Review my way forward?

[bamhm182]

Hey, everyone. I've had my eye on unRAID for a month or two now but have yet to pull the trigger. I'm trying to figure out in what order I would like to do things and thought I would come here for suggestions. Considering that all of my options deal with hardware, I figured this would be a good forum to post in.

 

My current setup:

Dell R210 Gen I

OS: ProxMox w/ 1 constant VM for Plex and the random ones here and there for playing with things

CPU: Celeron G1101 (Dual Core @ 2.26 Ghz)

HDD: 2x 3TB WD Reds (Don't have a RAID Controller that supports > 2TB, so they're in an LVM spread across the both of them. File security isn't a concern for me in this current configuration)

RAM: 8 GB (Max is 16 GB. I don't need it ATM/it isn't worth my time/money to upgrade this server)

 

End game:

Dell R710 Gen II

OS: unRAID

CPU: 2x Xeon X5690 (Hex Core @ 3.46 Ghz. I know the TDP is 130W and I could get some more energy efficient CPUs. I'm fine with that.)

HDD: 5x 3TB WD Reds, 1x 500GB SSD Cache (Or w/e. It has 6 bays and by the time I populate them all, there will most likely be some larger ones in there)

RAM: 72GB ECC (Pretty "standard" for this machine)

 

So the now to the fun part, how I actually get to that end goal. To get started, I'm working on sticking to a new "fun money" budget. I'm only allowing myself $200 a month to be spent on the non-essentials. (gas, food, rent, etc.) Right now I have $18 of fun money and I pass go on the 1st. One important note to address is that the R710's most common RAID controller doesn't support >2TB or pass through AFAIK. This means that I'm going to have to get a new RAID controller. I've heard a lot of good things about the H310 once it has been flashed. It's pretty attractive at its current price point. My only real complaint is that it doesn't have an external SFF-8088 port. I'd like to have one in case I eventually go crazy and decide I need an external JBOD. If anyone can suggest a better card for me, I'm listening.

 

I'm thinking about making the following purchase when I get more money:

$50 - H310

$12 - 32 GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit (I know there isn't much reason to get 32 GB, but it's hard to argue w/ $5 extra to max out the OS drive)

$59 - unRAID Basic

 

With this, I plan to have both my current WD Reds set up without a parity drive passing through the H310 in the R210. Then in the near-ish future, I plan to buy an R710. With the knowledge I have right now, I feel like it is possible to remove the H310/unRAID USB/WD Reds and put them into the R710, then boot without any serious issues. Am I wrong in this assumption? Are there any gotchas I need to be aware of? Only real concern I can think of is that the R710 has a backplane, whereas the R210 has two coldswap drives. If this won't work, I'm thinking I won't be anywhere near filling a 3 TB drive by this point in time. I'm thinking I can trim the fat/compress, if need be, buy another WD Red 3 TB, hook it up as a non-unRAID disc, and transfer everything to that. Then I can move the H310/unRAID USB/Old Reds to the R710, set it up like it was in the R210, then copy the data over and add the new drive as parity.

 

Sorry for the long winded post! 

 

tl;dr: I have an R210 w/ 2 3TB WD Reds. I want an R710. I imagine I'll have to buy/flash an H310 to get the R710 to play nice. Can I buy the H310 now, set up unRAID to use that, then when I get the R710, simply swap everything over to it and call it a day? If it isn't that simple, can I buy another WD Red, transfer everything to that, start over on unRAID in the R710, transfer everything back, then add the new WD Red as the parity?

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited March 15, 2017 by bamhm182

[trurl]

I haven't had experience with that particular hardware, but I have changed hardware several times and it worked fine. Even if you do have to work through some controller issues, for example, it shouldn't have any effect on your disks or their data.

[ashman70]

Why do you want to get an R710 at all? Does it have to be a rack mount server? Does it have to be Dell?