I have a small Unraid server. It has just 3 x 500GB drives, one is the parity and the others make up 1TB of storage. The PC is a repurposed desktop PC I got from the office where it work, its an old Dell workstation. The server was fine to begin with, but it now just dies all the time. It will boot and I can see the server from Windows but it will crash after about an hour at which point I cant navigate to it through Windows nor get to it through the web GUI. The only way to get it going again is to do a hard-shut-down (by holding down power button) then reboot, but I know the server doesnt like that, but dont know what else I can do.

If I boot the machine and go straight into the GUI I can click around for a few minutes but as soon as I try and look at dockers or do anything else it just locks up.

Considering the machine is clearly dying I have bought a new machine to replace it. The new machine has 6 NVME slots so I wont be able to transfer over the old 500GB HDDs. I have an external 1TB drive.

The problem I have is I want to get my stuff off the old machine onto the 1TB USB drive so I can then reload it onto the new machine once built. The server has a lot of family videos and movies that will be difficult to replace. The network is very slow, when I try and download over the network onto the drive using a PC it maxes out around 9MBs and dies after an hour. I would ideally like to transfer using the unraid server itself (rather than over the network) but I don't see any simple way to do that?

I will also need to set up the new server using the USB stick from the old one - I assume that will be an issue as none of the drives will be moving across?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

corbtower-diagnostics-20250819-1825.zip

If the old server is constantly crashing, it may be easier to remove the disks and connect them to the new server, and use the UD plugin to transfer the data, it can be one at a time.

11 hours ago, JonnyCorb said:

I will also need to set up the new server using the USB stick from the old one - I assume that will be an issue as none of the drives will be moving across?

You can just do a new config (Tools - New config) and assign the new devices.

Hey JorgeB - thanks for the advice. The problem is the old machine has SATA HDDs but the new server is NVME only so I have no way of connecting the old drives to the new machine.

29 minutes ago, JonnyCorb said:

Hey JorgeB - thanks for the advice. The problem is the old machine has SATA HDDs but the new server is NVME only so I have no way of connecting the old drives to the new machine.

It might be worth investing in a SATA dock that connects via USB to allow the old drives to be plugged (1 at a time) into the new one.

On a different note it is worth pointing out that Unraid (even with parity) is not a substitute to having backups of anything important to you. You should always have backups that are external to the server itself of such material.

11 hours ago, JonnyCorb said:

I would ideally like to transfer using the unraid server itself (rather than over the network) but I don't see any simple way to do that?

The Unassigned Devices plugin to handle mounting the external drive in conjunction with the Dynamix File Manager plugin to handle the copying (both built into Unraid 7) would achieve this.

Hey itimpi, thank you for your advice. I have a SATA dock - can I just plug the old drives into the new machine and pull the data off? So the process would be something like:

1. Set up new Unraid server (I have a 2TB NVME for parity and one for storage)

2. Connect the old drives one by one to the new machine and copy the data across(?)

I do have the other files stored somewhere else, it would just be much easier if I could get them off the drive!

I'm not familiar with the plugins you mentioned but will take a look - thank you.

The process is as easy as that.

On Unraid 7 you only need to install the Unassigned Devices plugin to handle mounting the drive in the dock. Dynamix File manager to handle the copying is now built in, although you are free to use other copying tools if you prefer.

Through trial and error it turns out the RAM was what was letting the system down - swapped it out and it started running fine. Once it was running I managed to get everything backed up to my 1TB USB drive using the Unassigned Devices and Dynamic as outlined by @itimpi. Once that was done, it was a simple case of building the new server then copying the files back using the same process.

Thank you all for your support.