Two into one will go !


hilly

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Hi - I have been running 2 UnRaid servers for a year or so now. Both are based on HP N40L's one has been modified to take 6 drives the other is pretty standard. One is used for media srotage and playback while the other is a backup destination for some home PC's, crashplan agent to back up to cloud and has a number of the normal plugins. While this is all fine and works well its not ideal to have 2 servers, they are a little noisey etc and so i am considering migrating to one server for all (and in the future could do virtualisation (when i work out what it is and how to do it) and have a clean UnRaid and a VM with the functions of the plugins.

 

So what and how?

 

As for "what" i like the Fractal R4 case (good prices on Amazon - i am in the UK) as it has enough drive slots for me, is big enough and feedabck seems good about heat and noise. The other parts i will read up about but if someone has some specific suggestions that would be good.

 

The second is the "how" my assumption having replaced drives, replaced parity etc is that i would take my current key from one of the servers and all of the drives, assign them correctly and do a new config, parity check etc to make sure they are happy in their new home. i would then plan to add in disks one by one from my second server and do new config, rebuild etc and repeat until all drives are in place. The other options would be to do the first stage as described and then do all the drives from the second server and repeat - or is that taking a chance i do not need to take? This would leave me a spare key i could keep as a backup (i backup my flash drive contents to a disk regularly in case it goes bang)

 

So what should i put inside my case as a reasonable setup which will cater for general use (I am not hitting it hard, just storage, serving movies, backups, bit of couch on occasions ...) and how do i make the two into one move as simple and reliably as possible.

 

I might then keep one of the N40L's and set it up at another house as a backup destination for key stuff and sell one to pay back some of the outlay on this project.

 

So, thoughts, input, guidance please before i start down this road?

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Well I can attest to the Fractal R4. I bought 1 and ended up liking it so much I bought another the same day to replace my Cooler Master HAF X. The only thing I would suggest is to replace the fans with these Noctua's as the case does run a little hot (it has to pull air in over that heavy duty filter). The other specs really depend on what you are doing. Are you transcoding video via PLEX? Because then you'll want a bit of a beefier CPU (rough estimate according to PLEX is a benchmark of 2000 per transcode running).

 

 

I went with the following:

 

(1) Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl w/ USB 3.0 ATX Mid Tower Silent PC Computer Case = $99.99 (AWESOME CASE!!)

 

(1) Intel Core i3-4150 Haswell 3.5GHz LGA 1150 54W Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4600 BX80646I34150 = $109.99 (Microcenter)

 

(1) ASUS H87I-PLUS LGA 1150 Intel H87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard With UEFI BIOS = $104.99 (great mobo as it has 6 SATA3 ports)

 

(1 set) Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory = $134.99

 

(1) SilverStone Strider Plus ST50F-P 500W ATX 12V v2.3/EPS 12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified 100 % Modular Active PFC Power Supply= $82.00

 

 

The mobo will allow room for updatability if I want more power in the future, the PSU is a single rail (as suggested in unraid best use). The rest is pretty standard. The mobo's onboard NIC does not work with the latest stable version of unraid (5.0.5) as I'm guessing that it is just too new. I had to use beta 5a (beta 6 is out now) and it works flawlessly.

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Hi - Thanks for the input on hardware, will take a good look when i have time later. I dont do any transcoding i just stream movies over my home network to one or two TV's in the house. The N40L does not have the greatest power in the world but with 4gig ram onboard its done everything i need so i guess a standard set of hardware will do for my needs. Thanks for the tip about the fans - if i understand right the R4 does not use PWM fans as the fan speed controler just changes the voltage applied and sorts the peed that way, or have you got the MB connected?

 

Anyone else got suggestions? Do i need a SAS card as i will have enough drives to fill the case and dont think the MB will have enough SATA ports

 

Any views on the best way to migrate 2 into 1 one the box is built?

 

Thanks again in advance

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If I was in your shoes I wouldn't buy a case like R4 just to aggregate the HDDs from your existing servers as the future expandability is a bit questionable. From your statement I understand you have already 10 HDDs. This case will not leave you a lot of free space for additional disks.

Fractal R4 is great for a desktop case (I use it for my PC) but I wouldn't buy it for unraid.

My suggestion would be to look around for a server class case so that to ensure you will have enough room for additional disks in the future.

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The R4 is indeed a VERY nice case ... and with only 17.5TB of data, it should be fine for your plan to combine your two servers.  You can mount up to 11 3.5" drives [8 in the built-in trays;  3 in a 3-in-2 module installed in the 5.25" bays]  plus 2 SSDs in the slick little "behind the motherboard" mounts.    That would let you have up to 40GB of data (using 4TB drives) plus a pair of SSDs for cache and/or VM application drives.

 

 

As for the process to combine your two servers ... there are two ways to do this easily:

 

(1)  If you don't want to buy any additional drives right now, I'd simply do this:

    (a)  Run a parity check on both of your servers and confirm everything is perfect (no drive or sync errors)

    (b)  Move the 4TB drive and ALL of the data drives from both servers to the new case.

    ©  Boot with the flash drive from the server that had the 4TB drive.  It should boot fine (it will only show the drives that were on that server).    Then just do a New Config and assign all of the data drives and the same parity drive -- and then just let it do the parity sync.

    (d)  After the parity sync completes, do a parity check to confirm all went well.

    (e)  Done  :)

 

(2)  If you don't mind buying a couple new 4TB drives, then I'd just move the drives from the larger server to the new case;  boot to confirm all is well; and then add 2 new 4TB drives to the system [Pre-clear them first].  You'll then have 8TB of added space on the system -- so you can simply copy all of the data from your smaller server across the network to the new server.    This approach has the advantage that you are never running "at risk"  (which you would be doing in #1 while running the parity sync.

 

Clearly #2 is the better choice -- not only do you never run at risk; but you'll reduce your drive count.

 

 

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Thanks very much fro the info so far, very helpful.

 

So the process i have 2 options (lets see how much money is left after the build to see if a couple of new 4TB could be purchased) and the case seems to be ok for my needs in terms of size, just need to be aware expansion will be in terms of drive size but not number. My data increase rate is not very high now so not a major issues.

 

Garycase - could you just confirm in your option 1 do all the shares get created auto when a top level folder is created or would i need to go and adjust them all to what i want after in terms of security, public etc?

 

anything i should know about a SAS card if that is want i need for the drives that wiull not go on the motherboard and will pretty much any setup do for what i want i.e. an i3 processor, 16gig ram and a decent power supply with a single 12v rail?

 

Cheers :-)

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If you move the larger server "intact" (as I suggested);  then add a couple 4TB drives so you can copy the data from the smaller server, I'd suggest creating the shares you want BEFORE you copy the data from the corresponding shares on the old (smaller) server.    Then just copy everything from one share at-a-time to the new server.

 

As for the configuration you build -- yes, an i3-based system would be fine; although if you plan to use virtualization you may want to go with a server-class board that supports ECC RAM and use a Xeon with vt-d support, which would give you more options (and the ECC memory will provide an additional layer of data integrity).

 

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Thanks for the input, great help. Not sure i will want to get into virtual stuff as i use this for stroage rather than doing things and always have my PC for working on, laptop, tablet .... (how many of these do we really need?) and budget is also a consideration. i will now put together a shopping list and see how it all looks before running it past the chief accountant !

 

Just on the hardware, and recomendation for SAS card or anything specific i should know so i can use all the drive slots (not going to be enough SATA ports on the MB)

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  • 1 month later...

Since you clearly don't mind running the latest Beta, I'd install v6 on the new server off-the-bat;  then copy all your data from the 2nd server; and then configure the new system using Docker packages ... leaving the old system as is until that's complete and working well.

 

This gives you not only a backup of your data (on the old system); but also a backup of you configuration.

 

I'm sure you know this, but be sure you give the new server a different name than the old ... i.e. if the old system is still called "Tower", you could call the new one "TowerNew".

 

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