Coming from MDADM RAID5 to UNRaid

[Dimtar]

Hi All

 

I am currently running a machine with a 250GB HDD with Fedora 15 installed. I also have six x 2TB Hitachi drives with a little over 2TB of data currently.

What I am wondering is there anyway someone can think of moving to UNraid without having to move all the data onto an external drive.

 

I thought maybe remove one of the drives from the RAID5, copy over as much data as possible to this singular hard drive and copy the rest to an external HDD.

Boot into UNRAID and create array and move data back from there. Could anyone suggest a way that doesn't include using an external drive, may not be possible but worth asking.

 

Thanks!

[vca]

Any drive you remove from a RAID5 array will be unusable, this is because of the way the data and parity are striped across all drives in a RAID5 array.

 

The easiest way of doing your data migration would be to have a network connection between the old box and the new unRAID box and then copy the data across the LAN (perhaps using rsync).  Figure on write speeds of 20-35MB/s if writing to drives that are parity protected or something in the 40-60MB/s range if writing to an unprotected cache drive. So roughly 12-24 hours to copy the 2TB.

 

The next way is with an externally attached USB drive.

 

The third way is to add an extra internal drive to the old system, format it with a file system that unRAID can read (reiser, ext3, ...), copy your data to it and then move the drive into the unRAID box (but do not add it to the protected array) and then copy the data to the desired location on the protected array.

 

For 2TB of data I'd go with the network copy and just let it run overnight.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

 

 

 

[jamerson9]

I thought maybe remove one of the drives from the RAID5, copy over as much data as possible to this singular hard drive and copy the rest to an external HDD.

By this, you mean to run your RAID 5 array in fault mode, by taking out one drive and copy 2TB of files to this extracted drive?

Well if your risk level or the worth of losing the data is below ~$70, I'd say go for it. 

 

I'd try and find some disk space in any nooks and crannies of any systems you might already have or borrow. You would be surprised on how much space you can dig up by doing some spring cleaning.

 

If not just purchase a 2TB drive and play it safe and end up with a nice 12TB usable space unRAID server.

 

 

[Dimtar]

Just as an update I ended up doing the following.

 

Borrowed three 1TB drives from work, open up my RAID on Fedora and copied the files into 3 less then 930GB folders. Formatted the three drives as NTFS, as RFS wouldn't work and copied the data across. Once that was done I booted up UNRAID and sorted out the array.

 

Lastly I load the NTFS3G driver and I am copying the data back. Nearly done too.