Moving disks to new build

[jcato]

Hello! I have a server with UnRaid 4.7 that I've been using for years. I've built a new server running ESXi and virtualized UnRaid 5.0 on it. It currently only has a parity drive and small data drive for testing. Once I'm ready to go to production, can I just move the 3 data drives from the 4.7 server to the 5.0 server and rebuild parity? I think I would remove the test data drive, use the new config utility to reset the config, move and assign the disks and then start the array and parity check. Any problems with this plan?

[garycase]

That should work perfectly.  Just move the drives; do a New Config; and let it do a new parity sync.

 

The only thing you need to be careful about is that you assign the correct drives 

[jcato]

Great! What do mean exactly by assigning the drives correctly? I'll have one (new) parity drive and the 3 old data drives. You just mean assigning the correct parity drive?

 

Also, in the old server I just used disk shares. I think I want to try to use user shares and security. Will I have any issues setting this up with data already on the disks?

[JonathanM]

Great! What do mean exactly by assigning the drives correctly? I'll have one (new) parity drive and the 3 old data drives. You just mean assigning the correct parity drive?

 

Also, in the old server I just used disk shares. I think I want to try to use user shares and security. Will I have any issues setting this up with data already on the disks?

Just assign all the data drives first, and check to see if they are all available, then assign the parity drive and let it generate parity.

 

Before you turn on user shares, you can prepare for it by going through each disk share and cleaning it up. Every root folder on every data disk will automatically turn into a user share, and files hanging out in the root won't be in any user share. So, just create identically named folders on all the disks that you want to host a user share, and move the data into those folders. Then when you turn on user shares, all the root folders that are identical will turn into one big user share with all the data across all the included disks.

[garycase]

Yes, as jonathan already confirmed, just be sure you assign the correct data disks.  The safest way to do it is assign all the data disks;  Start the array and confirm everything looks good;  then Stop the array; assign the parity drive; and then Start it back up and let it compute the parity sync.

 

After the parity sync is done, run an initial parity check to confirm all is okay -- and you're done :-)