Some questions regarding USB access from FreeNAS

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ovizii

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I have a low spec FreeNAS system with 5 HDs which I would like to extend to 6 HDs so I need to move my data off that raid, rebuild it with 6 HDs and copy data back.

I realized uploading the data to an external, online storage service would be too expensive so I guess I'm going to buy a huge external HD, connect it via USB (USB2 only as my FreeNAS does not have USB3) and copy data to the ext. HD, sort out the raid with 6HDs and then move data back.

What I am unsure about is how this works exactly. I understand that after plugging in the USB drive I can use dmesg to find it but then I guess I need to format it? What would be the best FS to use and can I do this via GUI too or only command line?

Any other tips or problems you see with my idea?
 
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anodos

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I have a low spec freeNAS system with 5 HDs which I would like to extend to 6 HDs so I need to move my data off that raid, rebuild it with 6 HDs and copy data back.

I realized uploading the data to an external, online storage service would be too expensive so I guess I'm going to buy a huge external HD, connect it via USB (USB2 only as my freeNAS does not have USB3) and copy data to the ext. HD, sort out the raid with 6HDs and then move data back.

What I am unsure about is how this works exactly. I understand that after plugging in the USB drive I can use dmesg to find it but then I guess I need to format it? What would be the best FS to use and can I do this via GUI too or only command line?

Any other tips or problems you see with my idea?

It might be faster to connect a USB3 HDD to a client machine and use rsync, SFTP, SCP, etc to copy the data to the HDD. This is because USB2 typically caps out at 30MBytes/sec. I typically get at least 60MBytes/sec to a USB3 drive on a a client machine. USB2 is a tighter bottleneck than gigabit networking.

How low spec is "low spec"?
 
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Stux

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ZFS would be a good file system.
 

ovizii

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It might be faster to connect a USB3 HDD to a client machine and use rsync, SFTP, SCP, etc to copy the data to the HDD. This is because USB2 typically caps out at 30MBytes/sec. I typically get at least 60MBytes/sec to a USB3 drive on a a client machine. USB2 is a tighter bottleneck than gigabit networking.

How low spec is "low spec"?
Low spec is HP N54L, 16GB ECC RAM, etc,etc,etc

I can't do what you suggest, my only client machine is an old macbook pro with USB2 only.
I also do want to use CP and nothing else in between as I have a legacy problem: when I initially copied data across, I used a multitude of access methods and i.e. when using rsync I messed up quite a lot of data with special characters in the file names due to UTF8 being different on OSX than FreeBSD but if I ssh into the machine I can see everything just fine on the command line, even the files with broken names. So copying locally to a share doesn't give me the same security that I really copied everything.

Oh and forgot to add that the NAS is connected via ethernet to a repeater so the connection from my macbook is wireless only!
 

ovizii

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ZFS would be a good file system.
would you mind giving me some advice on how to find the HD after connecting it via USB and how to format it? Any other advice after reading my other reply?
 

danb35

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Plug in the drive, go to Storage -> Volume Manager, and create the pool. It will probably be the only available disk to create a pool on, unless you have other unused disks installed in your server.
 

Victor S

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You should have eSATA connector on the back side of your server. Then you may use external eSATA HDD dock instead of USB. It should give you the fastest available data transfer rates. Connecting the HDD and creating volume on it should be pretty much the same as for USB.
I did it several times already on my HP N34.
PS after all I've installed low-profile PCI USB3 card in my microserver in order to take an advantage of modern USB3 flash sticks
 

ovizii

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OK, I've ordered the external HD and was looking at how to do the move. I will create the new pool on this HD but I just realized I'd like to not only copy my data (aka 4 datasets each with their own periodic snapshots) but also the corresponding snapshots.

After a bit of search on the forum I saw this advice but I haven't figured out yet if this copies all existing snapshots or only the latest?

Code:
1. Create final source snapshot:
Code:
zfs snapshot -r Data2/Storage@copy

2. Copy the data:
Code:
zfs send -Rv Data2/Storage@copy | zfs receive -F Data1/Storage


Can someone help with the syntax, the man page doesn't really help.

I would be copying dataset[1-4] on pool-old to pool-new. How would the above command need to look like?
 
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