Advice on moving to completely different hardware (incl. disks)?

[R__]

Hi, I'm upgrading my NAS setup, including disks (and cache drive), and I was wondering if there's a recommended way of going about things? I found a bunch of information on how to move the disks to another hardware setup, which seems straightforward enough, but I also want to change disks completely. I'm going from 4x4TB to 4x12TB. I don't believe there's a way for multiple arrays (yet), otherwise I would've moved the 4x4TB as well as a separate array.

 

I have the array, a dozen Docker images, and a VM I want to move. I was thinking I'd setup the new machine with an Unraid trial license, copy everything over manually, and then migrate my license to the new flash drive, but I'm not sure that's the most efficient way of going about it?

 

Thanks in advance for any advice on how to optimize the process!

[JonathanM]

Why not put all the current drives in the new machine, then upgrade them one at a time? That way the old disks will still have all your data as a backup, and you can continue to use the machine while it's in process, albeit at the cost of slowing the rebuilds down.

[R__]

8 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

Why not put all the current drives in the new machine, then upgrade them one at a time? That way the old disks will still have all your data as a backup, and you can continue to use the machine while it's in process, albeit at the cost of slowing the rebuilds down.

Thanks for chiming in. The time that would take seems very significant, I'd rather just have both machines running at the same time and transfer the data over (also sounds like a good time for some data pruning). Also, wouldn't my parity disk have to be 12TB if I wanted to swap one by one?

 

Would my approach of setting the new one up with a trial, copying stuff over, and then transferring the license be problematic? My old disks would still have my data that way no?

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, R__ said:

Thanks for chiming in. The time that would take seems very significant, I'd rather just have both machines running at the same time and transfer the data over (also sounds like a good time for some data pruning). Also, wouldn't my parity disk have to be 12TB if I wanted to swap one by one?

 

Would my approach of setting the new one up with a trial, copying stuff over, and then transferring the license be problematic? My old disks would still have my data that way no?

If you want to start over with your apps, reorganize and copy only what's needed, then your approach would be better.

 

If you upgrade one at a time, then yes, the first drive to be upgraded would be the parity drive.

 

Moving VM's and containers is a little trickier, but I suppose it's a good exercise to figure out if your backup routine is robust enough.