Can you transfer data from a local hard drive?

[freenasdude]

I plan to setup a freenas unit with ZFS and RAID-Z. But I have a bunch of data that I would need to put onto it. Instead of doing it over the network, can you transfer data into the array from another hard-drive?

In other words, my motherboard has 5 sata slots. I have 5 drives; 2 with data on them, and 3 empty. The 3 drives will be the start of the array. I make the 3 disk array, transfer the data from the 2 drives to the array locally. Then add the 2 drives to the array to make it a 5 disk array. I hope this makes sense.

What I don't know is how I can transfer from the 2 drives, locally, to the array.

I'd appreciate any help!

 

[joeschmuck]

It depends of the format of the two drives your current data is on. In general the answer is yes but you may have to mount them manually.

What bothers me is what you plan for your array. Can you please explain what you goal is being very specific on what the pool of drives should look like when completed after adding the last two drives once data has been transferred.

 

[freenasdude]

They're NTFS. The unit is only for data redundancy, and maybe bittorrent. Not sure what else I would use it for.
Didn't want to invest in a raid card and windows' raid resyncd for like ~10 hours whenever an improper shutdown occurs.

Who knows, maybe this isn't the solution I'm looking for. I was fine until I found out about the resync'ing the hard way.
I only need my data when I use my PC. Because it is my only copy of the data, I put them in a RAID1 array for redundancy.

I've looked at other solutions like the Drobo, but that's anywhere from $700-1000 + the drives. $300 + drives is enough to build a decent freenas.

 

[interpeix]

The first part yes, you can mount NTFS and transfer data to your Raidz...but the second part...w0w0...be carefull.

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

 

[joeschmuck]

If your data is important to you then make routine backups. If it's really important to you to maintain it fully operational then create a RAID-Z2. FreeNAS is an excellent product for normal everyday use and some folks create some very fast and reliable servers with it. You first need to figure out how much space you need. There is a RAID calculator that has ZFS in it and you can tell it what RAID-Z level you want , the size of hard drives and number of drives used and it will tell you the usable capacity. http://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/

And you really need to check out the link in the previous post so you can try to understand how ZFS works.

Last thing, ZFS prefers you do not use a hardware RAID controller [unless it's flashed to be a dumb interface] as it uses it's own software which also is a huge benefit because if you have a hardware failure like the motherboard or RAID card, you can just move your drives into another computer and it can be different RAID controllers (dumb down) and it will run fine. It's hardware independence.

 

[freenasdude]

Yeah those links don't work. Just explain it to me like I'm 5.

 

[russnas]

i use this command to copy folders internally in shell,i cant find the command to copy individual files,
copied folder from a single drive to my raid internally via this command.

from drive to new drive, space between the two
rsync -av /mnt/drive1/folder /mnt/drive2/folder

 

[joeschmuck]

What does your raid look like? (configuration) And what are your plans for it?