A little additional info on one of our FAQs please.

[marti1973]

Wonder if you can give me an opinion on this one.

I built my first FreeNAS using 7.xx and a copy of Learning FreeNAS by Gary Sims (well worth having). It's a simple spec' of

Two SATA HDD of 200Gb
FreeNas RAID 1 mirror giving about 170Gb of usable storage
Boots from a 128Mb flash drive in a USB port
Shared over a mixed Win7 & Ubuntu12.4 network

I lost visibility of the share and investigation showed that one HDD was inaccessable. Replaced it with an identical drive but it could not be detected despite swapping cables etc. Swapping both drives to another PC suggested they are OK (they spin-up) and it may be the controller that suspect.
In-order to refresh my memory on the set up, I built another FreeNAS using v8.xx which worked perfectly.

My query is, if I build another fresh FreeNAS in either v7 or v8 (newer PC and new flash drive) and introduce the two SATA HDD from my first v7 build, how do I rescue the data? Found this in our FAQs:

1) If my hardware/motherboard dies, can I rebuild with new/different hardware and still import/read the data from my disks? What about my datasets?

YES, as long as you aren't using hardware RAID and let ZFS handle the RAID; datasets are basically a folder/directory that lives on your volume with your other files, but have a separate mountpoint, such as /mnt/your-pool/dataset_1

Any addition guidance along these lines such as how do I introduce the original HDDs and do they have to be in a certain order or a safe ways to rescue the data, would be much appreciated.

Great bit of coding; I've just been a bit unlucky with the hardware I suspect.

 

[marti1973]

Any advantage to V7 or v8 if I just fresh build and pop the drives in?

Any advantage to V7 or v8 if I just fresh build and pop the drives in?

Cheers

 

[marti1973]

Planning to build a V8 with spare dive, remove the HDD and trash the build.

Planning to build a V8 with spare dive, remove the HDD and trash the build. The Rebuild the V8 and re-add the original drives. All prior to risking my V7 drives with valuable dat. Does this sound a resonable trial? Does it matter how the drives are re-added?

Incidentally, still getting "Action required to acyivate membership" emails from the V8 forum. Can these be stopped as my memberehip appears complete?

 

[marti1973]

Tested further on this, discovered that simply swapping two SATA drives causes no issues. FreeNAs just picked them up and the test data was safe. Ran out of time to try the same with a fresh build.