I'm physically building my new server as we speak.  Moving from a windows JBOD configuration, so I'm going to have to format all my drives.  Will I be able to hook my old drives (unformatted) up to the server via SATA cable and transfer the data over to my new drives that are already formatted to whatever file system unRAID uses?  Or will I have to use my USB SATA dock?

I would think a USB-SATA dock would work, install the unassigned devices plugin and connect your drive, you will have to share it out so you can access the drive from another system to then copy it to a share on your newly created unRAID server.

I would think a USB-SATA dock would work, install the unassigned devices plugin and connect your drive, you will have to share it out so you can access the drive from another system to then copy it to a share on your newly created unRAID server.

 

Hey thanks for the reply!

 

What do you mean by "you will have to share it out so you can access the drive from another system"?  I hadn't heard of the unassigned devices plugin before, so thanks for the heads up on that.

 

I figured it would work with the USB-SATA dock, but I figured the data transfer would go quicker if both drives were connected via SATA.  Do you think it would work like that as well?

So you are going to create a new array and you want to copy data to it from the drive you are going to attached using the unassigned device plugin, correct? You'll need to do this from another pc, so your source needs to be shared out so the pc you are doing this from can access the data, and your destination, on the array needs a share so it too is accessible from the pc you are doing this from and so you have a place to copy to. Does that make sense, or is it more confusing?

For a single NTFS based drive, well, connect that drive to your unraid system.

Use the 'unassigned devices' plug in and mount that extra drive into your unraid system.

At the unraid prompt, type:

mc

This will run Midnight Commander, a text based front end that makes it easy to copy files around. 

 

The only gotcha I think was a few folks found it difficult to mount NTFS partitions into unraid.

 

But if your Windows system is using some hardware RAID (even JBOD), then all bets are off.  Taking a single drive out would not neccessarily be readable in any machine, let alone an unraid machine.

It won't be possible to have both the new unRAID and the old Windows box up at the same time?