Need help on best/fastest way to transfer files to freenas

[silverdevil]

Hi everyone thanks in advance for your help and input. Here is my situation:

I just set up a Freenas box with the following specs:
Supermicro A1SA7-2750F (with 2x USB 3.0 Ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 4x Gigabit ethernet ports IPMI)
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SAi-2750F.cfm
16gb EEC ram
4x 3TB WD Red drives (RAID Z2)
2x 120 GB Sandisk SSD

I have a ton of files on several 2TB USB 3.0 external hard drives that I would like to migrate over to the FREENAS CIFS shares that i just set up.

My problem is this: My other computers suck. I just bough an ASUS ROG G501JW laptop, which is very thin with USB 3.0 ports, but it lacks a gigabit ethernet port! I only have a 100Mbps USB adapter that came with the computer to compensate. I have other desktop computers networked with 1 gbps connections to an ASUS RT-AC68U router (https://www.asus.com/us/Networking/RTAC68U/) , but none of my networked desktops have USB 3.0 ports. Now, the ASUS router does have a USB 3.0 port, and I can easily plug a drive in and access it on my network from other desktops, but there is no option in my router's Tomato Firmware to copy the router's shared files onto my freenas machine without going through a middleman (like a networked desktop).

I found that when I used a networked desktop to drag and drop files from the ASUS router's shared USB 3.0 drive onto my FREENAS CIFS share, the speeds are terrible, like 25 MBps (about 200 Mbps). I am assuming this is because the data goes from USB 3.0 external > router > the desktop that issued the copy command > router > freenas machine? Normally I get 80MBps speeds (about 640 Mbps) when I copy large files that are on my desktop hard drive to the FREENAS share, which is probably normal (assuming the data goes from desktop > router > Freenas).

So am I missing something or not understanding something here? Is there a way to get my ASUS router USB 3.0 port to copy directly to the FREENAS without having to go through a windows desktop computer to tell it so? Or can FREENAS just get it from that router's USB 3.0 port somehow? Does rsync have a role to play in all of this?

I have noticed that FREENAS will not recognize any USB 3.0 drives plugged into the NAS even with the tunable xhci_load enabled. very frustrating as I would have just plugged the drives directly into the FREENAS machine (yes I am aware that USB is unreliable, but this seems like such an easy way out) .

please help this newbie, thank you.

 

[dlavigne]

What filesystem is on the USB 3 drive?

 

[silverdevil]

What filesystem is on the USB 3 drive?

Hi, the external drives with my data are all ntfs.

 

[dlavigne]

Have you tried importing the drive using the instructions in http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html#import-disk? Note you'll want the xhci driver loaded and a ZFS dataset ready to copy the data into.

 

[silverdevil]

Have you tried importing the drive using the instructions in http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html#import-disk? Note you'll want the xhci driver loaded and a ZFS dataset ready to copy the data into.

I believe i have tried that earlier, but will try again when i am home. my problem was i did the xhci_load =yes under loader tunable and rebooted but after plugging in the external drive i could not see it when trying to import. it was not being recognized. is there more that i have to do besides set the tunable? should it load automatically or is there another command i have to enter each time? thanks

 

[dlavigne]

Assuming the port is active in the BIOS, the loader is loaded, and the filesystem is supported, it should "just work". If it doesn't when you try again, we'll troubleshoot some more from there.

 

[Tom_]

I have the same board as you and I could not get *anything* connected to the USB 3 ports (ext, internal type A, internal header) recognised in FreeNAS with a variety of BIOS settings +/- the xhci_load tunable. Drives show up in the BIOS but not in FreeNAS. I hope one of the experts here can get you going...

 

[silverdevil]

Assuming the port is active in the BIOS, the loader is loaded, and the filesystem is supported, it should "just work". If it doesn't when you try again, we'll troubleshoot some more from there.

oh dear god. okay so somehow, the USB 3.0 drive was recognized and i began the import. BUT, then at 61% it got stuck on a file for 40 minutes. i wasnt sure what was going on so i clicked the button continue as background process. I started another CIFS share to the dataset i created for the import to see if something went wrong. The folder structure of the imported drive has been created in th share but there are no files. so the whole thing failed somehow? Surely some files copied over in 40+ minutes. How can i check to see what is goign on and stop the process if necessary? is there some sort of task manager? thanks..

 

[DifferentStrokes]

There is a task manager, of sorts. Go to the command line and run "top". From here you can kill processes.

 

[silverdevil]

There is a task manager, of sorts. Go to the command line and run "top". From here you can kill processes.

thanks. okay but which one of these correlates to my import disk and copy command? sorry im really new to non-windows stuff.