• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Migrating from external hard drives - how do I do this?

J

jonathan1984

n00b
Joined
Dec 14, 2007
Messages
5
My current storage situation is something like this: I have five external drives of various capacities that I would like to migrate to a NAS setup. I've acquired the parts for a homebuild NAS setup. What I can't figure out is... how do I set the array up so I can migrate all my files and reuse my drives.

I know the idiot-proof way to do this is to let each drive be its own JBOD, but it sort of defeats the purpose of getting a NAS. I also don't really have the money to replace four hard drives.

The sizes of my external drives are:
- one 4TB drive
- two 3TB drives
- two 2TB drives

Of that 14TB in capacity, I have 3TB in free space. I also bought a new 4TB drive as part of this project. So, how do I migrate all this data to a NAS setup without having to buy new drives? Any help would be sincerely appreciated. (Currently I'm planning on using NAS4Free, but if there are suggested alternatives they would be welcome, too.
 
Is this for an HTPC (meaning data that almost never changes but files are added or deleted)? If so consider snapraid and whatever OS you want and keep the drives as they are. For snapraid you will want 2 parity disks and they have to be as at least as large as the largest disk in your storage.
 
If I understand you correctly, you are going to build a home NAS and reuse your external drives (as internal drives) but you have no where to copy the data currently on your external drives. The only way is to either borrow storage space or buy drives, especially if you want to implement RAID on the NAS.
 
jonathan1984 said:
NTFS.
Click to expand...

You can keep that and keep in on windows if you use snapraid. However you have not mentioned what your purpose of the nas is and what you expect from it.

Also your current disks are not at all convenient for raid. I mean on zfs (which you will be using with NAS4Free) you could have a few mirrored vdevs in your pool but that would 1/2 your space. Your disks being all different sizes do not lend themselves well for raidz1, raidz2, or raidz3.
 
drescherjm said:
You can keep that and keep in on windows if you use snapraid. However you have not mentioned what your purpose of the nas is and what you expect from it.

Also your current disks are not at all convenient for raid. I mean on zfs (which you will be using with NAS4Free) you could have a few mirrored vdevs in your pool but that would 1/2 your space. Your disks being all different sizes do not lend themselves well for raidz1, raidz2, or raidz3.
Click to expand...

It's mostly for HTPC and video storage, so I looked into SnapRAID as was suggested earlier. That's what I'll be using going forward - I'm migrating my files gradually to ext4 on a Fedora box, and once that's done I'll put in SnapRAID.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top