Hi guys, appreciate any help or feedback.

I've been running unraid for about 9 years now, and several of those have been on my 2nd (current) server which is a SuperMicro X9DRi-LN4+. It's been pretty solid, but is getting very old and my use case has changed considerably in this time. I no longer need the CPU power that I had need for when I started. Also, I'm out of room in the current tower for more drives. I have a number of drives that have been traded out for the increase-the-storage-now shuffle over the past few years that I could put back into play for more storage on the array. As such, I've got a new build on the way.

I have a few questions about the process however. I plan to migrate essentially the drives only. The USB that my unraid is on is of the same age, seems like a good time to replace that. My new system will also be an ASRock W880D4U, and with it two new NVME drives to replace my current SSD drives for the cache pool. Additionally, I'm on version 6.12.6 so I'd like to upgrade at the same time.

Is there a way to transfer the USB to a drive or partition on the new server, or is it better to just get a new USB?
For migration of the cache, should I move everything from the cache to the array via the mover?

Also, for the upgrade, is it best to just have a fresh install of the latest unraid and then move the drives and restore things individually? There are several things I won't need to migrate like old plugins (nvidia plugin) etc. I've also made some changes over the years which are probably not relevant to the new system.

Backup up the flash drive > move via mover to array > migrate drives etc?

Also, I do have a great affinity for a process that allows me to roll back to the existing server should there be any problems.

What's your thoughts? What am I missing?

First important questions:

• Is your current cache pool a ZFS mirror (Probably not on Unraid 6.x. or RAID 1)? Because then, after the update to 7.3.3 or newer, you can simply replace one SSD, let Mirror/Raid1 rebuild, and then swap the second one.

• The most critical point is probably the update to 7.3.3 or newer. If your filesystems get upgraded in the process and somethings go wrong, the array may no longer start with a flash backup of 6.x. So my question is: why are you waiting with the update to 7.3.3? The hardware swap is probably the smaller problem and mit 7.3.3 easy going (new kernel - new hardware).

• And the third question is the most important of all: do you have a backup of everything important? Something can always go wrong, except when you have a backup.

Edited October 9Oct 9 by UnraidSecretaryOffice

Currently a pool - BTRFS (mirror)

I've not really upgraded for a few reasons, primarily because everything has just been working and I didn't need any new features and haven't paid attention as a result. Secondly, when I upgraded to 6.x there were a few bugs I ran into, so I was a bit gunshy

I will make a backup of anything truly important (VMs, personal files, etc) but most of the storage and function is just my Plex server now. If it was all lost that would suck, but not the end of the world.

• In fact, one of the things I kicked around if this would matter is making a second parity drive prior to moving. today I have a single parity drive, and 8 drives in the array. In the new server I plan to have 15+ drives, so as I understand it dual parity is pretty important at that level.

Yes, I understand that. Going from 6.x to 7.x is also a big jump. But I think you can’t get around it if you want to use the Core Ultra on your new Mainboard with Plex. So first the backup, then I’ll help you further here :-)

Regarding parity: yes, but parity is not a backup. What gets deleted is gone from the parity as well, and if your house burns down (hopefully never), parity doesn’t help either. You know that, but sometimes one forgets it again :-) (after update to 7.3.3, migrate to btrfs or zfs disk by disk, after that you have the ability for snapshots (also no backup but bit better then nothing))

Your new board takes the new Core Ultra, right? You shouldn’t do that without the latest kernel. Without a new kernel, Plex can’t do hardware transcoding on the Core Ultra, because your old kernel doesn’t know the new iGPU architecture, and the new Core Ultra CPU is poorly supported in general on your old kernel in Unraid 6.x.

Edited October 9Oct 9 by UnraidSecretaryOffice

Also asked about this in this thread:
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/199098-unraid-730-731-array-startperformance-related-issues/

But what's the support like in 7.x for 9400 & 9305 -16i cards for connecting all the drives?

Sorry, but unfortunately I have no experience with HBA cards. For hard drives I only use SATA, and my Silverstone SST-ECS06 PCI-E Card an my NVMe-SATA adapter with MB585 chipset runs stable under 7.33 and uses less power than an HBA card.

Edited October 10Oct 10 by UnraidSecretaryOffice

Personally, I would do the upgrade in two separate steps. Either upgrade the hardware and get it running on the latest release. Then upgrade the software.

OR upgrade the software and get everything working (If you have any problem). Then do the hardware upgrade.

The reason for this is to make one change at a time, so, if you have any problems with either upgrade, you are only looking at one change as the cause of the problem.

Edited October 9Oct 9 by Frank1940

How could you do the software update and the hardware change at the same time? That is physically not possible 😜

12 hours ago, UnraidSecretaryOffice said:

How could you do the software update and the hardware change at the same time? That is physically not possible 😜

There is a procedure for doing a manual upgrade (or downgrade):

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/updating-unraid/#manual-downgrade-or-upgrade

How about getting a new instance running on the new hardware, and then migrating the array?