Hey all. I am considering migrating from WHS v1 + DAS to some other OS (Windows, Unraid, etc) to gain 2TB+ drive usage.

 

I'm not finding too much on the Internet regarding migrating from WHS v1 to Unraid but I did have a question regarding data transfer. I have 18-20TB of data on the WHS setup. How do I go about migrating/keeping that data if I were to install Unraid? I've read about pre-clearing drives and that would erase my data.

 

Here's my config:

WHS

AMD X2-245 64-bit

A785GM-M based mobo

2GB memory

AOC-SASLP-MV8 (1 8087 port support 4 drives, 1 port connected to expander)

7 2TB drive

 

DAS

HP SAS Expander

8 2TB drives

 

 

I recently did a WHS to Unraid transfer.

 

I bought a new drive to start as my parity drive, then drained a disk from the WHS box to start the process. By running the "Remove Disk" wizard within WHS it will move all your data off it and onto other space in your WHS box. Once I had drained the disk, I installed it in my new Unraid box in bay 2 (bay 1 being the new party drive) and built the unit up. I did a clear on the drive, created a share on the array (with a single drive), and exposed it over the network.

 

It's then just a question of copying data off WHS into the new Unraid share, then deleting said copied data data off WHS to free up a drive to run the Remove Disk wizard again. Drain a disk, move it to Unraid box, clear it, add it to the Share, and then copy more data off WHS.

 

You do eventually have to delete data off WHS, so to protect from failure I let Parity build each time I did a disk transfer. That way I was never in a situation that I couldn't recover from a drive failure.

Thanks for the reply!

 

So I will need 2 server it seems then? There's no way to keep my current hardware and "update" in some manner?

In the last couple months I've transitioned from a WHS 2007 v1 environment to Unraid 6.1.6.  There was no direct migration or upgrade path. 

 

Copied the WHS data about 500 GB to a USB disk, after Unraid was operational copied the data back.  I took the opportunity to upgrade the system proc, MB, memory, PS, case.

 

Before dismantling WHS I used VMware's VM converter to establish a VMWare image of WHS.  I attempted to migrate this image from VMWare to KVM without success.  Thus today WHS runs under VMWare Workstation 12.x I have here locally on another host if I need to fall back to it.

 

With your situation having 20 TB of WHS data doing a temporary migration to another set of HD's is likely not realistic.

 

Thought about pumping your data up to a backup storage provider, then pulling it back down once you have Unraid operational?

What I did was get a spare disk and preclear it.  Take all my WHS disks and keep them safe, setup Unraid on the same box with just the new drive.  Mount the first Windows disk, copy data across, rinse and repeat. 

 

Time consuming and no redundancy whilst this process is on going but for me that was a risk I was prepared to take and my most important data is backed up anyway.