Trying to upgrade to have NAS to run plex server natively on Drobo instead of home computer. Also to upgrade and expand storage. I have 4 4TB drives that gives me 10.89TB and I’m currently at 9.2TB 85% capacity. From what I have seen I cannot just get a 5N2 and pull my old drives and install without losing all my data. Trying to see what options I have to be able to do this and keep my data safe. I’m assuming it would take a long time to transfer 9.2TB from old machine to new one over firewire or USB.
Thanks in advance.
Populate the new unit with sufficient capacity to transfer the data, after which you can wipe & re-purpose two or three from the old unit.
My sums suggest a couple of 12TB drives should do it, though 2 10s ought to also if you migrate sufficient data to allow decreasing drives in the old gen two, & waiting on the long rebuild times.
The drives are formatted differently between the two models, so simply swapping the drives isn’t possible. Like cyber_beardy says, you must have a couple drives in the 5N2 already to copy your files into before removing your Gen2 drives. Adding your existing drives to the 5N2 will WIPE all data on them, so make sure you got everything copied over.
Just realized that the 5N2 only has ethernet ports in the back and no hard connection for data transfer. Are there any apps, programs, or anything you can use to focus or speed up the wireless transfer of Data from the hard wired gen 2 to the 5N2. I’m not extremely tech savvy, hence why I went with Drobo since it pretty much is plug n play. When it comes to new territories in technical things sometimes I need it spelled out for me…
Thank you for your help and comments.
Since you don’t state if you’re a Windows or Mac user, it’s hard to be certain any answer would be helpful.
For myself, on Windows, transferring over WiFi, I’d be using robocopy possibly with the “Easy Robocopy” free GUI, more because it’s robust & can recover if the wireless should glitch than to speed things up per-se. Nothing is going to be exactly fast with a large dataset & a Gen 2 involved. Consider a wired (gigabit) connection if possible, older & slower wireless will bottleneck even USB 2.0 transfers, unless you have dual-stream wireless AC or a Mac using airport extreme.
For a Mac, you’ll have to wait for a Mac user, or just trust copy/paste & hope.
Thanks,
Forgot to specify that. I’m a Mac user, for the same reasons. I’m ok with being judged lol