I have just finished my trial and was happy with the setup , shares etc. so I bought the starter license. I understand that it limits me to 6 devices.

My question is how does the unraid system count the devices?

I have 1 x parity disk, 3 x storage disks, 1 x cache drive and currently a boot USB. As far as I can see, that is 6 devices but after installing the key I am told that I have exceeded the allowed devices?

Now, I also have 6 other drives on the system but they are just unassigned as far as unraid is concerned. One of them will be the boot drive when I install it but that is just swapping 1 device for another.

These other drives have other OSs on them and are bootable.

Unfortunately, the error message does not say how many devices unraid thinks I have - that would be helpful. Is it seeing 7 or 12 devices?

One other point is that the number of slots allocated to the array is set at 5 and I cannot reduce it. It should be 4.

There is an entry for a 2nd parity drive but I don't have one so it is just shown as unassigned. Is that being counted?

The cache drive has its own slot and, although not named as such, the boot drive must have a slot.

There is nothing of any importance on the array as I have just been experimenting, so I could delete everything and start over but I don't want to do all that and find I have still exceeded the license.

Can someone please shed some light on this?

EDIT:

OK, I clicked on a registration link and that told me that I have 11 out of 6 devices, so that means that unraid is counting everything attached to the system even though unassigned.

That is no use to me at all so I either forget the $50 just spent or cough up another $60.......

Rock and a hard place......

Edited 22 hours ago22 hr by colins2

21 minutes ago, colins2 said:

so that means that unraid is counting everything attached to the system even though unassigned.

That is correct; every attached device counts for licensing, even if they are unassigned. If they are external devices, you could disconnect them and reconnect after starting the array; that's when the check is done.

Thanks for the confirmation.

Sadly, apart from the current boot USB drive, the rest are internal HDDs. When running unraid, I don't need them or even want to see them. They are there for the occasional times I may want to boot into another system. It's a very old bios on a very old HP workstation so I don't think there is any easy way to turn off the extra disks, short of unplugging them.

If you don't need them, I would recommend disconnecting them; you could also drop them offline with:

echo 1 > /sys/block/sdX/device/delete

But this would need to be done after every reboot.