I'm new to unraid

I currently have a Windows 10 pro machine with a 3TB Hdd and a 120Gb SSD as a boot Drive. the 3TB drive is nearly full I wanted to know if there is a plane and simple way to switch it to unraid with no parity Drive. Just the usb drive as boot for (Unraid) and the SSD as cache and the 3tb for main shares with all of its data still on it from the windows machine.

 

Things to note. I don't have another Drive big enough to hold the data

 

All array drives in Unraid need to be formatted by Unraid so you cannot simply add the drive to the array.   You could, however, easily mount it outside the array using the Unassigned Devices (UD) plugin.

 

What is not clear to me is where you want to end up?   For instance do you intend to continue to run Windows in a VM under Unraid?   If so you may want to keep the SSD as a Windows boot drive mounted using UD.  In such a case since having at least one array drive is mandatory in Unraid you could assign a second USB stick to this role if it is not going to be used to store data.

No there isn't. The HDD and SSD need to be formatted with xfs / btrfs file format so you will need an additional drive to hold the data, at least temporarily.

 

Given what you described though, I would ask why you would want to switch.

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

All array drives in Unraid need to be formatted by Unraid so you cannot simply add the drive to the array.   You could, however, easily mount it outside the array using the Unassigned Devices (UD) plugin.

 

What is not clear to me is where you want to end up?   For instance do you intend to continue to run Windows in a VM under Unraid?   If so you may want to keep the SSD as a Windows boot drive mounted using UD.  In such a case since having at least one array drive is mandatory in Unraid you could assign a second USB stick to this role if it is not going to be used to store data.

My end goal is not to use a windows vm i want to take advantage of docker containers. I do not care one bit about the data on the SSD, only the HDD. it has all my media on it.

1 hour ago, testdasi said:

No there isn't. The HDD and SSD need to be formatted with xfs / btrfs file format so you will need an additional drive to hold the data, at least temporarily.

 

Given what you described though, I would ask why you would want to switch.

The Windows system is currently used as a Plex Media Server. I wish to switch to unraid because of its better performance and upgradeability but just don't have the drives atm. I want to get everything up and running with just one drive, then add more in the future ect.

I just don't think I can get away from the NTFS issue.

45 minutes ago, StuntDog said:

The Windows system is currently used as a Plex Media Server. I wish to switch to unraid because of its better performance and upgradeability but just don't have the drives atm. I want to get everything up and running with just one drive, then add more in the future ect.

I just don't think I can get away from the NTFS issue.

You might get away in the short term with my suggestion of using a USB flash drive to satisfy the Unraid requirement of having at least one array drive, and keep the 3TB drive in NTFS format as a UD device.     Then when you get a new drive you can put that into the array and copy data from the NTFS drive onto the new array drive.    Having done that the current NTFS drive could then be added as an additional array drive as at that point you do not mind the fact it’s contents will be lost as Unraid formats it.

4 hours ago, itimpi said:

You might get away in the short term with my suggestion of using a USB flash drive to satisfy the Unraid requirement of having at least one array drive, and keep the 3TB drive in NTFS format as a UD device.     Then when you get a new drive you can put that into the array and copy data from the NTFS drive onto the new array drive.    Having done that the current NTFS drive could then be added as an additional array drive as at that point you do not mind the fact it’s contents will be lost as Unraid formats it.

This might be a stupid question but can i add the 3 terabyte Drive using UD and then using Docker containers (Plex) access it even though it is still ntfs

2 minutes ago, StuntDog said:

This might be a stupid question but can i add the 3 terabyte Drive using UD and then using Docker containers (Plex) access it even though it is still ntfs

I cannot see any reason why not.    You might need to try it to be absolutely certain, or get feedback here from someone else who has already tried it.    Performance of NTFS is likely to be slightly lower but that is probably not the main criteria in this case?

 

One thing to bear in mind with assigning UD mounted devices from docker containers is to make sure that when setting up the Container path mapping you use one of the “Slave” modes.