I am planning to transfer all my data from my current build, which is running Unraid. I have a Plex media server with approximately 20 TB of data. Additionally, I will be utilizing a graphics card to assist with transcoding. How difficult or easy is this process likely to be? Has anyone else had experience with this kind of transfer? Any information or advice would be greatly appreciated as I want to address all my questions before making the purchase.
Typically your options for transferring data are over the network or physically attaching the drives to the new machine in spare SATA bay(s) or via USB. The best approach may depend on exactly what your HL15 configuration will be. If speed is a factor, it might be worth getting a 10G NIC for the old PC and direct attaching the two PCs for a network transfer. 20TB will take about 56 hours to transfer over a 1G LAN in a best case scenario, and usually transfers don’t go error free for that long so you find yourself needing to do restarts and keeping track of what has copied over and what has not. Unraid may still limit the copy to the speed of a single disk, though, unless you can get multiple copies going concurrently, so 10G may not help.
What configurration are you looking at for the HL15? Are you looking at the full build, or re-using some of your old PC? If full build, the Xeon 3204 processor or something better? The Xeon 3204 is less powerful than your i7-9700F. Is the HL15 supposed to replace the old PC or shift Plex off of it, but you will keep it to do other stuff? Will the HL15 also be running Unraid? If the HL15 is supposed to fully replace the old PC, does the old PC run any other virtual machines or containers? Since you are talking about copying data, what hard drives do you plan to install in the HL15?
I’m not sure what is involved in getting a computer to a new duty station, but you may want to get a padded pelican case or such to transport the HDDs. I’ve used this for 10 HDDs for a few moves;
So, with Unraid, the array is essentially a JBOD with a parity. So as @DigitalGarden pointed out, it would be the speed of 1 disk as each disk is its own filesystem then merged with FUSE. Unless you have a SSD cache pool then you can go faster. but 20tb will fill the Cache then you will end up moving directly to the array after that.
This is why unraid has such flexibility on drives. You can add more drives without any kind of serious work/time. you have mismatch drives, you can loose more drives than parity allows and not lose EVERYTHING only the stuff on the failed disks. If you have Parity you can have up to 2 parity drives for the ability to have 2 failures and still keep going.
There is a Plugin called Unassigned Devices, that will give you the ability to mount external drives in unraid if you are using those. If you want to copy your data to the Array using an internal Disk, you would still use Unassigned Devices to give support for things like NTFS filesystem.
If you have 1 20tb of data, and wanted parity I would put the empty drive into the Unraid array as a data drive, let the OS format it XFS (the recommended filesystem for the array, then copy from the old drive to the new one. Once you confirm everything is transferred. you can take the old drive that’s mounted in UD (Unassigned Devices) and unmount it, then add as a parity drive, and then you would have 16tb data drive with another 16tb Parity for redundancy. OR maybe 2 16tb Parity and then smaller data drives. But the Parity drive has to be EQUAL or LARGER than the largest data drive in the array, so a 16tb WILL be one of the parity drives
OR you can go standard raid types, mirror, striped, or even ZFS.
PS. i hope this made sense, i’m falling asleep at the PC.
Also you are likely going to be similar to my Plex HL-15. I went with the highest clock and single core performance I could because of my workloads. Plex obviously would never need that CPU lol. But I run game servers and video encoding on there, as well as some services for hosting other media, and such.
Yes the machine is up and running It has Unraid as the OS, its a very well rounded NAS OS/Hypervisor, it supposed a Parity protected JBOD array (Unraid) also has ZFS and regular raid support, runs docker containers, VMs, lots of plugins and containers in the built in a “free appstore” style part of the os. they have GUI templates and it pulls the docker container and installs with click of the button. Mine ran alot of stuff but I built a seperate server for compute/render/game servers with, so the HL-15 is just mainly plex now.
HL-15 is easy to build in, ATX motherboards are tight to the fan wall, so no larger, and also no water cooling space.
my Motherboard has one x16 PCIe with the 9305-24i HBA, 2 x4 electrical slots one has the 10gb NIC, other has NVMe adapter. motherboard has 1 Gen5 m.2 and 3 gen 4 M.2 slots. the Gen5 slot is empty because the HBA is Gen3 so I left it empty. I didnt need a GPU as its only Plex now, and has the iGPU on the CPU for transcoding.
if you have a bifurcation slot you can run m.2 or U.2 easily with cards in those slots.
