hardware upgrade questions

[orkid1989]

not sure which forum this should be under so i thought i would try here. i have built a server with a bunch of random parts to function as multiple gaming host servers

 

1st i plan to upgrade from my outdated xeon 1620 to a ryxen 1700x which requires new cpu, ram, and motherboard. i know it will work with unraid but fear loosing my vm and potential saved game data. any suggestions how to do this safely?

 

2nd i plan to add a 6tb drive to the array and replace a old 1tb drive which appears to have nothing on it. as well as adding either a 1tb ssd or 2 500gb ssd to the cache.

 

any suggestions how to safely do all this with minimal chance of loosing data?

[Frank1940]

 

21 minutes ago, orkid1989 said:

2nd i plan to add a 6tb drive to the array and replace a old 1tb drive which appears to have nothing on it. 

 

any suggestions how to safely do all this with minimal chance of loosing data?

What I would do is to simply replace that old 1TB HD with  the new 6TB drive and let it rebuild.  Then you will be sure to lose anything which might be on that drive. 

 

[orkid1989]

so just like the procedure in replacing a dead drive?

[orkid1989]

also for the cache drives would i be better off buying a 1tb ssd or 2 5gb ssd? current configuration is raid 0 with 500gb ssd and a 120gb ssd

 

[Frank1940]

1 minute ago, orkid1989 said:

so just like the procedure in replacing a dead drive?

Correct.

 

I would also do your upgrade one step at a time.  As an example, first replace that old 1TB HD.  Then when you are verified that everything is working properly, add the SSD cache drive and get it setup and working.  Finally do the hardware (MB, CPU, RAM) upgrade.   Doing it in steps makes it easier to solve any problem or glitches that might arise.  (The exact order is not important. It is doing it a step at a time...) 

[orkid1989]

ok. my main fear was the mobo and cpu. afraid they will need to reformat the drives which would suck because i would loose both current vm's with months of saved game data from everyone on the server

[Frank1940]

3 minutes ago, orkid1989 said:

also for the cache drives would i be better off buying a 1tb ssd or 2 5gb ssd? current configuration is raid 0 with 500gb ssd and a 120gb ssd

 

The basic question I would be asking first, is why do you need the speed of a RAID 0?  Most folks are using a RAID configuration on their cahce setup to get a bit of data protection. 

[orkid1989]

well i currently have the cache setting on the appdata and domains set to "yes". i assume that this allows quicker downloads and access and when a move in invoked the data gets put on the slower array. so not really a need for redundancy. so i bout the 500gb ssd to add a cache and had a 120gb ssd laying around. but i might be misunderstanding the purpose of the cache pool.

[Frank1940]

4 minutes ago, orkid1989 said:

ok. my main fear was the mobo and cpu. afraid they will need to reformat the drives which would suck because i would loose both current vm's with months of saved game data from everyone on the server

I don't run any VM's so I don't know what is involved here.  I don't know where you have the 'saved game data' stored.  If it is on the array, it should be safe.  If it is inside the image of the VM, that could definitely become an issue.  

 

Hopefully someone else who has done something similar will jump in at this point.

[orkid1989]

how can i tell if it is in the array or inside the vm image?

[Frank1940]

Where did you tell the games (or VM) to store its data?  Was this location in one of the User Shares that you see on the "Shares'" tab of the GUI? 

[orkid1989]

when i go to user shares and the vdisk is in domains. it says that the domains are all stored on disk 2 (2tb disk that i am keeping)

[itimpi]

5 minutes ago, orkid1989 said:

when i go to user shares and the vdisk is in domains. it says that the domains are all stored on disk 2 (2tb disk that i am keeping)

What is surprising about that?    Setting the domains share to Use Cache=Yes means that you want Unraid to move the files from the cache to the main array.   If you are not sure how the various settings for ‘Use Cache’ actually work and how they affect whether files end up on the array or cache try turning on the help in the GUI.