Hello,

 

I am about to build an unRaid system and have some questions regarding adding drives to an existing array.

 

Because of budget, up until now I have just bought HD's one or two at a time.  By now I have around 12 drives, ranging from 2-3TB each.  The problem is, most of these are mostly full and formatted to NTFS.

 

However I believe I can free up 3 drives to start an unRaid server with.  I would like to create this 3 disk array, and then one by one copy the data from my other NTFS formatted disks to the array, and then add each disk to the array as I go, expanding the array and eliminating all of my single drives.

 

I assume this is possible, but I do not know if I would run into any problems with adding 7-8 drives to an array one at a time like this.  I also assume this would take a long time, but I don't know exactly how long it takes to add a drive to an existing array.  I'm not sure which distro unRaid uses but I assume it could mount an NTFS volume?

 

When the build is complete I will have about 12 drives, running on two SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8's like is recommended in the wiki.

 

I also had one more question - is it better to run these controllers in PCIe x4 slots only, instead of x16 slots?  I plan on using an Intel i3 processor and haven't found any boards that have 2 x4 slots.

 

Thanks for your help!

That's exactly how I'm getting drives into my new unRAID. I'm up to 1 parity & 3 data drives in unRAID and 5 drives left in my WinXP machine. The worst part has been trying to find places to stash all the files so I can move a drive out of the Win box into unRAID! I've got a couple of 1TB drives with <10MB free now!

 

Also, this is very slow. I'm running 100MBs network, not Gig, which isn't helping. Also, I created a parity drive, which I probably shouldn't have - writing with parity is quite slow, especially for multiple TB of data. It would probably have been much quicker to leave the parity out and build it once at the end.

 

I've got an external TB drive, and I should probably be using that to transfer data using the SNAP add on, instead of transferring across the network, but...