Upgrading hard drive with out losing data

[1uke_]

Hello,

I recently bought a HP Proliant G7 n54l

I am running freeNAS on this box, it came with a 250GB hard drive. Very soon I will be looking to add 4 x 2TB drives to the box.

My question is how do I upgrade the HD with out losing all the data on the 250GB drive.

Is it a case of putting in 1 x 2tb and copying the data across and then putting in the rest of the drives?

Is there a tutorial or video tutorial where I can find out more on this process please?

Thank you for your help.

 

[gpsguy]

Read cyberjock's guide first.

How do you plan to use the 4x2 TB drives? If RAIDz1 or RAIDz2, then no, you won't be able to do it that way. You'd need to back up the current drive and start over.

In theory, one could put the 250Gb drive in the CD-Rom bay (or connect it via eSATA). Unfortunately, those interfaces don't support AHCI (they run in IDE mode). There are hacked BIOS' available for the N54L that enable AHCI on these ports. If you went this route, you could copy the data with all the drives inside the Microserver.

Did you upgrade the RAM in your N54L? I have 16Gb in mine.

 

[1uke_]

Read cyberjock's guide first.

How do you plan to use the 4x2 TB drives? If RAIDz1 or RAIDz2, then no, you won't be able to do it that way. You'd need to back up the current drive and start over.

In theory, one could put the 250Gb drive in the CD-Rom bay (or connect it via eSATA). Unfortunately, those interfaces don't support AHCI (they run in IDE mode). There are hacked BIOS' available for the N54L that enable AHCI on these ports. If you went this route, you could copy the data with all the drives inside the Microserver.

Did you upgrade the RAM in your N54L? I have 16Gb in mine.

I'll be showing my lack of knowledge here but what is RAIDz1 and RAIDz2?

I was planning on having A and B contain data and C and D mirror the data then I have back ups and redundancy.

Let me know if you can help me more.

Thanks :)

 

[leenux_tux]

A few things you should probably do before you make the jump and start creating pools, VDEV's etc.

• I would definitely recommend (as has already been mentioned) reading cyberjocks guide. Not understanding the FreeNAS RAID levels might cause you to make the wrong deployment decision on your disk configuration, which could be an even bigger pain to get around at a later date than trying to get around the issue you currently have.
• If possible, try installing FreeNAS into a virtual environment first. This is for testing purposes only and allows you to get a feel for how FreeNAS works in a "safe" environment. Also, being able to "snapshot" the Virtual Machine before you make any changes allows you to revert back to the original. In this environment you can create pools of different types (i.e RAIDz1 or RAIDz2), remove virtual disks so as to see what the effects are, delete pools etc

Seeing as you only have a 250GB drive with data on I would look at archiving that data off to a USB drive connected to a laptop/PC, CIFS share and use something like robocopy to make the backup. With robocopy you can just leave it running and if the copy stops/fails will allow you to ignore files that have already copied when you run robocopy again.

 

[1uke_]

A few things you should probably do before you make the jump and start creating pools, VDEV's etc.

• I would definitely recommend (as has already been mentioned) reading cyberjocks guide. Not understanding the FreeNAS RAID levels might cause you to make the wrong deployment decision on your disk configuration, which could be an even bigger pain to get around at a later date than trying to get around the issue you currently have.
• If possible, try installing FreeNAS into a virtual environment first. This is for testing purposes only and allows you to get a feel for how FreeNAS works in a "safe" environment. Also, being able to "snapshot" the Virtual Machine before you make any changes allows you to revert back to the original. In this environment you can create pools of different types (i.e RAIDz1 or RAIDz2), remove virtual disks so as to see what the effects are, delete pools etc

Seeing as you only have a 250GB drive with data on I would look at archiving that data off to a USB drive connected to a laptop/PC, CIFS share and use something like robocopy to make the backup. With robocopy you can just leave it running and if the copy stops/fails will allow you to ignore files that have already copied when you run robocopy again.

Hi, thanks for helping me get my head around this. It's all a bit new to me.

What is the best (and possibly free) was I can test FreeNAS in a virtual environment?

I run both OSX and Windows XP if you have anything I could use to test on those two machines I'd be very grateful.

Many thanks :)

 

[leenux_tux]

If your looking for "free" Virtualization take a look at "VirtualBox". I don't have any experience of it as I use VMWare Workstation and ESXi, however, from what I have read it looks a very good free VM environment.

 

[cyberjock]

I use Virtualbox and it works great for experimenting with FreeNAS. Never underestimate how important knowing your server's OS inside and out. You might lose your data if you don't.