I have my server started and all my disks have been pre cleared and formatted. I am not doing the parity disk for the moment.

Here are my questions:

- how do I make all my disks show up as one volume in my network? I know unRaid does not work as a regular NAS with striping but I read somewhere that building a share does the trick of showing one volume for all my drives. How?

 

- I have all my data on external drives formatted as NTFS and i can connect them to my unRaid using an eSata port. When connected unRaid gives them a name, like /dev/sdg for exemple. How then do i access their data and copy it to the unRaid volume/disks?

 

Thank you

I have my server started and all my disks have been pre cleared and formatted. I am not doing the parity disk for the moment.

Here are my questions:

- how do I make all my disks show up as one volume in my network? I know unRaid does not work as a regular NAS with striping but I read somewhere that building a share does the trick of showing one volume for all my drives. How?

 

- I have all my data on external drives formatted as NTFS and i can connect them to my unRaid using an eSata port. When connected unRaid gives them a name, like /dev/sdg for exemple. How then do i access their data and copy it to the unRaid volume/disks?

 

Thank you

First... be VERY careful.  Do not "format" or create reiser file systems on your external disks.  that will erase them.  One user recently pressed a "Create ReiserFS" button in unMENU and re-formatted their NTFS drive because it was not recognized, because the driver was not loaded.  The basic advice is... follow the wiki, type

modprobe ntfs

to load the driver, then proceed.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Copy_files_from_a_NTFS_drive

 

The wiki gives instructions on how to connect NTFS drives as read only.  You MUST either manually load the read-only-ntfs driver, or install the ntfs-3g driver to access your data.  The device name /dev/sdg is for the entire drive. You do NOT want to use it when mounting your disks.  Your data is probably on the first partition /dev/sdg1 but could be on a second ( /dev/sdg2) depending on how the disk was partitioned. 

 

the other issue is you just need to enable "user-shares" but since you did not tell us which version of unRAID you are running, you'll need to find that in the settings yourself.

 

Joe L.

I am sure someone will chime in on setting up user shares (I don't use them so will not attempt to explain).

 

But I would urge you to use the disk shares initially to transfer your data to the array disks.

 

The user shares have a "split level" setting that is confusing to many users.  And getting it wrong will cause related files (even in the same subdirectory) to be split across multiple physical disks.  This condition is not optimal - since it can cause disk spinups at awkward moments.  Cleaning this up can be way more time consuming than recopying everything!

 

Once your data is loaded, you will still be able to set up the user shares and view the entire array as one thing if that is your goal.