Case Pics

[crazyea]

All I know is after seeing all that I am glad I went with just using drive pool and snap raid. I almost went with unraid but it just seems like a lot more work. I only have 11tb on the drive pool server and I just made full copies of each drive in the pool beside the parity drive.

So I have a direct backup of each drive if any fail and I have the snap raid parity to rebuild any drive that fails give me a little extra security.
Wow 3 to 5 years in and out of the hospital really made me fall so far behind on my knowledge base lol very cool info

I just started using UNRAID over the past 3 weeks since the Seagate 10TB deal first appeared in the deals section. Before that I had 2x 10TB drives mounted in my pc.

So far I love it. It's actually very simple. Install unraid on the usb. boot it up, assign the drives to an array and your done. Of course adding in docker containers like plex, sonarr, radarr, sabnzbd, take a few minutes extra, but I MUCH prefer having my media server in the closet over hosting it on my main pc. This way I can fiddle around any time I want, and dont have to hear my wife get annoyed while she is watching something.

 

[crazyea]

You need to attach them via SATA, won't work over USB.

Caution: You will need to re-format the drives hence you'll lose all of the data.

Procedure:

# Scan the drives, record PD#
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Format_140_11923_64.exe --scan

# Show Support Formats:
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Lite_120_11923_64.exe -d PD1 --showSupportedFormats
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Lite_120_11923_64.exe -d PD2 --showSupportedFormats
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Lite_120_11923_64.exe -d PD3 --showSupportedFormats
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Lite_120_11923_64.exe -d PD4 --showSupportedFormats

# Convert to 4KN
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Format_140_11923_64.exe -d PD1 --setSectorSize 4096 --confirm this-will-erase-data
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Format_140_11923_64.exe -d PD2 --setSectorSize 4096 --confirm this-will-erase-data
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Format_140_11923_64.exe -d PD3 --setSectorSize 4096 --confirm this-will-erase-data
C:\TMP\Apps\SeaChestUtilities\Windows\Win64\SeaChest_Format_140_11923_64.exe -d PD4 --setSectorSize 4096 --confirm this-will-erase-data

--

NOTE: I did 4 drives at a time using above instructions. The conversion takes a bit of time, ~ 2 mins.

So after converted will the format be a fast format? Or will it take 15 hours, because I dont mind taking a drive or two offline at a time to convert if its quick, but 15 hours I would probably pass.

 

[anabioz]

You need to destroy the partition table prior to converting

So after converted will the format be a fast format? Or will it take 15 hours, because I dont mind taking a drive or two offline at a time to convert if its quick, but 15 hours I would probably pass.

I guess that depends. On windows using diskpart, covert to gpt and format fs=ntfs quick, took less than 5 mins.

As for unRAID, I guess you'd have to pre-clear the drive for it to be quick. I setup a fresh array and that took awhile because it was building up the parity setup.

 

[crazyea]

I would think that if I backed everything up. unplugged my usb key, did a quick windows install, ran the conversion on all of my drives, formatted to ntfs, powered down, put the usb key back, booted unraid, and recreated the array, it would then format to xfs.

of course to resync parity will take 15 or so hours, but I could run plex on an unassigned usb drive in the meantime. I dont think i would need to run preclear again. my understanding is its just to test the drive for infant mortality and parity resync is enough.

 

[gingerbee]

thanks for the info crazyea still sounds like a lot of work compared to what I had to do but I am super interested in unraid just cause it seems like such a cool OS thanks again for the info good luck on your unraid adventures

 

[crazyea]

You need to destroy the partition table prior to converting


I guess that depends. On windows using diskpart, covert to gpt and format fs=ntfs quick, took less than 5 mins.

As for unRAID, I guess you'd have to pre-clear the drive for it to be quick. I setup a fresh array and that took awhile because it was building up the parity setup.

I attempted converting to 4kn. While it was possible with the shucked drives, it was not possible with my retail drives so I just reverted them all back to 512e just so the drives were all the same format.

 

[anabioz]

I attempted converting to 4kn. While it was possible with the shucked drives, it was not possible with my retail drives so I just reverted them all back to 512e just so the drives were all the same format.

Interesting, I would not have guessed that the drives would be any different. If they are the same model, they should operate similar. When you ran 'showSupportedFormats', what was the output I am curious.

 

[crazyea]

Interesting, I would not have guessed that the drives would be any different. If they are the same model, they should operate similar. When you ran 'showSupportedFormats', what was the output I am curious.

I don't recall now, but the iron wolf pro's are slightly different models.