I have an 8 drive tower configured as JBOD.  I would like to convert to UNRAID. Currently I have a total of 7 HD, a mixture of 2Tb and 4Tb drive. One of the drives is a ne  and empty 4Tb drive.  I have unraid configured on a USB stick and it boots successfully. I am hopinh I can just disconnect my tower from the current computer and hook it up to the new computer running UNRAID. Is there anything I need to watch out for in the transition. I would hate to not have the data on the drives be unavailable for a significant amount of time. I think the advantages described for UNRAID are exactly what I am looking for but just incase,  is there a way back to my existing configuration with my twoer conncted to a Win10 PC?

Appreciate any comments.   

37 minutes ago, ijourneaux said:

I am hopinh I can just disconnect my tower from the current computer and hook it up to the new computer running UNRAID.

If this connection is USB, it's not going to work well or at all. The only connections between drive boxes and a computer that work well are SAS.

The drive tower is esata. There are 2 sata ports each with 3 multiplexed drive connections

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3 hours ago, ijourneaux said:

The drive tower is esata. There are 2 sata ports each with 3 multiplexed drive connections

That will work better than USB, but sata port multipliers can be trouble, and speeds will be low, as multiple drives have to be accessed simultaneously through the ports.

 

Disks in the Unraid parity array must be formatted, so any data will be gone. If the drives are NTFS single volumes currently, Unraid has an Unassigned Devices plugin that should be able to read them, but you would need to have empty drive(s) connected so you could copy the data to the parity array. Once the data is on the Unraid array, it will be natively unreadable to Windows, but there are third party programs available in Windows to read Linux formats, or you can set up a Linux VM in windows that could mount and read the Unraid drives.