Migrating from WHS to NAS

E

elleana

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 15, 2006
Messages
2,590
I have a spiffy little WHS box which I've had quite a lot of fun tinkering with. However, lately I notice that I hardly every use any of its abilities anymore and its just a glorified NAS. I'm thinking of gutting my WHS and using the parts for other projects and moving all my HDDs into a NAS, except for one very big problem.

Since WHS pools all disks into one huge disk and stores data there, anyone have any suggestions on how to move the same disks into a NAS and migrate all the data? I believe I have around 1.5TB to 2TB of data on my WHS right now. Obviously I can't just move drives over, so anyone have any experience with this?

[Yes, I realize buying a new WD 2TB drive is an option but... any cheaper solution?]
 
Depending on the drives you have... Move it a bit at a time? Obviously you'll need enough spare parts to have the NAS up at the same time as the WHS...

Bring the NAS up with the biggest spare drive you have, move enough data off the WHS to pull a drive out, move it to the NAS. Rinse, Lather, Repeat.

This is what I plan on doing when I rebuild my WHS boxen.
 
If the NAS reads NTFS you should have no problem. AFAIK, WHS just uses plain NTFS with reparse points for replication... you can pull any of the storage drives out of the WHS pool and read it directly.
 
I went through this recently.. It took a bit of shuffling data becuase I didn't want to buy any more drives. I had to move enough from my WHS to my main box so that I could remove one of the drives from the pool. Then I moved it over to the NAS..

It gets tricky if you have to setup the NAS as a raid.. which I did. I had to move everything over to a spare disk and then setup the raid and then remigrate it all over.

But now I went the easy route and bought a DROBO that's stuffed with 4 1tb drives and a Promise NAS that has 4 500gigers in a Raid5

Zack
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top