Starting from scratch but using the data in old HDDs?

[delirial]

Hi,

 

My old server died a while ago. When I moved, I decided to leave the old box behind and just take the drives and USB. (Cheaping out on moving costs...)

 

I'm now about to setup a new server. The plan is to buy a Lenovo TS440 and use higher capacity drives (4TB-6TB), because the box can hold fewer drives than I had before.

 

Would it be possible to mount the old drives somewhere (maybe a linux box, or maybe in the server without making them part of the array and doing them one-by-one) and move the old data to the new drives? What are my options, other than rebuilding the old array?

 

Thanks,

delirial

[ysss]

Technically if you put them all in a new (unraid) server in any order,  as long as the parity drive is in the correct slot, the array should start right up and you just need to run parity check to confirm things.

 

Alternatively, each drive can be mounted individually and you can access the data as long as the OS can handle the filesystem (reiserfs). BUT, once a drive is mounted on its own, it wll lose the ability to be rejoined to the array that it belonged to.

 

So i'd reckon the most ideal way is to setup a temporary unraid server to hold your old drives and copy everything to the new server (through network), since this will keep the redundancy of the data throughout the transfer. But if yoq dont have access to an adequate temp server and the data is replacable, personally i'd grab a listing of all the content of the drives, check their smart attributes to see that they're at comfortable levels, and just copy the drives one by one to the new server.

[Frank1940]

Hi,

 

Would it be possible to mount the old drives somewhere (maybe a linux box, or maybe in the server without making them part of the array and doing them one-by-one) and move the old data to the new drives? What are my options, other than rebuilding the old array?

 

 

You didn't give us much information about any other systems you have but there are a couple of programs which will  allow you to read data disks from unRAID servers in Windows.  Here  is a link to them:

 

      http://yareg.akucom.de/

and

      http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

 

It will take a lot of time to copy any large volume of data across a network but it is probably the simplest way to do it.  Several years ago when I converted my server from FreeNAS to unRAID, I copied about 3TB of data from a backup of the FreeNAS server back to the reconfigured hardware which was running unRAID.  I did it at night in a week to ten days.

 

NOTE: As a point of disclosure, I have not used either one of them but they were each recommended by some unRAID user who had employed them to do exactly what you want to do.

 

[ysss]

If you use gigabit network, it probably won't be your bottleneck. A common unraid array writes at sustained 40MB/s while gigabit network can do more than 2x that. I've been copying 4tb drives as i convert them to xfs within unraid, each one takes about 28hrs in my system at around 40mb/s ish.

 

If time/power consumption is your consideration, don't start the array yet. Just copy all data from old drives to new drives, put all new drives to the new unraid and create a new array and tell it to retain all data from the drives. It should just start to create the parity from that point on.

[trurl]

You should be able to do this all within the new system.

 

Just build the new system, but don't put in the parity drive yet. Instead, use that slot for putting each old drive in and copy its data onto the new drives. Remove that old drive, put in the next and copy its data, etc. Then when all of the data is on the new drives, put the parity drive in and build parity.

 

Since you will still have all of the data on the old drives it should be pretty safe to run without parity until you have finished copying everything, and writing the new drives will also be faster without parity. Another advantage of this method is you can format the new drives to XFS if you want.