Upgrade HBA and install Unraid together.
Upgrade HBA and install Unraid together.
Hello. I own a NAS server I've assembled for Plex and cloud services. I have an LSI HBA card with two SAS ports feeding eight IronWolf drives. I'm considering expanding my storage. If I replace the HBA with one supporting 16 drives, will Unraid still identify the previous array using those original eight drives connected to a new HBA? I've faced problems moving drives between onboard SATA and external cards where OS struggles to manage them. I thought it was best to clarify this before proceeding with the upgrade. I don't want to end up rebuilding a new array just to transfer data. Thank you.
Based on my experience, Unraid doesn't cause any problems as long as the drive's UID stays consistent. In extreme cases, you might need to revert Unraid back to the original drives. It's important to maintain the same drive order, which aids the operating system in managing drives, though I've encountered array drives in USB adapters without issues before.
When the new components arrive, I plan to rearrange the existing array and launch it before installing the additional storage. Do you think there’s a reason I notice such poor write performance between an onboard SATA and a drive connected to my LSI HBA? The drives typically offer around 250MB/s during copying, whereas removing data from a SATA drive usually drops to just 1-2MB/s, which seems unusual.