Adding disks 1 at a time?

[drumstyk1]

Hey guys, I am assembling my first build tonight and trying to do as much homework as possible. I am having trouble finding a definitive answer to my Q with the search.

 

I have 4x 2TB drives that are nearly full in a win 7 machine. I bought 1 more 2tb drive that is still in the box. Is this the best procedure for not losing my data?

[*]preclear drive A (new, blank drive)

[*]add drive to array

[*]copy content from drive B to drive A

[*]preclear drive B

[*]lather rinse repeat for each?

 

I understand that my data will be unprotected until i add a parity drive as the final step (since i don't want to rebuild the parity over and over)

 

Is my understanding here correct? I don't suppose there is a better way short of having 8tb of backup space?

Thanks for all the help! I have learned so much from this forum and I am excited to get started tonight!

[JonathanM]

Since you are nearly out of space, I'd get another 2TB drive to give you more breathing room when you are done. As it stands right now, you will end up with 4 data drives that are once again full, and you will be risking your data multiple times along the way.

 

After parity is built once, you don't need to rebuild it every time you add a drive, and preclearing reduces the time to add a new drive into the array to a few minutes instead of several hours.

 

If you have 2 new precleared drives, you can assign 1 as parity, 1 as data, build parity once and start copying from your first windows drive onto a protected array. If you use a file level verified copy like teracopy or similar, your data risk is very low, and you can be confident in your data before you start preclearing the windows drive you just finished copying from. After the drive passes a couple preclear cycles, you can add it to the unraid box in a matter of minutes, and start the copy process from the second windows drive, and repeat until you are done, at which point you will end up with 2TB free space. Unraid gets a little cranky and slow when you fill the drives completely anyway.

[drumstyk1]

I will have to look into teracopy! I will also order another drive but I'm too impatient to wait for it . I also just stumbled across SNAP. It sounds like this could allow me to pop in my full windows drive straight into my unraid box and transfer the data via sata instead of trying to LAN it from my win machine? I am still looking into this but my first drive is 98% done preclearing (@ 25.5 hrs). I underestimated how long this process will take with this many drives, sheesh! I am trying to take my time and read as much as possible to make sure i don't mudge anything up!

[JonathanM]

SNAP could probably work for you, but it will remove one link in the chain that you will be using on a daily basis. My reasoning is this, why not exercise the newly built system as hard as you can, exactly as you would be using it after everything is copied over and settled down. If you eliminate your network from the transfer, yes, it may speed things up, but you won't know if the network connection is solid and reliable.

 

In my opinion you should take as much time and exercise the system as much as possible before you rely on it to keep your data safe. If you don't care about your data, then by all means take as many shortcuts and speed up the process by any means necessary.

 

It's much less stressful to troubleshoot any problems you might encounter if your data isn't at risk.