convedrting big (external ) drives

[yancy smith]

I need help ... I have  a bunch of 4,6,8, 10 TB ext drives and non cased ... If you get themm from the WM or other they come as Exfat and during the summer I almost had a drive corrupt all as some of the files on a exfat are min 1 mb blocks and under Ntfs can be 4Kb all this id about the file system.  The question is  since the files are  on thesre rannge from isos, movies, tools .. and personal backups ..

 What would be  a good or ideal file system to take the dives to linuX and I can use the tools on the  laptops and a tower using linux...

[Bill Jacqmein]

I like Jim Salter's answer of ZFS.

Which brings us to NASes, at least 2, and then replicate (ZFS, rsync,
etc) between them like Brian Moses https://blog.briancmoses.com/ (he
replicates to his buddy Pat's https://blog.patshead.com/index.html)
and Alex from SelfHosted (https://selfhosted.show/) replicates his NC
NAS back to his Mom's in the UK. The NAS idea does bring a lot of
flexibility with some additional management and learnings. And there
would still be a need for offline backup, just in case.

Otherwise I use ext4 for my linux only externals. You will have to
play data shuffle to move data from an existing external, reformat it
and move data back.

On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 9:06 AM yancy smith <free.ad...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I need help ... I have a bunch of 4,6,8, 10 TB ext drives and non cased ... If you get themm from the WM or other they come as Exfat and during the summer I almost had a drive corrupt all as some of the files on a exfat are min 1 mb blocks and under Ntfs can be 4Kb all this id about the file system. The question is since the files are on thesre rannge from isos, movies, tools .. and personal backups ..
>
>
> What would be a good or ideal file system to take the dives to linuX and I can use the tools on the laptops and a tower using linux...
>

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[George Law]

hey yancy

you're not real clear if you're looking to keep any of the data currently on them or just wipe and have the storage available on your home network?

recently had a qnap NAS fail on me, there's a known issue with the specific model celeron they used. I walked into my office one day and the nas was beeping and all the lights were red.  unlike past NAS failures where I had been able to connect the drives to a linux box and poke around until I could figure out how to get to the data on the drives, QNAP uses their own proprietary blend of md raid, lvm and DRBD and I had 5 TB of data inaccessible :( found the issue and an electronics shop that offered the fix for about $80.

At that point I bought 3 new drives - a 3TB to match another I had on hand and a pair of 6 TB and frankensteined together a home grown NAS running TrueNAS from a machine that was previously running Fedora with ZFS.  I had an existing 3 TB zfs pair that TrueNAS picked right up on and imported.

I bought this case off amazon which has space for 13 HDDs  for $90

https://a.co/d/djMONvt

So if you're looking to keep the data but have at least some to start with, you could build a ZFS zpool with 2 and then start migrating data from the other drives to ZFS and as you clear up additional drives, you can create additional zpools with the additional drives.

It is possible to create a 1 drive zpool, there's no redundacy there, but still allows you to create and use a single drive if you do not have a pair.

I've read a lot of folks also like unRAID but no experience there.

~George

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[E. Matt Armstrong]

I just built a new NAS out of a bunch of random sized drives using SnapRAID and MergerFS. I understand this better than ZFS. I think MergerFS can handle any FS as long a your linux distro can read the FS. It works great for my home lab. https://perfectmediaserver.com/03-installation/manual-install-proxmox/

[Bill Jacqmein]

Component I like of ZFS is the data integrity but I also like MergerFS
and SnapRAID to utilize random drives.
I have had a lot of luck with just mdadm as well.

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[Bill Jacqmein]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCa6ulzMG7k - Interesting NAS Case. I
have never wanted to weld as much as I do after watching the case
being built.

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[George Law]

Very cool Bill

It's got me thinking of moving from truenas to unRAID just need to good to see if there's anyconversion guides. 

My biggest concern with truenas is currently having to replace with pairs.

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[Bill Jacqmein]

I moved from Truenas to unRaid after an unfortunate episode of me
learning how to do data recovery on ZFS...
Ive been using OpenMediaVault (https://www.openmediavault.org/) and
plugins like Snapraid
(https://wiki.omv-extras.org/doku.php?id=omv7:omv7_plugins:snapraid)
and mergefs (https://wiki.omv-extras.org/doku.php?id=omv7:omv7_plugins:mergerfs)
can let is behave very much like unraid.

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