Adding drive without formating

[IllNate]

I used to run a raspberry pi4 as my NAS, but now I'm upgrading to an unraid setup. I have 2 new disks installed in the array, plus an SSD cache. But now I want to add the data (and the disk, format is ext4) from my old setup to the array. Once the data is moved, I'll clear the disk and add it to the array in the xfs format. 

 

What is the best way to add the data on this new disk to my array? I read a post about unassigned devices plugin, would that method be bottle-necked by the network? Would it be better to just mount the disks from the console and "cp -r" the contents to the data drive? Looking to copy about 3TB of data, so would really like to avoid a network copy if possible. 

 

Thanks,

Nate

Edited September 18, 2020 by IllNate

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, IllNate said:

Looking to copy about 3TB of data, so would really like to avoid a network copy if possible. 

As long as you have a gigabit network, you really won't gain much if any speed locally.

[trurl]

Unassigned Devices will let you mount a network share, but it is more commonly used to mount a disk on the server without assigning it to array or pool.

 

You can mount ext4 disk with Unassigned Devices, copy its data to the array. Then add the disk to a new slot and Unraid will clear it and let you format it as XFS.

[IllNate]

Thanks, yes, I would prefer to mount it on my unraid server if possible. Mounting ext4 on my windows PC over USB, would be a bit troublesome. I already have the drive installed in the unraid server as well. Thanks!

[IllNate]

Ok, so this has been a huge pain. UD wouldn't mount the ext4 drive. I'm new to unraid, but the pages I read said there should be a little plus sign next to the drives. There is not. I switched from a sata connection to a USB connection. Same thing. Then I attempted to mount the drive on my windows PC using Ext2Fsd, but that also failed. Then I fell back to my raspberry pi4, and the drive mounts fine, all my files are there, but for some reason the pi won't mount the samba share. I'm hesitant to just ftp the files from the pi to unraid because I assume I'll have to go back and fix permissions and stuff.

 

What did I do wrong with UD. What are the steps to mounting a drive? Does UD support ext4?

[JonathanM]

2 hours ago, IllNate said:

Then I fell back to my raspberry pi4, and the drive mounts fine, all my files are there, but for some reason the pi won't mount the samba share.

Try using UD to connect the pi4 share.

[IllNate]

The pi share isn't working, this is what prompted the upgrade. I'm sure I could get it working again, but I was hoping to get unassigned devices working.

 

This is what I see: 

 

Why don't I see a plus sign next to the disk or am I reading old tutorials and the new version has no plus sign?

 

Thanks,

Nate

[trurl]

If it's mountable in UD you should see a Mount button and it should show the filesystem under FS. UD does support ext4 but apparently nothing but your pi recognizes that disk as ext4.

 

What OS is your pi?

 

 

[IllNate]

Well, I ended up getting my Ubuntu PC back online (stole the PSU out of it while I was waiting for the unraid's PSU to come in the mail). Ubuntu connected to the ext4 drive just fine and I was able to upload the files. I'm not sure why UD had trouble with it... 

 

Now that the drive is empty, I can finally add it to my array. 

 

FYI: The Pi was Raspbian 10 (buster), kernel v4.19.118.