Migrating dataset from old FreeNAS to new

[danjb]

I have an existing 13TB dataset on a fairly old set of recycled hardware running FreeNAS-9.10-STABLE-201605021851 (35c85f7). It uses 12 drives of 2TB and 4TB sizes, including 4 in an external enclosure connected via eSATA, and is nearly full.

With the drives being old (some over 6 years) and the dataset being close to 90% full, I've decided to build a serious replacement server using real server quality hardware. I'll have a 4U rackmount case with room for 24 drives. Initially I'll populate this with 12 new 6TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration that will have at least one large dataset on it intended to house the data from my old 13TB dataset, but now with plenty of room to grow.

What's the simplest / quickest way to migrate data from the old dataset to the new one? Initially I thought I'd just copy it over the network. However, since I am going to decommission the old system once the new one is running, it occurred to me I will have enough open drive slots in the new system to plug in all the disks from the old system.

Then I could do a direct copy from old to new all on the new system. This seems like it'd be a heck of a lot faster than going over the network. Does this seem reasonable?

 

[danb35]

Does this seem reasonable?

Definitely, if you have room for all the disks in a single server at the same time. You can use pretty much whatever mechanism you want to copy the data, but I'd think ZFS replication would be the best.

 

[Sakuru]

Yes, you should be able to import the old pool and use rsync, cp, zfs send|recv, or replication to migrate your data to the new pool.

 

[danb35]

...but name the new pool different from the old pool.