Switching to unraid

[Thejack59]

Hello,

 

I've got an old DS411J Synology NAS (4x3TB Wd Red Drive) and it's pretty slow and boring. So an planning to switch to Unraid.

I'm thinking to build something like this :

 

Xeon E5 2620V4

X99 motherboard

16Gb of RAM

Silverstone GD07 Case

 

For the hard drive I am planning to use the 3TB WD Red Drive, which i've got. And buy some new in order to have more space.

 

My question is pretty simple, how can I transfer my data from the synology to unraid ?

 

My option :

- Buy two 8 TB Red drive and make an array

- Transfer the 7TB of data from the DS411J to unraid

- Install the 4TB hard drives and add those to the 8TB array

 

But I don't know if the last line is possible ? Can we add hard drive to an array composed by only two drives ?

 

Thanks a lot 

By the way, sorry for my English I'm French

[ashman70]

I'm pretty sure you need at least three drives to have an array on unRAID, one parity and two data. I assume on your Synology you are using RAID 5 since you mention 7TB of data. You would need to have at least that amount of free space on your new unRAID server to be able to copy the data over. If you buy two 8TB and perhaps one 3TB, one of the 8TB would be for parity, and the other 8TB and 3TB would be for the array, giving you 11TB of space. You could then copy the data from the Synology over to your new unRAID server. Once your data is copied over, you could if you wanted, add the drives from your Synology to your new unRAID server.

[tdallen]

Having just two drives (one data, one parity) in the unRAID array is supported (though I haven't tried it).  It's a special case and actually performs better than arrays with 3 or more drives.  I actually think you can start the array with just a single data drive?

 

To the Original Poster - yes, one of the great benefits of unRAID is that you can add drives of different sizes, and you can add drives at any time later.  So you can start with 2 8TB drives and then add in 3's, 4's, 8's, whatever.  The only restriction is that your parity drive needs to be as large as, or larger than, your largest data drive.  So later on when you want to add a 10TB data drive you'll need to upgrade parity as well.  For instance, you can see that my array has 6TB parity, 1 6TB data, and 3x3TB data drives.

 

That's a pretty powerful processor you're thinking about, what do you plan to do with it?

[Thejack59]

Thanks for your answer.

 

For @ashman70, that is an idea. And yes you are right, I am using an raid5 array

So for the transfer state, I will have 8TB parity hard drive & 8TB hard drive + 3TB hard drive. For sur it will work, but one thing I am afraid of is if one hard drive failed on my synology during the transfer, I loose all my data

 

For @tdallen, that's more what I have thought. I was presuming that was the case but we never know

And yes it's a pretty powerfull processor.

I planning to run a plex server, have a openelec VM for kodi or something like this, one or two Windows VM, a bluray ripping machine and play with all awesome dockers & plugins. Maybe this Xeon is overkill, but I prefer to be future-proof

 

Many thanks

[ashman70]

If one hard drive on your synology fails during the transfer, you don't lose your data, you only lose your redundancy, so nothing will change, the transfer rate may slow, but you won't lose any data. If you lose a second drive then you lose your data. Maybe you should buy an external hard drive, a 4 or 5TB and plug it into the synology first, back up a portion of your data to that, then plug it into your unRAID server and copy it to the array that way? It will be slower and take longer, but it gives you a second copy of some of your data.

[tdallen]

For @tdallen, that's more what I have thought. I was presuming that was the case but we never know

And yes it's a pretty powerfull processor.

I planning to run a plex server, have a openelec VM for kodi or something like this, one or two Windows VM, a bluray ripping machine and play with all awesome dockers & plugins. Maybe this Xeon is overkill, but I prefer to be future-proof

Sounds like a fun build.  Two things, though.  The CPU sounds great but that's not a lot of memory for several VMs - you should size that out and consider more RAM.  Also, if you are going to be doing any hardware passthrough into the VMs (GPU, bluray, etc) make sure you are selecting a compatible motherboard and hardware.

[ashman70]

I agree with tdallen, perhaps consider more memory. If as you say, you want to be future proof, perhaps 32GB would be a safe amount.

[Thejack59]

oh ok, I see what you've mean @ashman70.

 

So i will need to buy two 8TB hard drive and one extra 3TB hard drive. And with that, no data loss even if a hard drive failed. It's a good option

I was thinking about unplug one of the four 3TB hard drive and plug it to the unraid array and do the transfer but in "degraded mode" on the synology

 

I think I will probably go with @tdallen sollution and if this is not working I will go with your solution

 

Yes 16GB is probably not enough, I plan to buy juste one stick at the start and add more in the future.

Yep I just thought about GPU and stuff passthough. But how can I check if the motherboard can do that ? I was planning to buy an asus X99 ws/ipmi motherboard