Adding HDD's

[Adramelramalech]

I have many HDD's with a alot of data. I can not simply unplug the disk and plug it into the free nas, it will ask to format. What should I do here?

 

[Redcoat]

Welcome to the forums.

You need to install those HDD's in a system that will read them and then use appropriate system utilities to transfer (copy) the information from your HDD's to your FreeNAS storage.

If you tell us something about the HDD's and their data, also the host system you have to read them, also your FreeNAS and your network details, it should be possible for members here to give you more detailed advice.

You'll find some useful reading here https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/forum-rules.45124/

 

[Adramelramalech]

So I will def need a blank disk for this. Copy data. Used that now blank drive, put into freenas, and repeat, right? I can simply add a blank disk to a pool that has a disk with data?

 

[Redcoat]

Er - no. At least not unless the drives have ZFS data pools on them or are NTFS drives.

If you answer the questions I asked we can give you specific help.

 

[Adramelramalech]

I am just asking a simple question here. Why are you giving me beef?

 

[Adramelramalech]

then I do not understand. I am not buying 15 new harddrives just so I wont lose data. So how does this system or OS help anyone? It only help new people, not people with 25 years of data?

 

[Samuel Tai]

@Adramelramalech, if you're asking if you can attach existing disks to FreeNAS and use them as-is, then no. The only actions possible with adding a disk are a) adding it to a pool, which formats it, as you've observed; or b) importing data from it into an existing pool.

No one's giving you beef; we're trying to elicit more information to provide you an informed opinion of your options.

Both options do require additional drives. You shouldn't think of this as a fault; rather FreeNAS insists on data safety, and it's always better to have more copies of data.

 

[Adramelramalech]

he edited his post. he was and I do not know why. So like I said I am man with 15 harddrives and 25 years of data and freenas can not help me. Okay thanks.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Do you need to keep the drives, or do you need to keep the data? Do you need to import all the data at once, or could you stagger it as your finances allow you to get additional disks?

I think FreeNAS can help in your case, but you would need to import data into it, instead of attaching your current drives.

 

[Adramelramalech]

I just asked that above and was told no.

 

[Yorick]

And, before you dive down that rabbit hole, I suggest to read a primer on ZFS and determine whether this is what you want. https://arstechnica.com/information...01-understanding-zfs-storage-and-performance/

I think the ability to recover from a malware event in seconds (snapshots) is awesome, as are many other features of ZFS. And, it does require planning ahead for storage. No such thing as raidz expansion means that you'll be expanding vdev by vdev, and that can be un-intuitive to folk not used to ZFS. I know it came as a surprise to me, when I started.

 

[Adramelramalech]

So I thought it was a simple question but I guess I have to tell my life story. Hi, I am a data hoarder. I have been collecting data since the late 90's. I never delete anything and I collect and collect. I had bad experiences once with WD, cyclic redunacy errors, on a few drives, lost some data but RMA those drives. Because of that I have faithfully been trying to purchase new HDD every year. fast forward to now, I am in school, trying to free lance, trying to start some start up or business and I am still collecting data. I now have 5 computers. These computer have limits.They can only hold 2 to 3 disks a time. I have recently purchase a HDD box. I could not afford a Qnap or synology or even a ixsystem so I bought a cheap saberent box and I attached this to my router. It works, I see my shares but I ran into a issue. My PC's are domained and I was force to reinstall windows on one PC and I am not sure what happened but after reinstalling I was not able to see any shares. Been going back and forth with MS and Azure, reading on google and watching so many youtube videos. That is how I got to freenas. I was trying to figure my share issue over network and I watched a few freenas videos and said that is what I need.
Setup. 5 domain PC's all full of HDD's and one HDD box. Overall storage is near 80TB's. All PC's are connected to same switch. There is dozens of shares. I hope this helps.

 

[Adramelramalech]

Do you need to keep the drives, or do you need to keep the data? Do you need to import all the data at once, or could you stagger it as your finances allow you to get additional disks?

I think FreeNAS can help in your case, but you would need to import data into it, instead of attaching your current drives.

I think I can free two 8TB disks out of my 15. I put these into system. I copy data from windows to freenas. I now have another two empty disks. I can simply add these to the pool? OR will the two in there already say it will need to be formatted?

 

[Yorick]

I bought a cheap saberent box and I attached this to my router

So that's a what, a USB enclosure? Like one of these 2-SATA to USB things? https://www.sabrent.com/product-category/hard-drive-accessories/hard-drive-enclosures/3-5/

You are not going to have a good time with FreeNAS with that. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and ZFS, and that means it needs disk controllers that "tell the truth" - USB usually doesn't, people have lost a lot of data that way.

Now you can build a really inexpensive FreeNAS system, I just posted about my adventures doing that here: https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-expansion-also-backup-and-test-system.86434/

Any old PC hardware with 16 or 32GiB of RAM + a tower case + 83 bucks worth of HBA, cables and NIC gets you a solid FreeNAS system, minus disks.

So you have 80 TiB of data on 15 disks. We don't know the size of those disks. Or how you intend to structure your pool on the FreeNAS side. There are a lot of variables here - short story is, that Sabrent thing isn't going to get you to a FreeNAS system that safeguards your data.

 

[Yorick]

I think I can free two 8TB disks out of my 15. I put these into system

If you want some form of redundancy, then that gives you 8TB, in a mirror. You can then add additional mirrors.

You can also go without redundancy (yolo!), and add a second disk to each vdev after the fact.

If the idea of using two disks per vdev makes you cringe because of the overhead, I get it. Now you're into raidz, and that needs to be built at its final width from the word go. Do please read that ars technica article, it should help a lot.

 

[Adramelramalech]

Robot Check

 

[Samuel Tai]

No, existing disks in pools aren't reformatted when new drives are added. However, you do need to be careful on adding drives to pools, as it's very easy to create an unintended setup that ends up with less resiliency than before.

For example, with 2x 8TB drives, you should create a mirror pool, which gives you 8TB usable storage:

Code:

pool
  mirror-0
    8 TB disk
    8 TB disk

If you add another disk, you may end up with:

Code:

pool
  mirror-0
    8 TB disk
    8 TB disk
    8 TB disk

a 3-way mirror, and still only 8 TB usable, or

Code:

pool
  mirror-0
    8 TB disk
    8 TB disk
  8 TB disk

which is a stripe over your original mirror and the new disk. There's 16 TB usable, but if the new drive fails, the stripe means your pool is toast.

What you want is to add stripes with the same number of disks

Code:

pool
  mirror-0
    8 TB disk
    8 TB disk
  mirror-1
    8 TB disk
    8 TB disk

so there's 16 TB usable, and you can tolerate the loss of a single disk in each stripe.

 

[Yorick]

@Samuel Tai gave you a quick primer on mirror vdevs. That Sabrent 4-disk SATA to USB - do yourself a favor and don't use that for FreeNAS.

Your goal is to create something that holds 4 disks. Which means not all of your 80TiB are going in there. How much data do you intend to store, and how important is redundancy? Your basic choices with 4 disks are:

2 mirror vdevs - quite expandable with additional mirrors
1 raidz1 vdev - little bit more space, expandable with more (4-wide) raidz1 vdevs, redundancy is okay but you are running a real risk of losing all data during a rebuild
1 raidz2 vdev - same space as the mirrors, a bit better redundancy-wise, but for expansion you'd want to add another 6 or 8-wide to it.
4 single-drive vdevs - yolo, no redundancy, any one drive fails and all your data in the pool is gone

Now you see why the 20 questions. Knowing what you are storing now, and in future, what your expansion plans are, all that matters when planning a ZFS system. FreeNAS is no exception.

And - don't do it with that USB enclosure, that's just data loss waiting to happen with ZFS/FreeNAS.

 

[Samuel Tai]

OK, so you have ~80TB total. FreeNAS and ZFS in particular should only be filled to 50% occupancy before write performance starts going downhill quickly. Your total pool size will need to be 160 TB. Using 8 TB drives, constructed as a striped mirror, that's 320 TB, or 40 drives, and a rather hefty server chassis. If you use 12 TB drives, that's 28 drives, with some spares.

FreeNAS can scale this high, and even larger, but this level of investment may be out of reach for you financially.

 

[Samuel Tai]

If you want to continue using USB enclosures to migrate disks out of their current systems, you should look at OpenMediaVault. This may be a better fit for you.