I am experiencing extremely slow parity checks and disk performance.  This is due to poor planning on my part, by using all USB drives and multiple USB hubs (Anker 4 port).  

 

Which would be a better option for me, in order to make the situation better?  

 

1.)  Remove my hard drives from their plastic cases, and plug them into SATA connectors on the current PC?  How could I do this and NOT lose any data?

 

2.)  Move my USB drives to a much higher powered PC (see below) and purchase a quality USB hub (Anker 10 port).  Is this even possible?  

 

Current set-up:

AMD 8350 

Two - 8TB USB Seagate Drives (Parity)

Nine - 5TB USB Seagate Drives

One - 1TB USB Drive

Three - 8TB USB Seagate Drives

 

New set-up:

Ryzen 7 2700X

MSI X470GPLUS Performance Gaming Motherboard

 

 

I do not think that option 2) is viable as I believe that the USB sub-system throughput will always be a limiting factor on performance.

 

On the basis that option 1 ) is the only viable way to improve performance then the big question is whether the drive is identified with the same serial number and size when plugged in via SATA as when it is plugged in via USB?   Since Unraid identifies drives by their serial number and size rather than where they are attached then this may be an easy switch.   If the USB enclosures have changed the way the disks are presented compared to SATA then it is not a straightforward way forward.

 

I would suggest that the first thing is to try switching one drive from USB to SATA and see if Unraid brings it up without issue.  You might want to disable auto-starting the array before doing this.  With any luck the drive will simply come up as normal and you will be able to start the array and see all its data.   If Unraid reports that it is the "wrong drive" then the switch to SATA will not be simple as Unraid is seeing the disk either with a different serial number or with different physical size. compared tp the USB connection.

I agree with itimpi.  While we do support the USB protocol for assigning devices in Unraid, it isn't really recommended due to the performance bottleneck.  In addition, having all your storage devices laying external to your system is kind of risky too.

 

Even if the device ids are different after removing them from their USB shells, if you write down which disks were in which order before dismantling them, and you reassign the new disks to the exact same order as what they were before, you should be absolutely fine.  I also wouldn't expect the device ids to be different by changing the bus type, but I've seen stranger things happen, so I can't rule it out.