I am currently running two unraid servers with old AMD APUs on plus licenses that are maxed on drives. These setups are struggling daily, bordering on stable. I am considering merging the two servers to a PowerEdge 720 with upgraded license and some kind of external hard drive hotel. What is the correct way to do this?  

 

I've considered moving one server over to the new hardware as described in other threads and virtualizing the left-over unraid license within that to move the other array to, but I don't think this is ideal. Are there any advantages to taking the inception route?

 

When I originally moved to unraid I had a gaggle of external drives and time to help with the process. Hopefully the solution isn't to pull everything off then transfer to the new setup... again.  I guess I could test the limits of Amzs unlimited storage and GFiber, not a fan of this either.

 

I don't have any specs for the new hardware as I'm still looking for the best solution. If any of the old hardware specs are relevant I can provide those. 

 

Mostly looking for suggestions, thanks!

What version of unRAID are you running on the old servers?  How many hard drives are currently in each server?

 

One approach would be to upgrade one of the licensex and If need be, upgrade to the current version of unRAID.  Then select your new hardware.  Move the old hard drives from the old server that you upgraded the license for.   Get that server running.  Then move the data drives from the second server to the new server and do a "New Configuration' to add these hard drives to array.  (This assumes that all of the files and their paths are unique!)  Parity will then be rebuilt and you will now have single server with the contents of both of the old servers. 

 

The big problem with this approach is that you will probably have a lot of old small(ish) drives and you will have a large number of hard drives protected by a single parity drive.  This is not an optimal situation.  You could add a second parity parity and that would be one solution.

 

Or you could bite the bullet and order several large capacity hard drives and use these with the upgraded license on the new hardware.  There is a plugin called 'Unassigned Devices' which would allow you to mount the data drives from the old server on the new server and copy the files from each drive to the array.  This should be faster than doing it across the network.  You could recycle some of the old drives to be used in the new array as you get more data across.  (I would be looking at getting rid of the smaller drives and any that I was suspicious of from a reliability standpoint.)   This would also allow you to get of the Reiserfs file system as it is now basically unsupported. 

 

A bit more information on what your current hard drive configurations look like might provide some other thoughts.

8T WD Reds, harvested from external enclosures from Best Buy (Easystore) are about the best deal going. Check Good Deals sub-forum for info and shucking instructions. Prices have been bouncing around $170-$200. Excellent $/TB. If you can exchange 3 or 4 drives for one, it would make a ton of sense to do that. An array of 20 2T drives could be shrunk to an array of 6 8T. Of course I have no idea of your drive sizes.

Thanks for the suggestions! Both boxes are on 6.3.5. In the first box I have 6-4TB and a 2TB with single 4TB parity. In the second box I have 5-4TB and 2-3TB with single 4TB parity. I've been avoiding going to the 8's for awhile now, it might be time to start trusting them. 

 

If I understand the licensing correctly my cache pool counts against my drives. In the first box I have a 4 disk pool (raid 10), and in the second a 2 disk pool (Raid 0). 

3 hours ago, sdcp73 said:

In the first box I have a 4 disk pool (raid 10), and in the second a 2 disk pool (Raid 0). 

 

This could be a complication.  (I understand that it is easy to screw-up a RAID setup and difficult to recover from said screw-up.) You might have to setup your new server using a 30 day trail license and move the data over the network to the new server.  When you have the data off of one of the servers, you could then upgrade the trail license by using your purchased key file on the new server and requesting a new key file.  (An automated process by the way.)