Migrating from old NAS to unRAID

[chop69]

I currently have a 6 GB array in a ReadyNAS encloser, but am migrating to a new unRAID build.  The unRAID server is up and running with 3 4TB disks, and now it is time to migrate my data from the old NAS to the new.  At first, I just did a straight copy use a separate Windows machine, but the estimate was >24 hours since I was essentially halving my throughput passing in through the windows box and back out.  Surely there must be some way of copying directly from the old NAS to the new?

 

I'm by no means a Linux command line expert, but I did telnet into the unraid and tried to mount the share from the ReadyNAS with the command "mount -t cifs //192.168.1.50/media /mnt/readynas" it  prompts me for my password, but then rejects with "mount error (95) Operation not supported"

 

Is this just something above and beyond what a basic unRAID setup can do?

[garycase]

Going through the Windows box doesn't slow anything down, so that's what I'd do.

 

The fastest your UnRAID server is going to write is going to be in the range of 35-40GB/s.

 

A Gb network can transfer over 120GB/s ... so there's plenty of bandwidth to read data from your old server and write it to the new UnRAID box at the maximum write speed.

 

[RickInHouston]

I did basically what you are doing.  Since I had a backup copy of everything (the original NAS) I'd copy to the unraid without the parity drive assigned.  I moved my data over in chunks (about 50 movies at a time, but most were dvd's and not blu-rays).  Once all done I set up the parity drive.  Did a parity check and left my original NAS until I was sure all was sound.

[dirtysanchez]

Going through the Windows box doesn't slow anything down, so that's what I'd do.

 

The fastest your UnRAID server is going to write is going to be in the range of 35-40GB/s.

 

A Gb network can transfer over 120GB/s ... so there's plenty of bandwidth to read data from your old server and write it to the new UnRAID box at the maximum write speed.

 

Unless he's doing it before a parity drive is assigned, in which case he could read and write at 100MB/s easily.  So in this particular instance, yes, going through the Windows machine would slow it down.  OP doesn't state whether or not one of the drives is parity, but like garycase, I'm going to assume one is.

 

If you were to do it like RickInHouston states, by unassign the parity drive so you can write at the native speed of the drives and copying between the two via Windows you could get ~60MB/s throughput.  The assign the parity drive and let it build parity.  The data being unprotected in the mean time is not an issue as you have a full backup on the ReadyNAS.

 

Obviously the fastest way would be a direct transfer between the two machines (with parity unassigned in unRAID).  If parity is assigned you're going to get ~40MB/s writes max.  Unfortunately I can't help you here with mounting the ReadyNAS share on unRAID, as I know nothing about the ReadyNAS boxes and I'm still a Linux novice.  Have you tried mounting it via SMB or NFS?

[chop69]

What I meant by halving my bandwidth was the bandwidth of the middleman computer.  I can easily read from my existing NAS at ~110MB/s, saturating my gigabit connection.  If it's simultaneously reading and writing to the new unRAID box, even at only 40MB/s, it's still going to slow the whole process down.

 

I was able to do what I wanted to basically in reverse.  From the command line in the ReadyNAS, I mounted the unRAID box, and did the copy from that end.  A day and a half later, I'm done.