Upgrade and Migration advice

[neo117]

I currently have an unraid 5.0.6 server that has been running happily for several years now. it employs 4x 6TB hard drives (3 raid one parity)

 

I want to migrate to new hardware but maintain the current hard drives and also add a cache drive

i also want to upgrade to unraid 6

 

my current setup is an older AMD based and i was planning on moving to a spare i5 2500K CPU and motherboard that i have sitting around.

after upgrading i want to run plex in a docker container with no more than 2 simultaneous streams so i think that the i5 is enough

 

my questions are as follows:

should i stick with the older i5 when i migrate or upgrade to something newer?

should i upgrade my current rig to 6.0 and then transfer over to the new hardware or just build a new unraid 6.0 server and drop my drives in?

i was planning on a 128GB cache drive as i don't write to the array often so i think that should be enough. is it? should i consider some other configuration?

lastly, should i add the cache drive now, or wait until the new setup is up and running

 

any advice would be appreciated, and even more appreciated if you can offer actual experiences or reasoning behind the "why" of your advice

 

thanks!!

 

[trurl]

Have you read the Upgrading wiki?

 

[neo117]

2 hours ago, trurl said:

Have you read the Upgrading wiki?

 

yes, and it says i can upgrade OR do a fresh install, but i am looking for recommendations on which route to go that are more specific to my particular situation. i was interested to see everyones input as well as experiences from anyone who has maybe done something similar

[trurl]

I have always liked the fresh install approach. It is a good way to refresh your understanding of unRAID and make you reconsider how you want to configure things.

 

You will probably want to also consider changing the filesystem on your disks to XFS, but that can wait until you get V6 going. Do you have any free space? Do you have backups?

 

You might consider keeping the old system running and start the new system with new disks. That would allow you to have backups and to copy the data to new XFS disks on the new system.

[JonathanM]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

You might consider keeping the old system running and start the new system with new disks. That would allow you to have backups and to copy the data to new XFS disks on the new system.

This.

 

Keep the old server completely intact, build new and only transfer what you need. Use the old system for a complete backup. Unless you already have a complete backup of everything, in which case you would still want to change from ReiserFS to XFS, sooner rather than later. ReiserFS is still supported by unraid, but many people (myself included) experience performance issues, some rather extreme when using Reiser with large or heavily used disks on 6.X unraid.

[bman]

Having just done this I'd advise to keep the old i5 and mobo you've got if you're confident those parts have good life left in them.  I just bought a new "gaming" board and have had a lot of frustrations with it, at least for my own setup.

 

- It has no VGA output on built-in video, so I need to add a card or run DVI <-> HDMI converters and cables and thereby not be able to use my KVM switch any longer

- it expects a boot device of some sort to be present before I can get into the BIOS

- It only sometimes POSTs with a single stick of RAM. It seems much happier with two.

 

I spent a lot of time puzzling these bits out - next time I will avoid gaming boards (this is an Asus Z270E Gaming fwiw) with features I will never get to use with unRAID... but it was what was on the shelf at my local shop and I was down one server for too long.

 

Otherwise, agree with building a 'new' server that is unRAID 6 and just copying over what you need from your current running v5 one.  Then re-use the v5 drives in your new server when done the copying.

 

+1 on the XFS too, not least of which for me is because I like the File Integrity plugin which is not recommended for use with ReiserFS drives,

[neo117]

this is all good info and i appreciate it. I am not sure if i have new hard drives in the budget right now though, but based on the input so far, i may have to consider it

 

are there any downsides to XFS? 

is a cache drive still recommended, and how large if i only write occasionally to the drive?

 

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, neo117 said:

is a cache drive still recommended, and how large if i only write occasionally to the drive?

Ironically, if you only intend to use it as a cache drive in the classic unraid sense, no, you don't need one anymore. Modern drives are fast enough that pretty much all over the network writing is bottlenecked largely by the network, especially if you use the newly exposed turbo write that spins up all drives for writing instead of just the target and parity.

 

However... the cache drive has morphed into the apps drive, to include dockers and VM's.

 

What is your current use case for unraid? Does the ability to host media servers, downloaders, and even whole operating systems of practically any flavor accessed either remotely or given the right hardware connected directly to the unraid box interest you? If so, I'd recommend a minimum of 250GB SSD, or a 500 if the budget allows.

[neo117]

13 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Ironically, if you only intend to use it as a cache drive in the classic unraid sense, no, you don't need one anymore. Modern drives are fast enough that pretty much all over the network writing is bottlenecked largely by the network, especially if you use the newly exposed turbo write that spins up all drives for writing instead of just the target and parity.

 

However... the cache drive has morphed into the apps drive, to include dockers and VM's.

 

What is your current use case for unraid? Does the ability to host media servers, downloaders, and even whole operating systems of practically any flavor accessed either remotely or given the right hardware connected directly to the unraid box interest you? If so, I'd recommend a minimum of 250GB SSD, or a 500 if the budget allows.

 

well my current usage scenario is as follows:

i store about 12GB of media on the server which typically would handle no more than 1 to 2 data streams

I also store a backup of all of my important data from my personal computer and workstation (both of which employ raid 1 on their data drives)

 

upon upgrading, i plan on having a plex docker, and serve media from the unraid box with some light transcoding.

I would also like to run my pxe server on there and maybe even my imaging server too.

once i get involved with all of the possibilities of docker i may expand to more stuff , but i don't expect to have a huge load on the server

 

i planned on putting a cache drive because my current transfer rates are in the 15-25Mbps range and my previous research said that a cache drive would give me full gigabit etwork speed. if you are saying this is no longer the case then i may rethink it.

 

also, as an app drive, does it need to be an SSD or could i use a regular magnetic based drive?

[bman]

SSD is preferred for app drives due to the seek + access times being so short; but SSD is not necessary. As with anything, performance is based on the slowest part of the system.  Using a cache drive, even an HDD should net you better speeds than 25MB/s since unRAID doesn't have to update parity at the same time you're writing to cache.  (Once mover is invoked according to its schedule, parity is updated as files are moved from cache to array.)

 

For what it's worth, I also choose SSD for cache (specifically, and only Samsung Pro series devices) because they have more longevity and reliability than magnetic drives.  That eases my mind enough that I don't worry about using a single cache drive rather than an array of them for RAID1 cache. Saves me a bit of cash to boot!

 

 

 

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, neo117 said:

i planned on putting a cache drive because my current transfer rates are in the 15-25Mbps range and my previous research said that a cache drive would give me full gigabit etwork speed. if you are saying this is no longer the case then i may rethink it.

Given decent processor power, interface bandwidth, and drive speed, you can definitely sustain full gigabit speed to the array drives with turbo write mode.

 

But, since you are wanting to run dockers and such, I would definitely budget for a SSD of reasonable size. Apps are much more responsive on SSD's, but it's not a requirement. VM's, on the other hand, I wouldn't want to wait on a spinner for a VM, especially if the vdisk is hosted on your cache drive. Putting a vdisk on the parity protected array is tortuously slow.