Moving Data from WHS


hunter69

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I am say 2 days away from building my first unraid server.  I will be migrating all my dvd/blurays from whs.  This will be around the 3tb mark.  SO I imagine moving this amount of data over the wire would be a very slow process.  I am looking for suggestions as to the fastest way to move a large amount of data from WHS to unraid.

 

Thanks for any help you can provide

Bill

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No problem removing the drives.  I did not know if a person can remove a drive from whs and copy directly from the disk (i was womdering this due to the drive pooling feature of whs).  So If I can remove the harddrive's from whs, plug the drive into the unraid server and copy data from the drive to the array, this would be much faster.

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No problem removing the drives.  I did not know if a person can remove a drive from whs and copy directly from the disk (i was womdering this due to the drive pooling feature of whs).  So If I can remove the harddrive's from whs, plug the drive into the unraid server and copy data from the drive to the array, this would be much faster.

You will only be able to mount the disk in the unRAID server if is an individual NTFS of FAT file-system.  I doubt it will understand the WHS pool formatted drive.
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That is what I was worried about, so it sounds like my only option is to move the data over the lan.  If someone else has found a better way I would love it.  I know I could copy and paste the data onto a external usb drive but I do not have one and do not really want to buy one for this project.

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That is what I was worried about, so it sounds like my only option is to move the data over the lan.  If someone else has found a better way I would love it.  I know I could copy and paste the data onto a external usb drive but I do not have one and do not really want to buy one for this project.

Just let it go over the LAN.  Make sure you have a gigabit connection (if possible) start the copy, and verify it when done.  I understand Teracopy will do the verification for you.  I think you can get a windows version of rsync to do the same and verify the copy too.

 

I copied 5.5TB from my older server to my newer one over the course of several days.  I used "rsync" and it went pretty fast for the amount of data I was moving.  Much of the time I was doing other things... occasionally I checked to see how it was progressing.

 

Joe L.

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I'm copying data from one drive to another using MC and it's only going at 8mbs.  I suspect it's because both drives are on the SM-8 card.  Would it be better to unassign the parity drive, start up the array and copy? 

 

That leads me to my second question.  When I am copying from one drive to another I do notice that the light on my parity drive is flashing.  What exactly is the parity drive doing?  It's not actually updating the parity drive is it?  I thought that was wat the parity check was for?

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Yes, it is updating the parity drive.  Every time to write to any data disk in the array, the parity drive is updated.  Same if you modify or delete files.  It doesn't matter if the source is another computer or another disk in the array.

 

A parity check just reads back all the data and parity info to make sure they add up correctly.  If they don't, it corrects it and logs a sync error (hopefully you will never see these).

 

Still, even with parity updating, 8 mb/s is pretty slow.  It shouldn't matter that both drives on are the SuperMicro card.

 

Post a syslog?

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  • 2 months later...

Are you willing to remove drives from the WHS server?  With the UNMenu module you can easily mount the NTFS drives in UNRaid and then use MC (Midnight Commander) via a telnet or console session on the unraid server to copy the data drive to drive.

 

No problem removing the drives.  I did not know if a person can remove a drive from whs and copy directly from the disk (i was womdering this due to the drive pooling feature of whs).  So If I can remove the harddrive's from whs, plug the drive into the unraid server and copy data from the drive to the array, this would be much faster.

You will only be able to mount the disk in the unRAID server if is an individual NTFS of FAT file-system.  I doubt it will understand the WHS pool formatted drive.

 

That is what I was worried about, so it sounds like my only option is to move the data over the lan.  If someone else has found a better way I would love it.  I know I could copy and paste the data onto a external usb drive but I do not have one and do not really want to buy one for this project.

 

I'm also going to be doing a WHS->unRAID transfer once I get my server. Not sure this is still relevant considering the date of this thread, but it might be of use to someone else down the line.

 

It is, in fact, possible to read the data off the WHS without going over the network. The only sticking point would be whether unRAID can access "hidden" files on an NTFS drive. If it can, then all that needs to be done - theoretically - is to use the method outlined by jazzysmooth.

 

Here's the relevant article:

 

http://www.servethehome.com/recover-data-windows-home-server-failed-drive/

 

I, personally, would just power down the whole WHS setup and physically remove the drive rather than removing it first from the pool. That way you can just re-insert and powerup and be back to as-is in no time. Hope this helps someone else in the future!

 

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unRAID can mount and read NTFS drives, including hidden files.   You'll need to follow the directions in the wiki as it is entirely on the command line unless you install the user-add-on of "unMENU" 

 

If you install the add-on ntfs-3g driver you can also write to NTFS drives.

 

Good to know, thanks!

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I did not know if a person can remove a drive from whs and copy directly from the disk (i was womdering this due to the drive pooling feature of whs).

 

I went through this exact transition (WHS->UnRAID) a few months ago.  You may already have found this out, but there's nothing really all that special about how WHS stores data.  As others have said, once you mount the disks as NTFS you'll find all of your data under \DE\Shares on each disk.  Simple as that.

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