Hi Guys,  I've gone through what seems like a million migration posts and haven't come across an answer for a situation like mine.

 

I currently run a R710 with 4 3tb drives for storage and a 4tb parity drive.  I have the server a little over half filled(6+tb) and the total size is nice for me.

 

I recently acquired an R720 with better processors more ram and a full 16 900GB SAS drives.  I'm trying to figure out how to move my data with minimal downtime.  I have a few VM's which run checks against client web servers that I would like to keep intact.  And of course the family uses plex daily.

 

I know I will have to upgrade my unraid license for the expanded number of drives.  But how do I move everything over to a smaller set of drives?  I'll wait to move the cache drive until after the data is moved.   And since these are new to me drives(and not brand new) a pre-clear would probably be a good idea. I still have 60 days warrantied on the server so I would like to pre-flight the machine and drives a bit if possible.  

 

Everything I've seen on the forum is migrating the other way smaller drives to larger.  So any suggestions for this migration?

Edited July 18, 20205 yr by Skitzo2000
Solved, edited topic

You can move from the old drives mounted with UD to a user share on the new array.

The old drives are 3.5's the new server uses 2.5's  And I don't really have an easy way to mount the old drives to the new system except by a usb 2.0 interface so transfers would be super slow.  Plus once I plug my USB into the new system my old system is down until the system completes the pre-clear's.  So I end up with a pretty large downtime.

You can copy over lan from the old server.

That would require me to have two licenses for unraid though?

You can use any other Linux distro or use a trial license.

For some reason I thought the trial license limited you on the number of drives.   Obviously that is not true anymore.   Thanks so much