14 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Depends on the enclosure. USB is not recommended for array members, for multiple reasons, disk id being one. Heat being another, USB enclosures are typically designed for light usage, a parity build or check keeps the drives active 100% for many hours, which will likely overheat the drives if they are in the enclosure. Some enclosures also remap the drive in some way, making the content unreadable once shucked.

 

If you insist on using them via USB, and they are not readable once you shuck them, all is not lost. As long as you have valid parity and the drives stay healthy, you can unshuck and rebuild them directly connected one at a time. Still not recommended though.

 

I was afraid of that.

 

It's a WD My Book.

 

I was only planning on building a very basic pool without parity initially.  Then simply copy all the files from my current NAS over.  Then shuck the drives and put them in the proper server.

Edited April 18, 20197 yr by BAlGaInTl

I decided to go ahead and shuck the drives I had last night.

 

I'll set them up proper on a spare MB/CPU I have and then transfer my files from my current server.  Upgrading will be so much easier once I've made the switch to unRaid. 

Okay, I had another thought today. I'm starting the build tonight...

I have the 2 x 10TB drives shucked and ready to go.

Am I better of doing 1 parity and 1 data to start? Or is it better to start with 2 data drives so that the data is balanced access the two drives from the start?

Either way, I'll be adding the 3rd drive in a few weeks.

Thanks again for all the help.

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10 minutes ago, BAlGaInTl said:

Am I better of doing 1 parity and 1 data to start? Or is it better to start with 2 data drives so that the data is balanced access the two drives from the start?

Depends. If most of your data is live and regularly changing, then balancing across all drives is best. If your data is more write once, read seldom archive media type stuff, better to fill each disk to the limit before moving to the next disk. That way the fewest number of drives needs to be involved in daily activity.

 

You are keeping your data intact on the other drives until you have played around a while correct? If so, no need to add parity until all your data is copied, as copying to a parity protected array is somewhat slower than not.

Well unRaid is live for my home server now.

 

I've carefully packaged up the drives from my OMV server just in case.

 

I was really impressed with how smoothly unRaid handled my dual NICs on the first boot.  I thought that would be painful.  It just worked.