wizengamot
Dabbler
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2018
- Messages
- 11
Hey FreeNAS experts, I have what I hope to be a simple question. I did do a google search prior to asking it here but found nothing other than a similar post here but not my scenario. I am changing my pool configuration so that rather than having two sets of four drives in z1 configuration (where each set is n-1 for storage) I am going to one set of 8 drives in z1 configuration. All the drives in the configuration are brand new NAS drives. Of course, to do this I need to get all my data off the volume. My google search was "how to remove partitions from usb drive FreeNAS" and I got nothing useful.
What I want to do is to attach two brand new 8TB each USB 3 drives to the NAS computer, mount them, format them with a filesystem that FreeNAS enjoys using (aka NOT NTFS) but I am not 100% sure which fs to use or how. They will likely reach the FreeNAS system already formatted for NTFS but the only data on them will be whatever seagate ships on them and can be erased. Essentially I am looking for two man pages, one that describes how to remove partitions from existing NTFS drives and to add a new ready to format partition and one describing how to format them in a format agreeable to FreeNAS.
My overall goal is to copy data from the volume already on my FreeNAS onto these drives. I don't need step by step but would appreciate any information gotchas that could destroy my data. The drives I am partitioning are 8TB and all the other drives in the system are 4TB or less each so it should be easy to differentiate the drive when partitioning.
However, if a method exists to perform this operation on a windows machine and just connect these drives already formatted for FreeNAS to the nas box I would use that method over using the CLI on the FreeNAS box itself.
What I want to do is to attach two brand new 8TB each USB 3 drives to the NAS computer, mount them, format them with a filesystem that FreeNAS enjoys using (aka NOT NTFS) but I am not 100% sure which fs to use or how. They will likely reach the FreeNAS system already formatted for NTFS but the only data on them will be whatever seagate ships on them and can be erased. Essentially I am looking for two man pages, one that describes how to remove partitions from existing NTFS drives and to add a new ready to format partition and one describing how to format them in a format agreeable to FreeNAS.
My overall goal is to copy data from the volume already on my FreeNAS onto these drives. I don't need step by step but would appreciate any information gotchas that could destroy my data. The drives I am partitioning are 8TB and all the other drives in the system are 4TB or less each so it should be easy to differentiate the drive when partitioning.
However, if a method exists to perform this operation on a windows machine and just connect these drives already formatted for FreeNAS to the nas box I would use that method over using the CLI on the FreeNAS box itself.