Best practice to upgrade Unraid (After CPU upgrade)?


Recommended Posts

I recently was donated a i7 6700k setup with 32G ram and 256G M.2 drive. Replacing AMD A6-6400K 16G Ram.

 

Currently I have Unraid 6.8.2 - 4T Parity + 4 @ 4T NAS Drives + Cache Drive (old 500G laptop drive - no idea why I did that...) - It has worked fine for 4 years plus...

 

I basically just use Unraid for PLEX.

 

The array is being backed up slowly to a 12T USB3 external so its giving me time to think of a clean REDO. I have another backup also.

 

Some way or another 3 of my array drives are BTRFS and 1 is XFS, so I was going to preclear and format the drives to BTRFS for a fresh start. Although the M.2 is only a 256G Samsung EVO I was going to use as a cache but unsure of filesystem to use. I could go grab a 500G SSD but well... the M.2 is there free.

 

My questions are:

 

1) Any advantages to starting right from scratch (Re-Install Unraid to a new USBThumbdrive and start over?

2) When removing drives from the array config is there a proper procedure to reformat? I really want to "re-load" the array to balance them and the time spent is no concern as this is purely a hobbyist machine and can be down for extended days.

3) Just stick to BTRFS across all the drives? I may use VMs later but prime use is just PLEX.

4) Is the M.2 256G cache too small or fine for my use?

 

Thank you for your time.

Link to comment
25 minutes ago, Raycaster said:

1) Any advantages to starting right from scratch (Re-Install Unraid to a new USBThumbdrive and start over?

I can't think of any advantages. Unraid is essentially a clean install each time it boots. If you really want to get rid of all your webUI settings I guess you could start over, but you can just change any you want and keep the rest without starting over.

 

27 minutes ago, Raycaster said:

2) When removing drives from the array config is there a proper procedure to reformat? I really want to "re-load" the array to balance them and the time spent is no concern as this is purely a hobbyist machine and can be down for extended days.

Are you really planning to remove disks, or just reformat them? If you change disk assignments you have to New Config and rebuild parity, but reformatting is different and parity is maintained during format.

 

No point in balancing, and if you reload user shares with the default Highwater allocation they won't be balanced anyway. And Highwater is default for a good reason, it is a compromise between using all disks (eventually) without constantly switching disks just because one disk temporarily has more free space. Most Free allocation will be the most balanced in a way, but has other disadvantages that can affect performance and keep disks spunup.

 

41 minutes ago, Raycaster said:

3) Just stick to BTRFS across all the drives?

I've never bothered with btrfs in the parity array so maybe someone else will have an opinion.

 

35 minutes ago, Raycaster said:

4) Is the M.2 256G cache too small or fine for my use?

Depends on your use of course. That would be plenty for dockers and VMs, and some user share caching. Do you cache a lot of user share data every day? I say every day because mover is intended for idle time and daily in the middle of the night is default for good reason.

 

Latest beta allows multiple pools. I have 2x500G SSD as btrfs raid1 "cache" pool for user share writes, and 256G nvme as "fast" pool for dockers and VMs. Way more than I need but I just happened to have them.

Link to comment

If you don't start from scratch with your flash drive, make sure you disable dockers and VMs (in Settings - Docker and Settings - VM Manager) until you get cache installed. You want those running from cache and if you enable then before cache is installed they will wind up on the array and you have to go to some extra trouble to get them on cache where they belong.

Link to comment

And another thing since the title here is about a CPU upgrade.

 

Many of us have made extensive hardware upgrades without changing anything about Unraid at all. I recently replaced motherboard, RAM, and CPU. Unraid just booted up as if nothing had happened. All data and everything working just as it was.

Link to comment

Thank you very much for the replies, appreciated big time.

 

Yes, I simply swapped hardware and everything worked great.

 

OK, after the backup is done I will remove the array and cache, format drives and M.2 and copy media back on.

 

I will do a New Config with the formatted drive, add the M.2 as the new cache and build the parity drive.

 

As mentioned, this is just a basic media server with PLEX and hoping Unraid will enjoy the extra RAM and the i7 maybe provide some hardware encoding for PLEX.

 

 

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.