Unraid Question?? Hopefully someone can inform

Gears OG · October 3, 2022

So I have quite the media library, on my unraid server, some are hooked up via motherboard sata, and some on a raid card (not using it as a raid) I want to swap it over to a proper HBA can this be done without losing any information??

Electronics Wizardy · October 3, 2022

Did you setup the drives in a raid array on the raid card. If you didn't setup a raid 0 for each drive, then its probably running in HBA mode, so there is no point switching to a HBA card. You can test if its working in HBA mode by seeing if the smart data and tempatures shows up for the drives.

But if each drive is in a raid0 they might just work with a hba, Id test to see if the drives show data when plugged into the motherboards sata ports. Then you can move it to a HBA with no issue. Otherwise you will need to copy all the data off each drive and format the drive.

Kilrah · October 3, 2022

What names do the drives show up as on unraid's main page? If they properly show the drive mode and serial number it's likely the drives are passed through straight, if not the controller is likely managing them.

Gears OG · October 3, 2022

I want to switch to a HBA card I have an extra Sas to 4 Sata break out cable. so a 2 port card, possibly with a external port for future expansion

Kilrah · October 3, 2022

This looks normal so there's good chance it would be fine, i.e. your card already seems to be acting as an HBA.

Gears OG · October 6, 2022

just remembering i set it up as a JBOD not a raid, I just hope that it is not somehow locked to that JBOD if i go to change it. I am more of a hardware guy than a server guy, hence why i use Unraid. I dont want tot have to use command line.

Kilrah · October 6, 2022

Sometimes even in JBOD the card can be writing some kind of header that another card wouldn't recognise.

What I would do is leave both the old card in along with the new, and initially transfer only one drive from the old to the new card. See if everything is recognised right and the array can be started fine. If anything bad happens to the drive that was moved you can still move it back and rebuild it thanks to the rest and parity.

That's in addition to the backups you should already have anyway, but we all know how annoying restoring from backups is.

Gears OG · October 7, 2022

i dont have any back ups yet, I am when i upgrade my gaming rig to build a second server, probably in a rack with alot more storage. so one slower machine as mass data back up and storage, and the faster one as my media server. so both would be amd systems. the media server would have the 3900x with 32GB ram, and the mass storage would have my 3700x with 32GB of Ram. might be overkill but i already have them. thinking again, I might move both systems into a rack, although The Fractal Define R6 is a great case with lots of storage.