NAS : OT: NASs Are Great, Until You Need to Move Data From Them

Posted on Tue Dec 30, 11:44 by Devin, Blogger, Seattle
Home Page: http://www.crunchgear.com
luckily most NAS today allow you to just remove the hard drive... if i were transferring such a large amount of stuff I would just put the new HDD in my PC's case and transfer it like a normal file. A bit more work in some ways, but it'll take less than 20 hours...

Posted on Tue Dec 30, 11:49 by Daimaou, Survivor, Tokyo - Japan
Home Page: http://www.akihabaranews.com
Well I agree with you, but, what will you do in case of a RAID5 Setting like I have ?

Posted on Tue Dec 30, 07:32 by DaveB
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I have a QNAP NAS with 2 mirrored hard drives. When I wanted to swap them from 300GB to 1 TB each I had the same sort of problems - had to buy a 3rd drive as intermediate to put everything on before the swap.
The NAS drives can't be read by normal computers - something about the NAS having Linux OS onboard...

I remember thinking at the time how stupid it was - would have been much better if I could have plugged 1 x 300GB & 1 x 1TB drive into my PC, done a quick copy then have the mirroring done overnight.

Posted on Wed Dec 31, 02:44 by MarkP, Austin, TX
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This is a good argument for spending a little extra money to get a Drobo. When it fills up you can simply pop out a drive and pop in a larger one. The array rebuilds automatically and you can still use it while this process is going on. Plus, all of the drives can be different sizes, so you only have to upgrade one at a time. I've expanded mine from 700GB to 1.5TB in several steps and it's been totally painless.

Posted on Wed Dec 31, 09:58 by Daimaou, Survivor, Tokyo - Japan
Home Page: http://www.akihabaranews.com
Yep the Drodo is very Nice, but... here in Japan I cannot get one... If there are any Drodo Staff reading Akiba please help

Posted on Wed Dec 31, 10:39 by booest, boogineer, Singapore
Home Page: http://www.slsing.com
Tell me about it.
The eSATA really comes in handy in these situations. pray hard you do not need to do data recovery -_-"

Its an even longer nightmare .

Posted on Fri Jan 02, 06:40 by fh
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Yes NAS performance is a problem. However the bottleneck is NOT the network interface speed. The culprit is the SMB protocol, which is the most common desktop-to-NAS protocol, and unfortunately it is a very slow protocol. Even with gigabit networking, the protocol will drag the transfers down -- usually around 15MB/s sustained; however Linux (samba package) can reach ~35MB/s, while OS X sometimes has trouble breaking 10MB/s. The quick-and-dirty solution is to use another protocol such as FTP, even if it may not be as user-friendly.

There are some NAS units that can also be hooked up directly to the PC as a normal external HDD, which will allow you to bypass the "3rd hdd/backup" method (which you noted) as well as slow network transfers. Sadly few of these have RAID capability in the first place.