nas drives - way to remove the zfs from them if I want to move away from nas setup?

[justforplex]

I have a nas thats working ok, but Im concerned the drives are being taxed all the time, and will lead to early failure. What needs to be done to the drives to make them readable by a linux OS with plex media server? I know the zfs protocols used by nas may not work in linux, ive tried. How do I go about keeping my content on the drives without formatting for a new system?

 

[LarsR]

There is no way to keep the data if the other os does not use/support zfs. Most Linux distros can install a zfs package and then you could import your old pool. But the drives would still use zfs, just with another kernel.
If you want another Filesystem you pretty much have to make a backup, format the drives with the different format and copy your files back from backup

 

[Etorix]

You can't. ZFS is an integrated file system and volume manager, not a little label which could be "removed" to leave a readable file system.
There is now a working ZFS-on-Linux (ZoL) so, feature flags permitting, you may keep using your pool under Linux but it will still be ZFS.

 

[pschatz100]

I have a nas thats working ok, but Im concerned the drives are being taxed all the time, and will lead to early failure. What needs to be done to the drives to make them readable by a linux OS with plex media server? I know the zfs protocols used by nas may not work in linux, ive tried. How do I go about keeping my content on the drives without formatting for a new system?

I am curious to know the source of your concern. I don't believe that early failure of disks is a significant problem that has been reported here in the forums.

Also, why would you specifically want to read the drives with Linux? Is there a particular application you have in mind that requires Linux?

 

[winnielinnie]

I have a nas thats working ok, but Im concerned the drives are being taxed all the time, and will lead to early failure.

Why else would you want a NAS if not to be able to immediately access, use, and write data to it, on-demand? Are you referring specfically to the System Dataset and/or logs?

What needs to be done to the drives to make them readable by a linux OS with plex media server?

Linux supports ZFS, and because everything is under the umbrella of OpenZFS, you should get support- and feature-parity. However, updating your system or Linux kernel can introduce hiccups or breakage.

 

[justforplex]

I am curious to know the source of your concern. I don't believe that early failure of disks is a significant problem that has been reported here in the forums.

Also, why would you specifically want to read the drives with Linux? Is there a particular application you have in mind that requires Linux?

well, I should clarify - the drives I put in the nas machine were not nas drives, but rather some 2tb sseagates I bought new for plex storage. If these were nas specific drives, like reds or whatever, then I wouldnt worry.

 

[winnielinnie]

If you just want a dedicated streaming Plex server, why not just reformat the drives to a native Linux filesystem (such as XFS, EXT4, or BTRFS), then copy your multimedia to it, and then install Ubuntu with plexmediaserver?

If you need redundancy, you can use MDADM or BTRFS.