January 1, 201412 yr Right finally got a new laptop for the wife so in the new year the old one is turning into a unraid server. The one question I have is I'm going to be running 3 drives at the start. I have a 3tb and 2tb drives. I am going to buy another 3tb drive. The issue I have is that I have about 2.3tb of data. What I'm not sure about is how I'm going to transfer the data over. Can I just slot in the 3tb and let unraid format it then do the same for the 2tb. Then transfer over the data. I know that there will not be a backup till I have the third data disk plugged into unraid. Am I right in my thinking.
January 1, 201412 yr Did I understand correctly, you're using you wife's old laptop as a unRAID server?
January 1, 201412 yr Does this laptop have a bunch of eSATA ports? Or are you using some sort of SATA adapter card? Unraid does not support USB for parity, data, or cache drives, it only uses one USB for the OS drive.
January 1, 201412 yr Author Dam was going to use just usd mounted drives. Well that's that plan out the window. Many thanks for the help
January 1, 201412 yr unRAID doesn't need "cutting-edge" hardware. There are some posts on this forum about the cheapest unRAID build...here's a place to start: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=28262.0 And...with VIRTUALIZATION all the rage today, some good "gently used" hardware might pop up on the For Sale forum or on eBay. Good luck and don't get discouraged!!
January 15, 201412 yr Author Right have bit the bullet and bought a HP Microserver so..... Back to my original question. I currently have two HD's 2tb & 3tb. All my media data is on the 3tb and has about 2.3tb of media. I am going to buy another 3tb drive. Can I just install the 2tb and 3tb (New) drives in UNraid keeping the 3tb that currently hold my data separate and transfer the data over. Then install this drive in unraid.
January 15, 201412 yr That sounds about right. It will take some time to run PreClear on the non-data dives (3X is the reccomendation). If you want a parity drive from the get-go then it will have to be the 3TB. That will give you "only" 2TB of protected storage. Since you have more than that on your media-data drive you're kind of stuck. However if you set up unRAID without a parity drive you will then have 5TB of UNPROTECTED storage. Once you get media-data transferred you can then PreClear that 3T drive and add it to the system as your parity drive. PreClearing that large a drive usually takes at least 24 hours per cycle. Once the parity drive is installed within unRAID it will need to "sync" with the data, building parity. Once that process completes, it's not a bad idea to do a "non-correcting" parity check just to be sure. But, moving your data over to unRAID without parity should speed things up as parity is not having to be written at the time of the transfer. But again, you will be without parity protection during the transfer as well as the time it takes (3 days) to run PreClear on the media-data drive so it can be added to unRAID. Once you get your hardware take a little time to play around with unRAID so that some of the concepts are more clear; especially the "split level" of equalizing data between drives. One other suggestion is to treat the media-drive as a spare; either as an off-line backup or a cold-spare, on the shelf, ready for the day you get your first RED BALL (drive offline) experience. Good Luck!!
January 16, 201412 yr Adding a parity drive first is much safer. Use teracopy to verify the transfers.
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