I use to have unRaid and loved it, but due to some bad decisions last year (mostly involving needing to have a full Unix system for awhile) I moved away to FlexRaid.  I haven't been happy since.  There were annoyances in UnRaid but it trusted it much more.

 

I have 2 4TB drives (1 will be the P drive, 1 a regular drive.  I have 2 free 3TB drives, 2 free 2TB drives.  So that will be 10TB of space total.  I have 13 2TB drives that have data I need to move over ( 26TB ).  They are ext4 drives.  How do I migrate 26TB of drives with 10TB of free space, with as little down time as possible. 

 

I remember having to prepare the unRAID drives and that could take a very long time before.  I can't think how long it will take to prepare the 10TB of drives let alone the additional drives.

 

Also I recall unRAID allowing a FS other than Reiser but I can't seem to find any documentation on this in the wiki's.

 

Any help appreciated.  No I don't have a second box to really run the unRAID OS to prepare the drives   I'm seeing what I can scrounge up.

An unraid array with 2-4TB, 2-3TB, and 2-2TB drives will have 14TB of space. So you have a little more breathing room than you thought.

 

I've got to ask this, how much of that 26TB of data is irreplaceable, and how much is important to you? How much is currently backed up elsewhere? All the drive juggling that you are planning to do will be a magnet for murphy's law to bite you hard if you don't have backups.

 

I think your best bet is to scrounge a second box and take your time migrating and organizing.

I may have found an old box to use for now.  Very little of the data is irreplaceable... just pain in the ass-to-replace.

 

Any hints on what build I should look at for the drive types.  Should I keep it at rieser or go with Ext4?  It just seems wrong to keep it at a near dead file type.

Unraid will partition and format the drives for you when you include them in the array. Currently that will be a reiserfs format, but in the upcoming year there may be other options available, depending on which way Tom decides to go.

 

Any brand new drives should be fully tested before you populate unraid with them, Joe L.'s preclear script is a dandy way to do that. You don't HAVE to use it, but it's highly recommended.

 

After the array has parity calculated and is fault tolerant, any added drives must be cleared one way or the other. You can clear them using the unraid interface, which will keep your array offline while it completes, or you can use the preclear script to prepare the drive for a much more rapid addition, the array will only be offline for a few minutes while it is formatted. Either way clearing takes many hours.

 

If you are ok with not keeping backups while you transfer data, you could build the array with all your empty drives, copy a few drives to the protected array, preferably with a file copy utility that checksums and tests like teracopy. After you have a couple of your existing data drives successfully copied over, you could add those drives physically to the box, and start the preclear process on those while you are copying more drives. After the preclear is done, add those drives to the protected array, and move more of your old drives into place to preclear.

 

I hope you have a beefy system to support all those spindles.