and it worked you would likely be limiting yourself to an old filesystem and substandard disk layout, unraid is way more capable with newer technologies such as ZFS which I'd recommend you consider.  If you have the ability to backup your data to free up any disks you want to reuse from Synology then I would advocate this approach and let unraid set those up disks up like new and later you can transfer the data back onto your new system.  I'm certain that Synology's SHR RAID layout system was a large part of my IO bottleneck.  Lastly I transfered about 20TB of data using rsync over a wired lan between my Synology and new unraid server, it took a few days as I monitored the transfers and put them into batches for managability but its robust and removes the risk of data corruption on transfer.  I don't believe you will find an automated process with unraid in terms of discovering your Synology and transfer the data, you will need to learn some process here.

 

Depending on how you want to use your system you may/may not benefit from upgrading the CPU and RAM.  You mentioned wanting to run VMs which I agree requires CPU cores and RAM but if you could instead use containers as an alternative then you will realise a lot of efficiencies in terms of hardware resource usage, speed and performance.

 

I'm currently running 26 containers all a mix of different apps e.g. I use Jellyfin instead of Plex but also websites, home assistant, tdarr and many more.  My total memory utilisation is 14GB and the majority of that will be ZFS for cache.  Granted how you use your apps will drive resource utilisation differently but if you are just all about the arr's and grabbing then storing media you do not need lots of RAM.

 

If you do still look at upgrading your CPU, consider whether moving to an iGPU would be better than trying to preserve your GTX 980.

 

@Frank1940 recommended you setup a trial licenses to get to know unraid better and I think this is a really good point.  Unraid is nothing like Synology and you should get to grips with the unraid concepts such as Array Devices vs. Pool Devices and be clear about what/how you want to setup unraid i.e. using ZFS or XFS.  

Edited July 31 by KillerK

[Frank1940]

2 hours ago, kazkazkkaasuur said:

from which ~3TB is crucial and cannot be "replaced". Like family pictures e.g.

 

Be careful.  Unraid is NOT a backup if it is the only copy of this type of data.  Parity makes recovery from a disk failure much easier but that is not the only way to lose data on a server.  Think about theft of the server, Malware, fire, flood, lightning as possibilities.  Please consider a offsite backup of this type of data.  Consider Unraid to be one leg of your backup scheme.   (I personally use a rotation of several external USB hard drives stored in a safety deposit box for my irreplaceable data.)

[kazkazkkaasuur]

@Frank1940
Thanks, I'll keep this in mind. But my first issue I'll need to tackle what would be the best solution for the migration first.
What do you think is smart to do so?

Having the files on the Synology NAS, then migrate them to another data carrier (USB HDD's)
Then move the drives into the UnRAID system, and then transfer back?

[Frank1940]

52 minutes ago, kazkazkkaasuur said:

'll need to tackle what would be the best solution for the migration first.
What do you think is smart to do so?

Is this your current situation?

 

5 hours ago, kazkazkkaasuur said:

While on the NAS I have 48 TB of storage (which currently ~8TB is utilized from), from which ~3TB is crucial and cannot be "replaced". Like family pictures e.g.

You have only ~8TB of data to move from the Synology to your new Unraid server?

 

What I would do is to obtain two new drives larger than 8TB.  (I would look for the 'sweet spot' as far as cost/TB while balancing the actual cost against my finances...)  Assign one as Parity and the other as the data drive.  Then copy from the Synology to Unraid.  Then when you are satisfied that everything is working, you could shut down the Synology server and reclaim the drives.  You could install them now or wait until you need more storage.  (Hard drives are a failure point.  The more drives you are using the more likely you are to have a disk failure.  Remember that you can have data disks of different sizes in the array as long the disk are not larger than the parity disk.)

[kazkazkkaasuur]

17 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Is this your current situation?

Yeah, currently I'm more investigating and prepping everything. At this given moment not directly making the move. I need the desktop right now as a daily driver. But would be able soon to switch it out for a laptop.

I'll then take a look for 2 cost efficient HDD's, have these installed in the UnRAID machine and then start the migration.
Once the migration has been succesful, I'll shut off the Synology Drive and move the other disks into the UnRAID machine.

Thanks for your advice!

[kazkazkkaasuur]

Hi,

Just coming back to the topic after I had a long brainfart.
This project is still in it's research phase, as I'll need some more money to have a different PC that I can physically sit behind and do stuff on.

Currently I would like to do  a few things for the future where I want to keep using my Synology NAS in combination with an UnRAID machine.

The current use cases are this:
Having the Synology NAS with 48TB of storage as a long term storage and backup system. I have 4 drives in it, this would mean that 2 drives could fail simultanously and everything would be (yes, in theory) still be OK. This is something I can live with on that end.

The UnRAID machine would be more like a working horse, I would run services on it like:
- Arr's for media and streaming
- Docker
- Various Non-SaaS alternatives for my personal free-time hobby / business thingy
- Homarr
- Mealie
- TDarr
- Photoprism
- Cloudflare (Tunnels)
- Maybe 1-2 VM's so I can try out some Linux stuff from time to time.

Now.. the big question:
Is it possible to combine this setup.
So you have a Synology NAS for long time storage
You have an UnRAID machine for the powerwork.

I do think this will bring a lot of extra complications and would be more hassle to setup. But it's something that would fit my short-term budget really well at this moment.
I would like to have 1 propper machine in the future. But at this moment I can't bring up that financial sacrifice.
And as of now, I kinda had to turn off all the Docker containers on my Synology NAS, as the performance is so underwhelming, that watching a movie through Plex is just not really doable at all right now.

Thanks in advance!
 

[JonathanM]

6 hours ago, kazkazkkaasuur said:

So you have a Synology NAS for long time storage
You have an UnRAID machine for the powerwork.

Yes, you can mount external shares using the Unassigned Devices plugin.

 

As you suspect, it will complicate matters, but it's doable. Biggest issue I see on the forums when someone is using remote storage is disconnects, it's imperative that the remote storage is always available whenever Unraid is started. You must have a rock solid network.