moving from Windows 7 home to FreeNAS

[thegen99999]

Hello, and thanks in advance to any and all who help. I am currently running a windows 7 machine with Windows 7 Home x64. It has 4 4TB HDD's and 1 SSD for boot purposes in it. I am going to be removing Windows 7 and replacing the system with FreeNAS this weekend due to the loss of support of Windows 7, My question is, is there a way to move to FreeNAS and keep the data on the HDD's intact? I know the typical thing to do is to format the drives and let FreeNAS reformat them but I simply don't have an easy way to backup that much data in my home other that burning a ton of blu-rays over a period of many days. I am using user lever control on the drives to have more control over who gets access to what. Any help would be appreciated.


Thanks

 

[Yorick]

There is no way to read NTFS in FreeNAS. The drives will be reformatted for ZFS. What pool layout did you plan for?

What's the motherboard for this? FreeNAS is strict about Ethernet, let's make sure this will work for you.
Amount of RAM?

 

[thegen99999]

The system has a Phenom II X2 565 processor in it 8GB if RAM The motherboard in the system is an MSI 760GM-P23 v3.0. I am not sure of the pool setup, in my current win 7 configuration all the hdd's have 1 partition with no logical drives and I want to keep the layout as close to the same as it is now.

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Have you considered copying the data off onto an external HDD? Had a quick look online.. WD 10TB external for around US$150.

 

[Yorick]

The whole point of FreeNAS is ZFS, which requires redundancy to do its data protection. With four drives, you could do either raidz1, which gives you the capacity of 3 drives, or raidz2 for more redundancy, which gives you the capacity of 2 drives. You cannot change the raidz level after the fact, or add drives to the raidz itself. You can add another four to six drive raidz to the pool; you can also replace the drives in a raidz with bigger ones.

The BIOS would need to be set to access the drives via AHCI, disable all motherboard RAID functions.

That Realtek Ethernet chip may give you trouble, plan on an Intel addin card for networking.

Not sure about the Phenom - I think FreeBSD supports it, so good enough?

In a nutshell: Read or watch a ZFS primer before you go for this, you really need to understand what ZFS is and plan ahead.

 

[elorimer]

How much data do you have in total on the four drives? Hard to see how you can migrate without a backup somewhere else, unless you can fit the data onto one, two or three drives to free up a drive or more. Then, you won't be able to do raidz without going the purposefully degraded setup.

Weird use case, though, going from W7H to a NAS setup. Why not go the free upgrade to W10?

 

[thegen99999]

How much data do you have in total on the four drives? Hard to see how you can migrate without a backup somewhere else, unless you can fit the data onto one, two or three drives to free up a drive or more. Then, you won't be able to do raidz without going the purposefully degraded setup.

Weird use case, though, going from W7H to a NAS setup. Why not go the free upgrade to W10?

 

[thegen99999]

The setup is always been in a media closet as a Nas setup for accessing movies/music on other systems in the house, I was in the habit for several years a backing up on Blu-ray and then moving things into their appropriate folders afterward but I've gotten lazy over the years lol. This was just the system I came across that seemed to be appropriate for my use but maybe there's better software to do what I need to do not so concerned about raid because I will probably end up having to back everything up anyways just want the server to stay a server for our home networking files. Not a real fan of Windows 10 for various reasons and also would like to find something that runs a little lighter.

 

[Yorick]

FreeNAS is definitely not "a little lighter". Maybe UnRaid is better suited to your purposes? Parity drive is optional there, your 4 drives would just show as one bunch of storage space. You'd still need to copy your data off, put the drives into UnRaid, then copy the data back.

Edit: UnRaid also does not stripe, so in the case of disk failure, you lose everything on that one disk, just like now.

For data protection and redundancy, FreeNAS and ZFS every day.

If data protection and redundancy aren't wanted, then FreeNAS and ZFS aren't the best fit.

 

[elorimer]

Not sure for your use case why you would be frowning on W10, or why you would care much about keeping W7 even without support. But don't uninstall W7--get a new 100MB SSD for $25 and do a clean install of W10 and then add the disks, saving the W7 SSD in case you want to go back. If you don't like W10, then reformat the SSD and install FreeNAS on it.

I'm not far off from you. I have a FreeNAS server for media storage, and feeding it via Plex worldwide. I also use it to backup the six other Windows machines in the household. If you have 16TB of storage you have a big investment in your data now. A big advantage is that you will be able to lift those disks off that motherboard when you are ready and drop them onto a server class motherboard with ECC without much of a headache.