How to transfer volume to new drive

[gorillacowman]

I just installed freenas on an old laptop, and I set up all the datasets and shares properly and setup couchpotato
transmissons and plex. But I did that all on the internal hdd since I did not have my external one yet. So is there a way to transfer what I setup to the new hard drive.

 

[gpsguy]

Yes, there are ways to accomplish it.

But, laptops aren't a good fit for FreeNAS. Does it meet the minimum specs for FreeNAS. Realize that if you're using Plex, memory requirements will be even higher than the base requirement for FreeNAS. Your external drive ... is that USB? If so, it can be slow and unreliable.

What are the specs on your hardware and what version of FreeNAS are you running?

 

[joeschmuck]

I think that using an old laptop or other component is a good way to test out FreeNAS to see if you like it but unless this is a high end laptop with 8GB of ECC RAM then I would not use it for anything other than evaluation. Keep in mind that you still should have at least 6GB of RAM to run FreeNAS properly and even more RAM if you are going to add a lot of plugins. If it starts to hang on you, well you know why if you don't have enough RAM.

Building a NAS from scratch isn't difficult but it's not cheap either, but it is definitely a lot cheaper than buying a pre-built unit having similar capabilities.

 

[gorillacowman]

I am running it on an old laptop since I am 15 with no job and it was hard enough to get my parents to buy the external hard drive.
For the issue of speed that is not that bad for me because I was only getting 5mbs a second when transfering a file to the server over wifi (the server is connected through ethernet).

If I dont have enough ram is there anything bad that might happen to the data on my drives?

vesion 9.3
specs
old acer laptop
intel i3-370m
4 gb of ram
640 gb internal hdd
3 tb wetern digital my book

 

[SweetAndLow]

your pool with your data on it will just not mount one day and all your data will be inaccessible. Just use the external HDD as a normal external usb drive and have a backup strategy in place. That is going to give you the best result. Keep learning about OS's and hardware so one day you can have the knowledge to build your own system.

 

[gorillacowman]

your pool with your data on it will just not mount one day and all your data will be inaccessible. Just use the external HDD as a normal external usb drive and have a backup strategy in place. That is going to give you the best result. Keep learning about OS's and hardware so one day you can have the knowledge to build your own system.

just to let you know I have the knoledge to build a system but not the money

and also I trying to use the server as a media server too so it's not just for backups

 

[joeschmuck]

If you want to run FreeNAS with such low RAM, you can give FreeNAS 9.2 a shot and use a UFS drive vice ZFS. It will give you better results over ZFS on your platform. Heck, also take a look at NAS4Free as another option.

When I was 15 computers used punched cards.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

So is there a way to transfer what I setup to the new hard drive.

The basic procedure is to take a snapshot of the dataset you want to move and then use the zfs send and zfs recv commands.

 

[gorillacowman]

If you want to run FreeNAS with such low RAM, you can give FreeNAS 9.2 a shot and use a UFS drive vice ZFS. It will give you better results over ZFS on your platform. Heck, also take a look at NAS4Free as another option.

When I was 15 computers used punched cards.

Thanks I was planning to use ufs but since I couldnt find an option to do that so I used zfs.

 

[joeschmuck]

Thanks I was planning to use ufs but since I couldnt find an option to do that so I used zfs.

You must use an older version of FreeNAS, version 9.3 is the first version which does not support UFS.