UnRAID Parity Question

[thunderclap]

I currently run two servers: one running Plex and Minecraft on Windows 10 and a one running Pihole, Nextcloud, and Piwigo on a Raspberry Pi 4. I would like to combine these two servers into a single machine with a Core i5-3450. I'm considering UnRAID and another piece of software. I'm leaning towards UnRAID since it seems the installation of dockers is more convenient than the other software and requires less work in pre-configuration (UnRAID seems to auto-populate a lot of the settings on its own.)

 

That brings me to my question. The Plex server is set up as a RAID in Windows with 2 8TB drives, both formatted in NTFS. I know when I bring those two drives over they should/need to be re-formatted. The other software would be EXT4 and, I assume, UnRAID too. That said, I don't have additional drives to install prior to the move. My plan for the other software is to format one drive to EXT4 and then move my media collection to it, then format the second drive to EXT4 and add it as a backup drive. I know UnRAID wants a parity drive installed, but I'm wondering if the parity drive can be installed at a later date to ensure I can migrate my media collection first.

 

That's a lot of additional info for a simple question. :)

 

Thanks for any insight that can be given.

[trurl]

Array disks in Unraid can be XFS or btrfs. Most people use XFS.

 

Cache can be XFS or btrfs. btrfs required for cache pool of more than one disk.

 

NTFS and EXT4 are not supported in the array or cache but can be accessed with the Unassigned Devices plugin.

 

Parity can be added later. Do you have backups?

[thunderclap]

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Parity can be added later. Do you have backups?

My Plex media on Windows 10 is a RAID-1. I thought I could pull the second drive and format it for UnRAID, install Plex, and then use samba share (assuming UnRAID has that option) to transfer the media to the UnRAID drive.

[itimpi]

35 minutes ago, thunderclap said:

My Plex media on Windows 10 is a RAID-1. I thought I could pull the second drive and format it for UnRAID, install Plex, and then use samba share (assuming UnRAID has that option) to transfer the media to the UnRAID drive.

That certainly sounds like a feasible option.   Just to check - while doing this the Windows machine will not be the one to act as the Unraid server?

[thunderclap]

29 minutes ago, itimpi said:

That certainly sounds like a feasible option.   Just to check - while doing this the Windows machine will not be the one to act as the Unraid server?

Correct. The Windows 10 machine is its own machine. The UnRAID server will be a new computer.

[itimpi]

1 minute ago, thunderclap said:

Correct. The Windows 10 machine is its own machine. The UnRAID server will be a new computer.

Good.    Just wanted to check that you were not going to first need to get a Windows VM running on the Unraid server.