The need to migrate Unraid to new low powered hardware has finally arisen. We will be migrating from Dual Xeon LGA 2011 2960’s to a Ryzen 3700x for the homelab. This is going to be so much fun!

The Transition

Moving the Unraid OS from one server to another server is incredibly easy. Normally taking any operating system and migrating it to all new hardware requires a complete re-install, especially if you are changing to completely different chipsets. Sure, in some cases you can do this but it’s normally not recommended because of driver complications and other driver related issues. This is not something you need to worry about with Unraid.

First things first.

Before you unplug the USB with Unraid and plug it into a completely new system, do yourself a favor and go ahead and do a parity sync/check.

Then once that is complete, backup your data to a different system just in case.

Finally, migrate all the hardware you need from the old system, including drives, and slap it into your new system. Don’t forget to grab Unraid! No re-installs required. One thing I always like to do just in case, is grab a screenshot of the drive order within your array. Unraid will remember the drive order but it’s always best to cover yourself whenever possible.

I did the following in Unraid version 6.6.6

Do a parity sync Back up data Optional, take screenshot of drive order in the array Power Down Unplug USB with Unraid Move all the drives, HBA cards, GPU’s, etc etc to the new motherboard/CPU or whatever system Boot to USB Double check all drives are detected and are in the correct order in the array Start the array Done. Boooom Roasted!

What Sorcery is Unraid?

Why is Unraid able to be moved from computer to computer and from different hardware to different hardware with relative ease? Part of the magic with Unraid, aside from the Fel, is with the design and implementation of the linux kernel it runs. Unraid could perhaps be better categorized as an appliance because it’s more dedicated to a specific function than a true operating system would be.



Okay, that’s cool but why?

The reason why you can plug Unraid into virtually any hardware is because every time the system boots, the root file system gets loaded into RAM. So each reboot/boot means you are essentially starting with a fresh copy of the Unraid operating system. Traditional operating systems install the root file system onto some storage medium, like a hard drive or SSD for example. There are pro’s and con’s for this type of behavior, obviously the biggest pro is Unraid being hardware agnostic and another being that if the OS gets broken, rebooting it will restore the OS. Some Plugins can break this ability and there is the possibility of modifications to the OS config data that can break Unraid as well. However, in most cases, booting to safe mode (which skips loading plugins during boot) helps in alleviating potential OS issues or helps to figure out where the issue lies.

The Ryzen Build

Cool now that we talked about that a bit let’s talk about the build and then the why, the who, what, when, the where.

Here is the previous build most of the stuff was migrated to this build.