Is it possible transfer contents in RAID1 to a vdev?

[iRefugee]

I have an existing nas server with 2 hard drives configured as RAID1 XFS file system. Since I am building a new FreeNAS server in a RAIDZ2 configuration. Is it possible to add those drives to my configuration without having to wipe them? Or would it be easier to just transfer the contents over the network?

 

[tvsjr]

Nope, doesn't work that way. Totally different filesystem. Build your new system and move the data over, or back the data up, use those drives in your new FN, then pull the data back.

 

[iRefugee]

Thanks! That's kinda what I figured how I would have to migrate the data.

 

[leenux_tux]

Depends on a number of things...

1. Amount of data you need to copy ?
2. What other systems you have available and the amount of free space on those systems?
3. Do you have an external hard drive you could connect to one of your other systems ?

This is how I did it, might work for you might not, depends on your hardware....

1. Connect an external hard drive up to a computer on the network, in my case it was a 4TB USB connected to a Windows 7 Laptop (I will call this "slave").
2. Use ROBOCOPY to copy the files from your server to the external hard drive which is connected to "slave". If you are using a *NIX/FreeBSD based system instead of Windows use rsync
3. Take the hard drives out of your server, add them to the FreeNAS box and configure as required
4. Make sure the volume on the FreeNAS box is available (shared) either NFS or CIFS.
5. Connect "slave" system to share on FreeNAS and use ROBOCOPY (or rsync if using *NIX/FreeBSD) to migrate the saved data to FreeNAS.
6. Keep the data on the external hard drive as an archive. External H/D's are relatively cheap nowadays. All depends on how much you value your data of course.

ROBOCOPY has a few nice functions whereby you can mirror (/mir) a complete directory structure, plus, if you have to stop it for some reason you can re-run it and it will figure out what has already been copied and ignore, thus starting from where it left off. Other nice features are /W and /R (wait and retry). Some files can be locked and can't be copied, /W says "wait for x number of seconds", /R means "retry X number of times". When both timeout, the backup just moves to the next file.