I think I know how this works, but want to be confirm before I unplug my drives and put them in my case attached at different locations.

 

I have an unraid server with 7 drives in it.  Those 7 drives are in Icydock 4:3 SATA cases.

The 1st dock is attached with 4 SATA connections going from the Dock to the Motherboard, which is the StarMicro board Unraid recommended for servers at the time. This holds my parity drive and 3 other data drives.

The 2nd dock is attached with 4 sata connections to a AOC-SASLP-MV8 card. It has 3 data drives in it.

 

So within unraid my first 4 devices (parity, disk1, disk2, disk3,) looks like normal scsi devices on a scsi chain.

For instance: pci-0000:00:1f.2-scsi-3:0:0:0 host6 (sdh)

 

The devices attached to the AOC card, look like a different kind of device, because of the attachment point. pci-0000:01:00.0-sas-phy1:1-0x0100000000000000:1

 

My understanding, is that if I detach, the SATA cables on those first 4 devices and attach them to my AOC card's second port. All 4 of those devices would go missing.

 

However, they would be found if I go to my disk devices, and as long as I assigned the correct disks to the right "disk" location, the array would come back online.

 

In fact, I would presume, that is how you move devices from one machine to another, if a motherboard blew up, or some oher catastrophe. All Unraid cares about is that the disk that Unraid calls "disk2" is replaced in position "disk2" to start the array. It doesn't care where it is attached to in the box, whether it is on a SAS port, sata port, or even is a lun from a SAN, as long as the image is in the proper "disk" slot set up for the array.

 

Is this understanding correct?

 

Because I would like to move these drives off the motherboard SATA ports and onto the second port of my AOC card. Then remap them to their correct disk locations.

As long as you're running v5 of UnRAID, the drive assignments are maintained by serial number within UnRAID's configuration.    So you can freely more the drives to different ports and there's nothing to do -- when you boot UnRAID it will see all the drives just fine ... nothing will be "missing."    [That wasn't true with v4.7]

 

Excellent. This is actually 4.7, but will be 5 in a short time. I can move it to that level before swapping positions around.

Data drives are easy to transfer.

PARITY and Cache are two drives for which you need to be certain you've made correct assignments.

 

On my PC, I keep a screenshot of my unRAID web GUI  showing the serial numbers of the drives...that way, if something happens I know EXACTLY which drive is parity...The rest of the drives are DATA and can be installed in any order, but I wouldn't want to accidently assign parity as data---and thus mistakenly lose my parity protection.

 

Cache is similar, in that its not part of the data array, but not as critical.

 

Certainly always a good idea to have a recent screenshot showing the drive assignments.

 

But as I noted above, with v5 it's much less important, since UnRAID tracks those assignments for you.

 

In this case, as long as you do the v5 upgrade first, then you can freely move the drive connections as you see fit and UnRAID will still see the entire array just fine.