First unRAID build. UK.

[vekselstrom]

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Edited November 16, 2018 by vekselstrom

[garycase]

There are a lot of alternatives, but your plan is fine.

 

A couple of comments:

 

(1)  I'd get a 4GB parity drive so you don't need to change it if/when you decide to add some larger drives.  The 4GB WD Reds or a 4TB Seagate NAS would both be good choices.    The Seagate is slightly faster -- they're both 1TB/platter drives, but the Seagate rotates at a higher rpm (5900 vs 5400)

 

(2)  I presume you're aware that you can't just move your drives to UnRAID without losing all of their current content.    So you'll have to load the UnRAID array from your backups after you've created it.    If you don't have a complete set of backups, you need to create one before you destroy your RAID-5 setup to repurpose the drives.

 

[garycase]

In the event you don't have current backups (surprising to me how many folks don't), you could do the following to keep the cost reasonable ...

 

(1)  Buy 3 4TB drives, and copy all of your data to these [since you only have 12TB of space [5 3TB drives in RAID-5] this will clearly hold all of your data.    Do this on a client PC (perhaps a Windows box).

 

(2)  Now configure your UnRAID server using your old drives (you could do this without parity if you want -- everything will be faster, but you'll be running "at risk").      Copy all of your data from the 4TB drives to the UnRAID server.    I would do a full comparison after the copies to ensure everything is good.

 

(3)  Now add one of the 4TB drives to the UnRAID server as the parity drive (replacing the existing parity if you used one).    Once the parity sync to the 4TB drive finishes, run a parity check to confirm all is okay.

 

Done :-)    ... and you'll still have 2 4TB drives to use for backups (or to add to the array if you already have backup disks).

 

[vekselstrom]

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Edited November 16, 2018 by vekselstrom