Question, moving to Unraid

[Sparx]

Hi guys

I'm currently running Windows Server 2019 on my old HP ProDesk 400 G1 SFF work gave away a few years ago - Intel Pentium G3220, 6GB RAM, 240GB Boot SSD and 6TB HDD storage. It runs my Plex server and Unifi controller, along with acting as storage for my photos documents etc - which I have pCloud running for a cloud backup. For all of this it's actually worked perfectly for several years now, sitting quietly in the corner of my room doing the job great.

I've been wanting to move to Unraid for so long for various reasons and having the option to do so much more, setting up dockers and various things to play with. But reluctant as I need to work out how to transition from my current Windows setup to Unraid without losing any data...

Is it possible to setup Unraid with my existing drive? I have a feeling I can't, as aware Unraid uses XFS and not NTFS? Would my only viable option to be to spend on another large HDD (and 1TB SSD for cache maybe?) and set these up with Unraid, create the relevant dockers I want - then access the existing 6TB drive to shift data over, then wipe it after and partition as XFS into Unraid array? Or am I over complicating it and it can be done much simpler?

I'm also wondering if it's worth finding a cheap 1150 socket CPU to upgrade the G3220, maybe something like the 4690k? Wonder if this HP tower mobo and the PSU will handle it lol. Eventually I'll do a proper upgrade and maybe stick it in something like Jonsbo N1 NAS case, I see Linus did a video on it a while ago and it looks ideal.

Appreciate any advice or tips folks

 

[Street]

Is it possible to setup Unraid with my existing drive? I have a feeling I can't, as aware Unraid uses XFS and not NTFS? Would my only viable option to be to spend on another large HDD (and 1TB SSD for cache maybe?) and set these up with Unraid, create the relevant dockers I want - then access the existing 6TB drive to shift data over, then wipe it after and partition as XFS into Unraid array? Or am I over complicating it and it can be done much simpler?

Unfortunately, I think that's the only way. Set up your Unraid server, copy the data onto the new array, then add your existing drive into the drive pool. If you are using Unraid, you'd want to buy another drive to use as a parity drive anyway to protect the array.

 

[sja360]

Do you have a laptop or desktop that would have capacity to copy all the data then wipe the windows server then install unraid?

 

[TangoEchoAlpha]

Street is right. You could mount your NTFS as a drive outside the array, using something like the unassigned devices plugin, however the best way to do it would be to create the XFS drives (I do recommend using LUKS to encrypt them at rest) and then copy the data to the new drives in the array.

Street also makes reference to the parity drive - the parity drive needs to be the same size (or larger) than the largest single drive in your array. To avoid unneeded parity rebuilds, I would just get the largest drive you can afford right now and use that for parity.

 

[Sparx]

Thanks chaps, might have to take the plunge and buy a large HDD then.

I’ve also managed to obtain a free upgrade from a family member. Ryzen 3600, 16GB RAM, X570 board and RM750x PSU - nice! So will be using this as the new base to work with.

Question, is a parity drive necessary if I’m not fussed about losing the data?

I’ll have cloud backups of the important stuff (photos, documents, configs etc). The only ‘lost’ data should a drive fail would be movies, tv series etc which I can always grab again…

Could I add a parity drive later down the line easily if I became bothered?

 

[TangoEchoAlpha]

Thanks chaps, might have to take the plunge and buy a large HDD then.

I’ve also managed to obtain a free upgrade from a family member. Ryzen 3600, 16GB RAM, X570 board and RM750x PSU - nice! So will be using this as the new base to work with.

Question, is a parity drive necessary if I’m not fussed about losing the data?

...

Could I add a parity drive later down the line easily if I became bothered?

That free upgrade will run Unraid very nicely and allow you to run extra dockers, winner.

I honestly don't know if you can run an Unraid array without a parity drive. If you don't have a parity drive, I suspect Unraid will be running 'array-less'.

You can add a different parity drive later, but it is a bit of a faff, but not impossible - just a bit of config changing and rebuilding the parity. Depending upon the size of the array and amount of data, rebuilding parity can take a bit of time!

I really see the following a minimum drive wise - 1x decent USB for Unraid to boot from, 1x SSD for cache and your dockers etc, 1x HDD for data and 1x HDD for parity.

Pretty sure Unraid is still available with a free 28 day trial?

 

[Hades]

Yes Unraid still has a free 28 day trial and can be extended for one or two months after that. Yes a parity drive is worth having. Without the parity drive then all data on a failed drive is lost if it dies. A parity drive allows you to rebuild one failed drive without loss. It's like having RAID (but it's not actually RAID, hence the name Unraid). But it will run without a parity drive if you are happy running without that protection. Yes you can add a parity drive later if you want. I did exactly this (it took about 8 hours to build the 4gb parity drive). One advantage of not using a parity drve is that writes will be faster. With a parity drive writes can be quite slow which is why some people also use a cache drive.

 

[BigBoy]

I recently went from Win Server2019 to UnRaid, one of the best sources of information I found was the SpaceinvaderOne's YouTube channel.

SpaceinvaderOnes very good guides will help you setup, transfer files (from drives within the same server and external locations), utilize docker, and setup Vm's as well as much more. Very clear and easy to follow.

Unraid & Moving Data (Part 1) File System

This is the first part of a mini series about moving data to, from and around an Unraid server.This series will look at Krusader, Rsync, Root shares and Midn...

youtu.be