Upgrade/New Server Build

I currently have a home sever running WHSv1 and I am looking to make an upgrade. I have had the server running for around three years now and it is a little bit cobbled together from bits I had lying round at the time and has been slowly upgraded when and where I could afford it.

The use case for the most part is just SAB/SICK/COUCH and acting as a file server for some XBMC boxes I have in the house. I don't do anything to intensive on it. I might consider getting a webserver on it at some point as at the moment I do all my testing on my local machine and wouldn't mind having a staging server so I can test on additional machines easier.

I am interested in moving across to UnRaid from WHS but am really nervous looking at the various recommended hardware etc. to make sure I have something that works! I also would be keen to begin backing up my MBA to my server so if I can do some sort of time capsule server thing running also that'd be grand. I have been reading bits and pieces about virtualisation but not sure if that is overkill for what I am doing.

Would be keen to get an idea of what hardware is good to go for, I don't have a huge budget (would probably want any extra buys to come in around £300-£500). Finally I would like to go as low-power as possible. I am currently living in an apartment where I don't pay the electricity bills, however I am moving soon as will soon have to start forking out so would like to be as efficient as possible.

Current Server:

Case:

Fractal Design Black Pearl Define R3 Case

Hard Drives:

WD Green 1.5tb

WD Green 2tb * 2

WD Red 3tb

Motherboard:

Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H

CPU:

Intel C2D E7200

PSU:

Enermax 365AX

Additional SATA Ports

Some no name card with Silicon Image 3132 chip on, giving me two extra ports

RAM

Crucial 1GB DDR2 PC2-6400 * 2

..you can use and start with what you currently have, I'd say..

The challenge will be to move over the data.

Also current RAM size might be tight for the plugins you want to employ.

If you want to upgrade, I'd suggest:

- a microATX, Socket 1155 Board, like the ASROCK B75 Pro3-M (comes with 8 onboard S-ATA),

- 4 GB in 2x2GB modules of memory (you'll need DDR3 for that)

- and a small IvyBridge Celeron CPU (G1610/G1620) with boxed cooler.

You should also consider going for a new PSU, like a CORSAIR CX430 or higher wattage if your future change case involves more than 8 drives.

What total amount of data is to be copied over?

You could employ the 3TB Red as Parity or buy a second one if it can hold the data from your old setup.

At the moment I pretty much have all of my hard drives full, barring around 200gb, I would be looking at buying either one or two new 3tb WD Reds and getting rid of a couple of the older drives.

Will look in to that hardware. Should I look to install UnRaid using ESXI? Or should I just forget about that for now.

When your current disks are almost full, you need a new parity disks and at least one new data disk to get the stuff over.

ESXi is not a requirement for any usecase for unRAID...its just a convenience if you want unRAID plus additional hosts for other functions in order to separate and reduce complexity for unRAID.

For your actual plans with the plugins you mentioned, I'd consider this fairly standard., so no need for ESXi IMHO.

You'll also not meet your budget with an ESXi box 

Fair enough, does the parity drive have to be any specific size? If I were to buy 2 new 3tb drives would I lose 3tb to parity drive? Also assume I can plug in my old drives and transfer the data before I add them to the drive pool?

Fair enough, does the parity drive have to be any specific size? If I were to buy 2 new 3tb drives would I lose 3tb to parity drive? Also assume I can plug in my old drives and transfer the data before I add them to the drive pool?

Wrong perspective,    You don't "lose" space to your parity drive ... a parity drive is simply the cost of fault-tolerance.    If you want your system to not lose any data if a drive fails, you MUST have an error correction capability to provide this feature.    The simplest form of this is parity ... which works just fine for protecting against a single drive failure.    And yes, your parity drive must be the largest drive in your system (others can be equally large) ... so in the case you noted, one 3TB drive would indeed be dedicated to parity.

And no, you can't "... plug in my old drives and transfer the data before I add them to the drive pool ..." => but you can build the new system; start with 2 3TB drives (one parity, one data); and copy data from one of your old drives to the new system over your network;  then shut everything down; remove the drive you just copied the data from;  add it to your UnRAID system;  boot up and add that drive to the UnRAID array [it will take a long time to clear that drive at this point -- or you may want to run a "pre-clear" (read about it) to thoroughly test it, and then add it];  then you can copy another drive to UnRAID (which will now have additional space provided by that additional drive);  ... and simply repeat that process until you've migrated the drives you want to add to the new server.

Also assume I can plug in my old drives and transfer the data before I add them to the drive pool?

The standard procedure is what garycase alrady described.

AFAIR there is a method to mount an extra drive (NTFS in your case, provided that you did use your drives as individual formatted disks in Windoze) outside of the pool, then copy data over manually.

This would not require two systems running and no copying over network....but I've never done that.

Edit: provided that you have offline backups of your data, you COULD copy over the data to unRAID without a parity disk (use the two new 3TB disks for data),

then use the old 3TB for parity and recalculate Parity only after/when all data is copied.

Yup..your method is safer because the data is always protected by parity....but it will be slower...IF there are (good) offline Backups, the risk to copy over without Parity is maybe OK...the procedure will be faster though.

Whether the Paritiyx disk is new or used - provided that all disks pass a Preclear procedure (a used one maybe 1x, a new one I'd do at least 3x) before adding them to the array - does not matter.

IMHO, whatever disks fails after that, the problem and stress for rebuilding parity, will stay the same as the used or new disk is part of the array ... it's place does not matter

Cool, going to get everything purchased next week I think.

Will buy a spare case so that I can have the two servers running at the same time and do the transfer over the network. Will also buy two new 3tb drives so that once all the data is transferred and the old drives added to the pool I should have 3tb spare.

Any good apps or anything anyone knows of to help manage the transfer, got a feeling this is going to take a while!

...preclearing a 3TB disk 3xtimes will take approx 2.5-3 days ... get some fans, too 

Obviously you should buy what you want ==> but my nickel's worth is that you should buy at least one 4TB drive, and use it for parity.    Then you won't have size restrictions as you add additional drives (at least not until 5TB or larger drives are released).

Right made the order today as per Ford Prefect suggestion.

ASRock B75 Pro3-M

Intel Celeron G1610

Crucial 4GB DDR3 Kit

Cheap temporary case

Corsair CX430

3* WD Red 3tb

4gb Sony Micro Vault

StarTech 2 Port USB Motherboard Adapter.

Came to £450 or so all in. The plan is to set all three drives up in UnRaid (after having pre-cleared them all). Once that is done I will transfer across enough data to that I can remove my current 3tb WD Red which is in my WHS box. I'll then transfer the rest of the data across and sell my old parts off.

Decided against getting a 4tb drive for now, I will be filling his machine up with 3tb drives first and then will look to upgrade them one by one after that.

Thanks for the help guys, will let you know how it goes.