Hello,

 

I'm new to Unraid and plan to move my data from Mac Mini + Drobo (2nd gen, dual parity) with 5x4TB drives to a Dell T20 with unRAID using the same drives but with a single parity drive.

 

There are ~10TB of storage in use on the Drobo.

3TB are important files, 7TB are "disposable" media files.

I'm currently in the process of backing up all 3TB important files + 5TB media files to a 8TB Seagate SMR drive as a cold backup.

The important files are also backed up across two of my old 2TB drives to be extra safe.

 

My plan is to:

 

[*] shut down the Drobo, remove all drives from it, connect them to the T20 (obviously not mounting them) and check their health with SMART (the drives are 3 years old and Drobo doesn't expose SMART data to the user).

[*]If the SMART data is suspicious, scrap the plan and use it as an excuse to buy 3x 8TB drives.

[*] If they are O.K, I'll put 3 of them back into the Drobo (which should leave all data accessible but without protection) and pre-clear the other two drives in unraid.

[*]Add both precleared drives to the array as storage (without parity)

[*]Copy all important data + the remaining 2TB of not backed up media from the Drobo to unRAID.

[*]Move the remaining 3 drives from the Drobo to the unRAID array, preclearing them first. 1 as parity, 2 as storage.

[*]Transfer media from the 8TB Seagate to the array.

[*]Configure unraid as desired.

 

Does this seem sensible or is there a better way of doing it?

 

As for the unRAID array, is there any downside in formatting the storage drives in BTRFS instead of XFS? I feel like BTRFS is stable enough and it has a brighter future than XFS. I'd also like checksumming to protect against bitrot.

Thanks.

Do you have backups? You should have at least 2 independent copies of every important file, whether using drobo or unRAID. I mention this because the best plan might be to keep the drobo as backup and start with fresh drives on unRAID.

The personal documents and pictures are backed up offsite. Most of the important 3TB are backups and diskimages of old computers. I could delete a good amount of it and never worry about it, but keep them around "just in case". Same goes for all my media is from bluray discs catching dust in my cupboard.

 

I thought about using the Drobo as a backup for the unRAID server but the device is 7 years old and completely proprietary. If the Drobo becomes defective, there's no way to recover the data except for buying another used Drobo and even then it's not sure that i can be restored. It would probably make more sense to buy a USB 3.0 docking station and use the drives individually.

 

Starting with fresh drives has crossed my mind but 8TB disks are still quite expensive at the moment (3x WD80EFZX = 1020€).

 

Here's the Data from my five 4TB WD Reds. I bought them in two batches.

For some reason the drives from the first batch have Load Cycle counts over 600k, the newer ones (roughly half as old) only around 4k.

 

 

 

For some reason the drives from the first batch have Load Cycle counts over 600k, the newer ones (roughly half as old) only around 4k.

 

Some REDs shipped with a very low head parking setting, like the greens, problem was then compounded on some system that caused the heads to constantly park/unpark, those disks are beyond their designed load cycle count.

That's a pity. The drives are just out of warranty but I don't think WD would do anything about the high LC count.

 

I've ordered 2x8TB WD Reds. One as parity, one as storage. I'll keep the two "good" WD Reds in the new array and use the older ones as a monthly backup.

The LC isn't really a problem. I have an 8(!) year old WDC WD3200BEVT in my system with 1.380.007 LCs and still working fine 

Its an unassigned device for Transcoder-Temp-Data for Plex.