Moving Data to new system

[Irvin Daniel]

Hi all,

This may not be possible, but have to ask.

Is there a way to move a RAID 5 to a new Machine without losing the data?

I currently have a nas setup in hardware raid 5. My motherboard died while transferring the data. So the question is can I unplug the raid card and plug it into a new system and not lose the data?

As a side note can I change the OS on a hardware raid? since I am running the NAS on a USB can I install another OS and not lose data? This is just something I wanted to know?

 

[Jason Hamilton]

In theory this should be fine. Normally as long as your moving the raid controller itself you should be ok. The problem arises when people use the onboard raid in systems and the mobo dies then the only hope is to hope you find a mobo with the same exact controller. Just make sure that you put all of the drives back in the same order that you pull them out.

 

[ZFS Noob]

I agree with Jason. It should work, and whatever new OS accesses this RAID card should see the drives attached as the RAID card displayed them to the old OS.

 

[Irvin Daniel]

Thank you guys for the fast response. I will test it and let you know what happens. The question about the OS was meant to say I currently run FreeNas 9.1 can I plug the raid into lets say Win 8 OS and still see the data?

 

[Dusan]

The question about the OS was meant to say I currently run FreeNas 9.1 can I plug the raid into lets say Win 8 OS and still see the data?

This will not work. FreeNAS uses either the ZFS or UFS file system. Windows is not able to access any of them. Windows will see the drives, but will assume they are unformatted.

 

[Jason Hamilton]

Probably not because of how FreeNAS does its formatting with ZFS and UFS. Your best bet would be to either build out a new FreeNAS USB or use FreeBSD to see the drives. I could be wrong but I'm not sure how well windows will cooperate with the formatting done by FreeNAS

 

[Irvin Daniel]

OK got it will build out a new FreeNAs.. also another question When setting up the FreeNas what is the best network transfer connection? Meaning NTFS or ISCSI or what ever else there is? I want to connect at least 4 computers to it to read and write data all at the same time. (2 HTPC and 2 computers) looking at about 12TB of data on the NAS. Can you point me in the right direction? Thank you guys for the help....

 

[ZFS Noob]

Well, iSCSI exports a block device, so the receiving computer sees a hard drive, and it's not accessible until it's formatted by the client. So if you're running iSCSI then you'll need to different extent for each client, and they won't share data.

NFS would work, and SMB CIFS (windows file sharing) should work too. SMB CIFS is single-threaded IIRC, so I don't know about performance.

 

[Dusan]

It depends on what protocols your clients support. Generally, CIFS is the most universal, so start with that one.

 

[Dusan]

SMB CIFS is single-threaded IIRC, so I don't know about performance.

Yes, it is single threaded, but it still spawns a separate daemon per client. You are limited to single thread when you have just one client, but it will utilize multiple cores when multiple clients access the NAS at the same time.

 

[Irvin Daniel]

OK got it... thank you so much for the info.... I need to read up some more on this.. thank you again

 

[cyberjock]

Yes, it is single threaded, but it still spawns a separate daemon per client. You are limited to single thread when you have just one client, but it will utilize multiple cores when multiple clients access the NAS at the same time.

Wait.. per client or per user? I thought it was a per user....

 

[cyberjock]

Ok.. looks like its a "per connection". I could be mistaken but I believe Windows uses 1 connection per "server". But if you map //freenas and //192.168.0.X that counts as 2. Of course, who cares as you'll still be at 1Gb total unless you have some really funky network configuration with multiple NICs and stuff.

 

[Dusan]

Right, separate process per connection :).