Hello everyone!

 

After I finished my bachelor's degree, i finally had some money and got myself into unraid. Since my job was demanding a lot of time, I only slowly got into everything.

 

I settled for an amateur setup that working really well for me. I will show it below. Now I am studying my masters, again a bit short on money, but with more energy to fool around with my server. I set up my own Nextcloud following spaceinvaderone's guide and want to use it as a cloud-alternative for my family and friends so they don't have to rely on big companies that might not have their best interest in mind.

 

My current setup seems very prone to multiple problems that might harm the data or the disks, which would be devastating for me. 

 

I am using a HP T630 thin-client with an AMD GX-420GI and 8GB RAM. My storage currently are 2 external HDD USB drives with 4TB each, one as partiy, one as storage.

 

Basically, this whole thing stands next to my bed with the drives lying in my nightstand. Also I know I have to move into another house in around 8 months.

 

Now coming to my crossroad:

 

I could either get an enclosure or drive bay for my current and future drives, so they are protected again falling down etc, plug it into the USB-ports of my Thinclient, costing probably around 50€-150€.

OR

I could think about getting a proper setup, using something like In-Win IW-MS04-01 with an Asrock N100M and be settled for a long while, costing around 600-700€, depending on the HDDs.

 

I honestly have little knowledge about storage setups, I am a IT Security master's student, but this stuff simply was never part of my curriculum.

 

I have 2 questions and hope you can help me:

1.: If I go for route 1, how easy would it be to migrate everything to a route 2 setup in 1-2 years?

2.: Which route would you prefer and for what reasons?

 

Recommendations for possible route 1 or 2 components would be amazing and thanks in advance. Always happy to learn stuff.

USB not recommended for assigned disks for many reasons 

33 minutes ago, trurl said:

USB not recommended for assigned disks for many reasons 

Yes, i am aware of that. That is why I want to upgrade it to a proper system as soon as I can. But right now, i am stuck with my solution and was hoping for some guidance given my overall situation. That is why i explained it so extensively 

spaceinvader one has a video earlier this year titlted eco power build.   

 

It is SMALL, power efficient,  nearly silent, and has pleanty of power on tap.  Plus it has 4 hot swap bays on the front for your disk drives.

 

It's an excellent micro build, you likely just need to install your 2 current disk drives and boot from your current unraid usb drive on the new platform. 

 

I would NOT continue to use usb for the mounted drives, especially if you value your data.

 

Edit:  I'd recommend updating to the latest bios before moving over your data drives or unraid boot drive.

Edited November 20, 20241 yr by landS

Using my current disks and the flash stick would lessen the pricetag a lot into the affordable range. I wasn't aware of this possibility. Thank you!

Assuming disks are 1 parity and 1 data, I'd personally only unshuck 1 to ensure that removing the disk doesn't cause damage.  I've done this in the past to no I'll effect.   

 

You could also consider buying a 4tb referb disk for ~$30 and use that in the migration using unassigned devices pluggin to copy data over.

 

I've migrated disks/unraid flash drive to new hardware a couple times now over the last 15 or so years.  Generally it's a troublefree process.