Advice needed on how to transition to a NAS.

[danrod963]

Hello Everyone,

I am a NAS noob in need of some expert advice on how to migrate many years of data stored across multiple disks and PCs into one consolidated machine running FreeNAS. I'm still in the planning stages, but I'm hoping to gain as much knowledge to make this project go smoothly.

I currently have about 8 "storage" disks varying in size from 320gb to 1tb spread out over 4 PCs in my home, all at about 70% capacity or more. A lot of that is manual "back-up" of data... just direct copies of everything from drive A on PC 1 to drive B on PC 2... I know, I know, worst waste of space ever, but I didn't know any better back then.

My primary question is, what is the best plan of attack to transfer data from these disks and into a NAS while still utilizing the same physical disks in the new NAS machine.

Will I be able to start with two clean disks in say volume 1, and transfer data from other disks onto that volume, then create a new volume 2 with disks with those new free disks? Can I continue this type of pattern progressively until I've created the highest capacity volume possible?

Impossible? Too much of a hassle?

Should I just start out with buying new 1tb disks and forget about reusing the old ones (this seems like such a waste to me)?

Should I just setup each disk independently? Having them together in a single machine that is networked is improvement enough then it is now.

Any suggestions are much appreciated.

Thanks

 

[ben]

If you're above 50% utilization across all the disks, you're going to find it very difficult to migrate like that while also introducing redundancy (mirrors or RAID arrays). Do you have any sets of 2 or more identical disks in that bunch? If so, you can probably recycle them pretty readily into a NAS (in different ways depending on how many you have). I would then get new drives to fulfill the rest of your needs.

For example, if you have 3 1TB drives of the same model, you can use those as a RAID-Z volume, and go get new disks to fill the rest of the capacity (say, 5 more 1TB disks in a separate RAID-Z volume).

If every disk is different... you're just setting yourself up for either even greater inefficiency or huge data loss if you try to use them all together.

 

[Stephens]

Too much of a hassle? Should I just start out with buying new 1tb disks and forget about reusing the old ones (this seems like such a waste to me)?

First, read noobsauce80's guide on ZFS.

 

[danrod963]

Thanks for the input ben. I would have to say that I only have two pairs of disks are that are absolutely identical (a couple of 320gbs and a couple 500gbs).

So it looks like I may end up buying some new disks if I want any redundancy. What about just setting up all my disks independently in FreeNAS? At least that way all the drives/data in a single machine that will hopefully perform better than what I have to deal with now.

Stephens thanks for the suggestion, I have already read the guide on ZFS (very well put together might I add). Its great info on how to properly set up a zfs, however, I have asked my question in hopes that someone would be able to give me an idea to kludge it all together without using a traditional ZFS since these drives are old and the data I have isn't all that sensitive or valuable.

As I've been going through my drives, I really don't think I'd be all that disappointed or burdened if half this stuff was wiped out.

 

[ben]

If you must work without redundancy, independent disks are better than striped ones, because at least a failure only kills up to the capacity of that disk in data. you can also RAID-Z or Z2 disks of different sizes, but if you do that they all act like they're the size of the smallest disk, completely sacrificing the rest of the space on larger disks.