Migrate SW Raid5 to FreeNAS

[coolbone]

Hello all,

I currently have my home workstation (gaming/work pc) that houses a 4x2tb raid5 that's being controlled through the motherboard's Intel chip. I have an older C2Duo rig that I want to use and install FreeNAS on. I have a lot of important things that I must save, so I'm afraid of the whole thing rebuilding itself. I'm currently only using 1.7TB of the 5.45TB in the raid. What's the suggestion for migrating this?

 

[JaimieV]

There's no way your original raidset can be transplanted with data.

So, backup that 1.7Tb somewhere (buy a 2Tb drive if necessary, preferably two of them to reduce the risks to nearer zero). Move the disks out into the NAS. Intialise and set up volumes/shares. Now copy the data over.

Now use the new 2Tb drive(s) as a backup for the data in the FreeNAS box. RAID - even RAIDZ - is not the same thing as having true backups.