First Time Build - Advice on Transfer of Data

[dannycorker]

Hi all,

 

I'm approaching my first unRAID system, as I finally have almost all the components. As it's a first time I'm starting simple with a HP Microserver, and am after some advice on transferring my existing data to the array once all is up and running.

 

At the moment, I have two 2TB external HDDS full of data that I would like to have stored on the NAS ultimately. I also have an empty 2TB drive and an empty 1TB drive (As well as the 250GB drive that coms with the Microserver, but as it is such a small amount I'm not really factoring it into my plans).

 

From my understanding so far, my plan is the to preclear and add the empty spare drives first, choosing neither as parity initially. I can then copy one of the external drives contents to the array, add the now empty drive, and repeat with the 2nd external, before finally assigning the last added 2TB drive as parity, with the other two 2TBs and the 1TB acting as data storage. My question (hoping I have not made any stupid assumptions so far) is what the best way to transfer nearly 4TB of data will be? Attach the drives as USB? Copy over the network from Windows? Or is there some way I can mount them without preclearing just to copy the data off them, and then proceed with the preclear etc?

 

I hope I've not said anything too stupid, although I'm sure I'll have made some mistakes somewhere! And please go easy on the newbie if so - there's only so much I can be 100% confident of from reading without having a system to play around with, and once I do have the system to play around with I want to have it up and running as soon as possible, not making silly mistakes early on.

 

Thanks!

[joshpond]

From my understanding so far, my plan is the to preclear and add the empty spare drives first, choosing neither as parity initially. I can then copy one of the external drives contents to the array, add the now empty drive, and repeat with the 2nd external, before finally assigning the last added 2TB drive as parity, with the other two 2TBs and the 1TB acting as data storage. My question (hoping I have not made any stupid assumptions so far) is what the best way to transfer nearly 4TB of data will be? Attach the drives as USB? Copy over the network from Windows? Or is there some way I can mount them without preclearing just to copy the data off them, and then proceed with the preclear etc?

 

If you preclear the usb hdds with your data on them before you transfer you will lose all the data on them. Preclear zeros the whole drive.

 

Probably not the best to help you with this but I see a few ways to copy the data.

 

1) The easiest is plug the usb into the windows PC and copy over the network. Anyone can do this.

 

2) harder but probably faster and better is to mount the usb hdd on the server and rsync the data across.

 

Josh

[RobJ]

The FAQ has some help with that, specifically the following:

  "Is there a guide to moving all of my existing data to my new unRAID server?"