tldr; moving from a Dell r420 to a Dell m640 in a Dell VRTX, where should change any of my settings configurations
I currently am running my Unraid on a Dell r420 off a cheap USB stick. The r420 has an LSI 9206-16e with 2 Dell MD1000s attached. I’m not using any of the r420 drive bays as I couldn’t get Unraid to detect them after trying to flash the controller. The storage is:
- 1x 6TB (Parity)
- 11x 4TB
- 3x 3TB
- 14x 2TB
- 1x 2TB (cache)
I also have several other 2TB and smaller drives left some 10K and 15K rpm drives and a 12TB SAS drive I stumbled upon for cheap.
The Dell VRTX is the sff format version and I have 8 drives for that, but heard I will struggle with getting those to show up in Unraid. The m640 has 2x 300TB SSDs, that I might be able to use with Unraid easily.
This weekend I plan on moving the LSI Card to the VRTX, figuring out how to pass it through to the m640, and getting everything up and running. It’s going to take me minutes, so I’ve been led to believe as Unraid, should just work!
But I’m wondering how I can better utilize my storage. I’m wasting the 12TB Currently as it’s not being used. My gut reaction is take out one of the 2tb and replace with the 12TB and run it in it’s own pool since I can’t parity it and I feel like using it for Parity would be a waste as well.
Am I missing anything? Should I be doing something completely different? Is using a dual Xeon Gold 6134 128GB RAM Machine a complete waste for Unraid? Everything was well loved before it got to me, but I’m giving it a good retirement home running an *arr network of tools, AMP Game Server for a bunch of Teens, and learning about things like NGINX and PiHole for myself (and failing… stupid 502 gateway NGINX error!)
EDIT: Here’s the plugins I’m currently using that I’ve seen mentioned on the other place that we shall not go back to.
- Community Applications
- Disk Location
- Dynamix File Manager
- Dynamix System Buttons
- Fix Common Problems
- Parity Check Tuning
- Unassigned Devices and Unassigned Device Plus
- and now unBALANCE from https://lemmy.world/u/zehty recommendation
Like you, I had old retired server hardware for Unraid earlier this year that I used for many years, and it worked just fine. However, I decided to modernize my setup and retire the old hardware. I gave it to an enthusiast friend of mine to do whatever he pleases with it.
I wouldn’t say the hardware you have now is a complete waste. Instead, it provides a good platform for continuous learning. Is it overkill? Perhaps, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing either.
In my server, I have 11 disks and one cache drive. The majority of those drives host all my media and files, while three of them are dedicated to downloads and random stuff that I don’t organize too well but still keep around. It may not be the tidiest setup, but it works for me. Every six months or so, when I’m bored and want to try something new and learn, I streamline it. I also don’t use parity because I like to live dangerously!
I had never used parity on the roughly 65TB of crap until I moved to Unraid and figured… meh why not try it.
I am a benefactor of people like you passing on old hardware to less experienced people. That’s where I just got this Dell VRTX with 2x m640 Blades and 2x m520 blades and I really don’t know what to do with it. Someone else gave me the r420 and one of the MD1000s and before that I was using an R710 and the other MD1000. The R710 was my original system with a WIndows Storage Space that I didn’t know what I was doing with. Until I migrated everything to Unraid on the 420. Plan was to move back to the R710, but then the Dell VRTX showed up. Lots of options and about time to pass on the R710 and R420 to new homes I think.
Oh and All my drives came from my local college’s Surplus Store after being decommissioned from there, so far I’ve only lost I think 3 drives in the 10 years I’ve been tinkering with this *arr collection and plex. I stared on an Old Gateway laptop… yes… Gateway!
LSI cards are indeed a boon for servers with massive amounts of drives, like yours. Hopefully, you can get it working, and once you have it set up, everything should interconnect seamlessly.
If needed, you can also consider consolidating your data using unBALANCE. This way, you can distribute some data to the larger drives and potentially remove smaller, older drives that are on their way out or causing unnecessary overhead, which would free up space and optimize resources in your build.
undefined> consolidating your data using unBALANCE
OMG that’s perfect, just installed it. I need to remove one of the 2TB anyway to get the 12TB in there. This is like my dream come true I was trying to do that through the file manager thingy dohicky (technical term?)
Perfect! I had to use it when I was updating my cache drive and reorganizing download data across a few drives to add a new one. It took hours and hours, but once it was done, all the data ended up in the right places, and when I relaunched my dockers, everything worked without a hitch.
Just remember to turn off any services like VMs, dockers, or movers before using it. It’s much simpler that way since live data won’t be passing through while you’re moving it.
