I going to leverage some spare hardware to build a unRaid Server.  I currently have Server 2012 Eessntials, and use DrivePool, but now that I have started to collect a decent amount of data, I want the safety of a Parity based solution.  My 2012 server will host any of the "plugin" stuff, so this server will purely be a base unRaid implementation.

 

My question is what is the best approach to migrate my data off of the existing drives onto the new ones.  The problem is I want to use the drives I have in Server 2012 in the unRaid solution.  I can purchase say 2 new 4 TB drives (one parity, one data) to perform the initial unRaid setup.  Then I plan to copy data off one drive at a time onto the unRaid drives.  As I "free" up a drive on the 2012 server, I would then add it to the unRaid array to gain additional capacity to free up other drives.

 

Does this sound like a reasonable approach?

 

Also my "leftover" HW isn't super powerful.  It is a AMD Sempron 3100, with 2GB of ram.  I think it should be sufficient for a basic unRaid server, that will really be just used to stream (not transcode) movies, TV, and music.  Does this seem sufficient?

Does this sound like a reasonable approach?

That's how I would do it too.  The only thing I might do is get enough drives so that I would have 2 drives free of data at a time so that one of the two would be precleared before adding it to the array while I was moving data off the other one.  This way your unRAID array isn't doing the clear and therefor down as far as accessing the files while it is clearing the drive.

 

Also my "leftover" HW isn't super powerful.  It is a AMD Sempron 3100, with 2GB of ram.  I think it should be sufficient for a basic unRaid server, that will really be just used to stream (not transcode) movies, TV, and music.  Does this seem sufficient?

I had a Celeron 430 (1.8 Ghz) in my first unRAID server used to stream movies.  It worked very well.  I've since moved to virtualized unRAID boxes but I could switch back to it if I needed to since it was still working the last time the MB was installed in my case.

Thanks, very prompt and helpful advice.

 

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now that I have started to collect a decent amount of data, I want the safety of a Parity based solution

You still need a backup of stuff you can't replace. If the data is valuable to you, you may want to purchase enough 4TB drives to hold all your data in unraid, and keep your existing drives intact as a backup.

That's the plan, but I only have a smaller amount of personal, mission critical data. The rest of my media (movies and such) I want some comfort of parity, but if I did loose some I wouldn't loose sleep over it.

 

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Definitely agree with jonathanm's post.  UnRAID is NOT a backup (no RAID is).

 

It's a nice fault-tolerant NAS, but if you'd be upset at losing your data, back it up !!

 

Using older (typically smaller-capacity) disks for your backups is a good idea.  In general they don't have to be "live" as long as you have a process to ensure the backups are always current.  I have two UnRAID arrays with a total capacity of 39TB, and both are always completely backed up.

 

The rest of my media (movies and such) I want some comfort of parity, but if I did loose some I wouldn't loose sleep over it.

 

I've seen a lot of folks on this forum who SAY this, but get VERY upset when they actually lose a couple thousand movies and realize just how much work it's going to be to recover everything (re-ripping, compressing, re-encoding, organizing, etc. is a LOT of work).    That's often when they decide to close the barn door    [i.e. get some backup disks]

 

Definitely agree with jonathanm's post.  UnRAID is NOT a backup (no RAID is).

 

It's a nice fault-tolerant NAS, but if you'd be upset at losing your data, back it up !!

 

Using older (typically smaller-capacity) disks for your backups is a good idea.  In general they don't have to be "live" as long as you have a process to ensure the backups are always current.  I have two UnRAID arrays with a total capacity of 39TB, and both are always completely backed up.

 

So are you saying you have 78TB (most likely more)?  I believe in backups, but was hoping the parity features would avoid having to mirror (have a copy) of all my data.  If this is recommended I could do that without the unRaid solution.

 

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Definitely agree with jonathanm's post.  UnRAID is NOT a backup (no RAID is).

 

It's a nice fault-tolerant NAS, but if you'd be upset at losing your data, back it up !!

 

Using older (typically smaller-capacity) disks for your backups is a good idea.  In general they don't have to be "live" as long as you have a process to ensure the backups are always current.  I have two UnRAID arrays with a total capacity of 39TB, and both are always completely backed up.

 

So are you saying you have 78TB (most likely more)?  I believe in backups, but was hoping the parity features would avoid having to mirror (have a copy) of all my data.  If this is recommended I could do that without the unRaid solution.

 

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If your data is critical to you or your business then YES you should do this.  If you just have media files that you can record again, download again, rip again then the parity protection in unRAID will protect you from hardware errors of a single drive nature.  But you could do that with Server 2012 Essentials if you setup Raid 5/6.  The advantage unRAID has over most other Raid solutions is that each drive has an independent file system.  So if you were to have a 2 drive failure in unRAID you will have lost only 2 drives of data.  The rest should be OK.  So not as much recording again in my case.

So are you saying you have 78TB (most likely more)?

 

No, the two servers together total 39TB  (24TB on one, 15 on the other).    But it's all backed up.

 

 

I believe in backups, but was hoping the parity features would avoid having to mirror (have a copy) of all my data.

 

UnRAID (or any other RAID) is NOT a backup => it's a fault-tolerant server - period.    Since it does not stripe data across the disks, it does have the advantage that with a 2-drive failure you would only lose the data on those two drives ... but you would still LOSE the data.  Thus the need for a backup.

 

As with ANY computer, you should always have a backup of data you don't want to lose.

 

 

I could do that without the unRaid solution.

 

Yes, a backup is independent of UnRAID.  One nice thing about a fault-tolerant system is that it's still available if a drive fails.    But that does NOT eliminate the need for backups.  It's certainly true that a LOT of folks who use UnRAID don't bother with backups (as I noted above, they often change their minds after the first time they lose a lot of data).

 

What do you use now to backup your Server 2012?

 

If you just have media files that you can record again, download again, rip again then the parity protection in unRAID will protect you from hardware errors of a single drive nature.

 

I know a lot of folks who don't bother to backup their collections due to this same mindset.  However ... when they lose a lot of data, and suddenly realize just how long it's going to take to actually DO all of that reconstruction they often wish they'd spent a few hundred $$ to maintain backups.    For example, I have over 4,000 movies -- ripping, compressing, transcoding, cataloging, etc. easily took me a minimum of 30 minutes of "my time" (more "computer time") per movie ... probably more => all over a period of nearly a decade.  I have NO interest in repeating that process !!    A couple grand for a complete set of backup disks is good insurance IMHO.  [Considering what I've spent for the servers, the DVDs, the HTPCs on every TV, etc. this is a trivial expense]

 

Tell my wife that  :-)

 

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I should have said "relatively" trivial.    When you consider the total cost of the media; your time to organize/rip/catalog/transcode/etc/; the cost of the server itself it's simply not much $$

 

For example, I add perhaps 150GB/month to my server -- or roughly 2TB/year.  So with modern 4TB drives, I need to buy one extra drive every 2 years to add to my set of backup drives.  Even if I doubled that acquisition rate, that would only be one drive/year for backups.

 

... and in fact what I've generally done is use my older (1-2TB drives) for backups, as I replace them with larger drives.

 

So perhaps $100/year for backups.    Compare that to what it would take to recover if you had major data loss and even your wife might agree it's trivial ... at least "relatively" 

 

If you just have media files that you can record again, download again, rip again then the parity protection in unRAID will protect you from hardware errors of a single drive nature.

 

I know a lot of folks who don't bother to backup their collections due to this same mindset.  However ... when they lose a lot of data, and suddenly realize just how long it's going to take to actually DO all of that reconstruction they often wish they'd spent a few hundred $$ to maintain backups.    For example, I have over 4,000 movies -- ripping, compressing, transcoding, cataloging, etc. easily took me a minimum of 30 minutes of "my time" (more "computer time") per movie ... probably more => all over a period of nearly a decade.  I have NO interest in repeating that process !!    A couple grand for a complete set of backup disks is good insurance IMHO.  [Considering what I've spent for the servers, the DVDs, the HTPCs on every TV, etc. this is a trivial expense]

In my case a few Thousand since I have > 90TB of data.  Just a week ago SageTV said it would be recording 1+TB of recordings in the next 360 hours.

In my case a few Thousand since I have > 90TB of data.  Just a week ago SageTV said it would be recording 1+TB of recordings in the next 360 hours.

 

1TB every 15 days is indeed a pretty high rate of increase !!    We record a LOT, but I don't come close to that on my HTPC (I don't use UnRAID for that ... it has it's own small RAID-1 array - only 6TB of storage).

 

At that recording rate, I suspect you record a lot of stuff you don't watch (as do we).    I don't actually consider them important ... so that's the one thing I don't back up -- except for things we want to keep (e.g. most movies) => which I copy to a share on my UnRAID server (which IS always backed up).

 

But even a few thousand is, IMHO, worth it if the data's important to you.    I've spent that for my backups over the years -- the disks used to be both smaller and more expensive, but I've ALWAYS had backups of my data.

 

In my case a few Thousand since I have > 90TB of data.  Just a week ago SageTV said it would be recording 1+TB of recordings in the next 360 hours.

 

1TB every 15 days is indeed a pretty high rate of increase !!    We record a LOT, but I don't come close to that on my HTPC (I don't use UnRAID for that ... it has it's own small RAID-1 array - only 6TB of storage).

 

At that recording rate, I suspect you record a lot of stuff you don't watch (as do we).    I don't actually consider them important ... so that's the one thing I don't back up -- except for things we want to keep (e.g. most movies) => which I copy to a share on my UnRAID server (which IS always backed up).

 

But even a few thousand is, IMHO, worth it if the data's important to you.    I've spent that for my backups over the years -- the disks used to be both smaller and more expensive, but I've ALWAYS had backups of my data.

The calculations SageTV produces are estimated since for OTA/ATSC you just dump the signal straight to disk and it doesn't average the others based on past recordings it is based on the driver bits/second settings.  So that 1+TB is probably more like 800GB maybe as little as 700GB but I doubt it.  I used to backup to old drives too.  But I didn't have a good cataloging system and the drives I had available were always much smaller than what I replaced them with.  Also do to fan failure a couple of years ago I had to replace 12 2TB WD Green drives that overheated (~60c on parity check) and had others that got smart errors I don't like.  Out of 26-28 2TB WD Greens I only have 4 that are still usable in an array.  Replacing those over the past two years has eaten up my budget for backups since I am still expanding my arrays as well.

Out of 26-28 2TB WD Greens I only have 4 that are still usable in an array.

 

Wow!  That's a lot of drives to lose.  Guess it's not good to "bake' drives 

 

Out of 26-28 2TB WD Greens I only have 4 that are still usable in an array.

 

Wow!  That's a lot of drives to lose.  Guess it's not good to "bake' drives 

Nope.  I'm just glad I didn't loose any data.  It was a tense few months but they limped along until I replaced them.  This was the first fan failure I've ever had.  Usually they just get slow or noisy and I replace them.  This one just seized up completely.  It had some dust on it but I've had others that were much worse when I cleaned them - work perfectly.  And just to clarify it was just 12 that burned up the other 10-12 just went bad - smart errors I didn't like and slow downs when in the array.  One bad drive with no MAJOR smart errors put parity check speeds at 35-60MB/s (inner/outer tracks).  When I took it out parity speeds jumped back to 50-100MB/s (inner/outer tracks).  Another continually reports pending sectors that go away when I remove and preclear it or at least rewrite every sector - so not trustworthy.  So some of those I might be able to use as backups just haven't gotten around to testing them to find usable and mostly trust worthy drives to use for backups.

unmenu has  a shutdown on over temp script.

unmenu has  a shutdown on over temp script.

Yep.  That is why it was the first thing I went looking for after this happened.

Just installed that on my system as well -- never had the problem ... and hopefully this will ensure I never do 

Just installed that on my system as well -- never had the problem ... and hopefully this will ensure I never do 

I'm also going to check the fans more regularly and if they do not spin freely they get replaced right away with spares I plan to have on hand at all times.