Hey guys,

 

A few months ago I started looking into moving my current media server over to unraid. I currently stream blurays, DVDs, and music from a 20ish TB Windows Vista based server housed in a Norco 4220 case. I primarily serve to Dune media players, and my bluray files are full disc images (large .iso files). This machine had been playing multiple duties, hence the use of Vista. However, this hardware is now dedicated to serving media and I would like a more streamlined setup. This is also a good time to upgrade some of the hardware. I would appreciate it if you guys could look over my list of parts for known issues or concerns before I make a few purchases.

 

Case - Norco 4220 (have) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219033

MB - Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O (plan to purchase) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182253

CPU - Intel Core i3 3220 (plan to purchase) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116775

RAM - Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G (plan to purchase) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139262

PSU - SeaSonic X-750 (have) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151087

Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 (have two of them with associated cables) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009

HDDS - mix of Hitachi, WD, and Samsung 1-2 TB drives (have 12-14 in total)

SSD - Intel X-25m SSD currently houses the OS

 

I would like to run this server headless in my equipment rack.

 

The only other question before I get started is regarding transfer of files. What have people found to be the most efficient method for transferring many TB over from an older server to a new unraid build? I'm talking about the bulk movement of all of my current HDD contents to the expanding unraid build once I have everything up and running.

 

Thanks for any info!

Regarding your file transfer, are you going to expand your file system as part of the transition? 

 

My recommendation would be to buy 2-3 new 3tb drives, use one for parity and the other 1-2 for storage.  Copy over 3-6tb then pull the old hard drives from the old server, put them in Unraid, fill them up, repeat until all media is transferred.

 

 

I migrated from a Large number of swappabel hdds into unraid.

I took a 4 tb parity and some new disks, and started to move data onto the server. If a hdd was copied over, preclear it and add it to the server.

This took a while though..

I'm sorry, I wasn't very clear on my second question. I already have three empty 2TB drives ready ready to start the build. What I was asking about is the physical method with which I should move the files. For example, should I install the media HDDs into another workstation and transfer the files over the network, from an external USB drive dock, or via another method? Can a HDD be mounted directly into the unraid server (SATA port on the MB) for file transfer? Or is the way in which unraid incorporates these files slow enough that it doesn't matter? If that's the case, I suspect it would be easiest to mount the HDDs in my workstation and just transfer them over the gigabit network.

travis,

 

I'm still building my first unRAID server, so take my advice with a grain of salt.  You should be good just transferring over gigabit ethernet.  That has a max throughput north of 100 MB/s, and most transfer rates I recall people posting are at or below 80 MB/s.  If you don't have a cache drive (does the SSD serve as cache?) then your writes will be sufficiently slow that you'll likely never hit max network bandwidth.  Just my thoughts, and as my wife occasionally reminds me I have proven myself wrong in the past 

travis,

 

I'm still building my first unRAID server, so take my advice with a grain of salt.  You should be good just transferring over gigabit ethernet.  That has a max throughput north of 100 MB/s, and most transfer rates I recall people posting are at or below 80 MB/s.  If you don't have a cache drive (does the SSD serve as cache?) then your writes will be sufficiently slow that you'll likely never hit max network bandwidth.  Just my thoughts, and as my wife occasionally reminds me I have proven myself wrong in the past 

 

Well, I'm not yet sure how the hardware is going to go together. I've moved on to that stage of reading material now that I have purchased the necessary hardware (everything on my to-buy list above is now sitting on my desk). I will have little use for that SSD since I won't be housing an OS on it anymore. If I can use it as a cache drive to increase write speeds to the rest of the drive, that's what I'll do. We tend to add a lot of movies to our server because we have three kids under 5 and and their movies are cheap. Even then, it seems like my best bet is to get the unraid server up and running and transfer the media files via the network and build the storage as I clear HDDs.