Data migration from one drivepool to another

[dj4005]

I am about to replace a drivepool of 24Tb with one of 40Tb.

All drives will be resident in the same case for the duration of the work.  The old drives will be removed from the PC after completion. 

My question is - what's the best way of moving 20Tb of data (mix of small and large files) from one drivepool to the other? 

1) Insertion and removal of one drive at a time letting the leveling process take care of the move

2) One of the Microsoft tools?  (Robocopy - Richcopy)

3 Backup software such as Macrium Reflect that will allow me to clone the drivepools

4) A method I haven't thought of.

 

Any and all advice and experience will be appreciated!

Dale

[Shane]

The "best" way depends on your needs.

By all drives being resident in the case, do you mean they are all plugged in and visible to the OS at the same time?

Are you wanting to keep the existing Pool and just change from the old drives to the new drives, or are you wanting to create a new Pool?

Do you want to be able to use the Pool normally while the process happens, or is read-only good enough, or is taking it offline for the duration acceptable to make the transfer happen ASAP?

What are your old drives and what are your new drives (e.g. 3x8 vs 4x10)?

[dj4005]

Thanks!

All drives will be plugged simultaneously and visible to the OS at the same time.  If you want specifics, a LSI Logic SAS 9207-8i Storage Controller in HBA mode (no RAID).

Whether I use the same Pool or create a new one is kinda beside the point.  The old drives will go away and the Pool mapped to the same drive letter so that it can continue life as a Plex Server.

In thinking about it, keeping the Pool active in it's current job is a higher priority than how fast it gets done.  Of course, getting all 20.5 Tb files copied is priority #1.

I've got 2x12 drives - they will be replaced with 2x20.   After all is said and done, the 12's will be repurposed on another PC.

Thanks again...

[Shane]

Some testing with the latest version of DrivePool suggests it's actually pretty fast at emptying/removing drives - at least it was hitting close to the mechanical limits of my drives, although I was using mostly large files - so that's good news since you want to keep the pool active:

The simplest method is just to add the two new drives and then remove the old two drives. The catch is that drives can only be removed one at a time, so if it takes X hours to finish removing the first drive and just happens to finish five minutes after you go to bed, it won't be emptying the other one while you sleep.

To avoid that, another method is to add the two new drives to the pool as above but then temporarily turn off all the balancers except for the the Drive Usage Limiter balancer (and Stablebit Scanner if you're using that) and tell it not to let anything be stored on the two old drives (untick both duplicated and unduplicated); it'll keep going until they're both empty and then you should be able to remove them without any unplanned waiting inbetween.

[dj4005]

The whole issue became moot when one of the two drives arrived DOA.

I installed the good drive and have now moved all the data from one 12Tb drive to the 20Tb.  I am awaiting delivery of the second drive and will repeat the process.

The machine was able to act as Plex server while the file transfers took place.

THANKS for the assist!

Dale

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Also, for the larger drives, a larger cluster (or allocation unit size), can help, especially if you're mostly storing larger files on them.  More sequential data.