Hello,

 

I have unRAID up and running, bought the 2 x server pro versions for $150, not bad and I can run all the drives I have in my house with that license.

 

So, my noobish questions, (and no, I didn't troll the boards to see the answers):

 

#1)  I understand the parity drive is the biggest drive, makes sense to me.  What happens if I add a drive latter on that is now the biggest drive?  I have all 500GB drives, but suppose I add a 1TB drive down the road?  How is that handled, and what do I have to do from an admin standpoint?

 

#2)  So, I understand that the hardware is not that important, and that you are not tied to your motherboard.  Very nice, part of the reason I went with unRAID.  But, suppose I decied to switch everything out down the line, do I need to install the drives in order in a new system?  How does the OS handle that?  Does unRAID support "drive roaming"?

 

My current setup:

939 AMD 4800+ dual core

2GB RAM (I will upgrade to 4GB at some point, max of my board)

DFI Lanparty extremem board, 8 onboard sata, 2 IDE, 4 RAM slots (4GB MAX), 1 CPU 939.  I have 4 IDE WD 500GB drives, and 5 WD SATA 500GB drives (all black editions).  I have one drive for parity, and the SATA drives are in a SuperMicro hotswap backplane, all in a well ventilated MSI mid tower case (fans on every drive).  I have a Tagan 700watt modular power, only running the molex connector rails, so I have no extra wires blocking air flow within the case.

 

Video is a PCI ATI Rage 8MB, I have a 1x PCIe eSATA card for expansion.  I also have 2 x 16x PCIe slot free, and 1 PCI 32bit slot open and another 1x PCIe free.  Another nice thing about this board is that it has 2 GBe LAN ports on it, so I can bond if I need to.

 

Thanks,

Dave

 

#1 - The parity drive always has to be the largest.  So, per your example, if you wanted to add a 1TB drive, it would have to become the parity drive.  You could then take the old 500GB parity drive and add it as a data drive.

 

#2 - Assuming you switched everything EXCEPT the drives and the flash drive, it's easy.  Once you boot up on the new hardware you just re-assign the drives to the correct logical positions via the GUI.  Others here can explain the procedure in more detail, or do a search.

OK,

 

For question #1, when I would boot into the GUI, I could only assign the new 1TB drive to parity, and then the old drive I could assign to the data pool?  Is this correct?  And if this is the way it is done, I see that it is not automatic, the admin must handle this.  Which is fine, I just wanted to be clear.

 

Thanks,

 

David

 

Correct, it is not automatic and must be handled by the admin.  Adding any drive to the array for that matter, even a data drive, is not automatic and must be handled by the admin. 

 

It would only let you assign the 1TB drive as parity as this is now the largest drive in the system, and you could then also assign the old drive to the data pool.  This of course would invalidate parity and require a parity rebuild, which would be automatic.

#2 - Assuming you switched everything EXCEPT the drives and the flash drive, it's easy.  Once you boot up on the new hardware you just re-assign the drives to the correct logical positions via the GUI.  Others here can explain the procedure in more detail, or do a search.

 

 

As long as you're using version 5 it will remember drive assignments for you.

#2 - Assuming you switched everything EXCEPT the drives and the flash drive, it's easy.  Once you boot up on the new hardware you just re-assign the drives to the correct logical positions via the GUI.  Others here can explain the procedure in more detail, or do a search.

 

 

As long as you're using version 5 it will remember drive assignments for you.

 

This, in version five and onwards it remembers which drive goes where and as-long as they're all there is should work fine.

 

However, as for question one, I'll note that you'll have to do it in two different parts (So, two different 'admin' actions). One part would be changing the parity, and, the next part would be adding the data drive(s); however, before doing either I'd seriously recommend doing a non-corrective parity check to make sure all drives are in order.

It is possible to do 1) in a single step as unRAID can recognise the special case of the parity drive being a new larger drive, and the old parity drive becoming a data drive.  Basically unRAID copies the parity data to the new parity drive, and then formats the old parity drive as a data drive.

 

Precautions to take to minimise any chances of data loss are:

• Do a non-correcting parity check before starting to make sure no drives are having issues before you start.  If anything shows up correct this first.
  
• Back up the contents of your Flash drive.  That way if anything goes wrong it is easy to revert to your initial configuration (albeit with parity now invalid).