How to setup RAID

[Desty]

Hey folks,


first, thank all of you for such a great support and also great OS and plugins! Now, lets get to the point. I have a not so small problem with FreeNAS, since I am a newbie at FreeBSD and also FreeNAS. I have a mini Intel Atom server with two identical WD 500GB hard drives. Before I now migrated to FreeNAS, I was using Windows 7 as a NAS device. I had a software RAID1, the Windows 7 built-in option.
Now, here's the problem. I installed FreeNAS on a USB drive and its running ok. But the problem is, that I now have two hard drives which are almost full od different, let we say important, stuff. And the two identical HDDs are of course in NTFS. I actually now formated the second drive using ZFS. And now I want to have RAID1 like before on Windows. And for this, both HDDS need to be in ZFS, right? Is it possible to move all data from NTFS drive to ZFS drive and then format NTFS drive in ZFS and make RAID1 without loosing any data?

Thanks for helping!

 

[titan_rw]

Assuming the windows disks are readable individually, then in theory, yes. But it'll take some work on the command line in freenas. So if you're not familiar with unix at all, I wouldn't recommend it.

High level steps:

Break the software raid. Use one of the two disks to create the zpool in freenas.

Mount the remaining ntfs disk from the command line in freenas.

Copy data from the ntfs drive to the new zpool.

Add the second drive to the zpool creating a mirrored vdev, thus gaining redundancy.

Haven't done it myself, but in theory it's possible.

Like I said, if you're not familiar with the command line, I'd stay away.


Also, you haven't mentioned the hardware specs of your atom server. Pay attention to the recommended ram requirements. 6 gig or more is recommended.