N00b Question - Transfer NTFS to ZFS Share?

[MagicMayne]

So I'm new to configuring a NAS. I am migrating from Windows 7 where I had two 3TB hard drives containing media.

I have configured FreeNAS with one of the 3TB drives and set up my ZFS Share and created a (empty) volume that I can see on my network. This leads me to two questions:

First, is there an easy way to migrate the data from the NTFS formatted drive to the new share without just copying across my network? I'm looking at migrating 2.6TB of files so it'd take FOREVER...

Second: once migrated, can I easily add the second drive to the ZFS share to set up mirroring if it wasn't set up with mirroring originally?

I have access to a third 3TB drive through work, so I could recreate the share with the mirroring turned on if the second question isn't possible...but moving the data in a timely manner is a deal-breaker for me (and my wife).

Thanks!!!

 

[cyberjock]

Well, you can try to do NTFS transfer with FreeNAS(the manual gives steps for mounting NTFS in FreeNAS), but doing over the network is probably the easiest and safest. NTFS support is very flaky in FreeNAS, so there's no guarantees it will work or that it won't trash your file system. So doing it through Windows over the network is probably the best bet. Your bottleneck will probably be the disks themselves and not the network anyway.

 

[Dusan]

First, is there an easy way to migrate the data from the NTFS formatted drive to the new share without just copying across my network? I'm looking at migrating 2.6TB of files so it'd take FOREVER...

You can mount an NTFS drive, but it is currently (9.1.1) broken in the GUI. You need to mount it in CLI "ntfs-3g <device> <mount_point>" and then cp the files over.

Second: once migrated, can I easily add the second drive to the ZFS share to set up mirroring if it wasn't set up with mirroring originally?

ZFS allows adding devices to a mirror, however FreeNAS doesn't have a GUI for it, so would have to do it in the CLI too.

 

[cyberjock]

You can mount an NTFS drive, but it is currently (9.1.1) broken in the GUI. You need to mount it in CLI "ntfs-3g <device> <mount_point>" and then cp the files over.

The parameter to mount the NTFS partition as read-only is STRONGLY recommended.