I just installed a 3 drive RAIDZ in my small home server to replace my old drives. But I don’t have enough SATA ports to also connect my old drives because the 4th SATA port is blocked when using a M.2 SSD, which I do as my boot drive. So I can’t transfer around 10 TB of files from my old drives to the ZFS pool. I have an external USB connector, but it’s really slow or I could boot from an USB stick, install ZFS and use all 4 SATA ports to transfer the files. I also have another PC to put the old drives in, but it would be quite a hassle.
Do you have any idea what would be the best solution to this?
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USB 3 should be plenty fast. Even 4-disks per port do 600MB/s. Get some USB-SATA adapters, or a multibay box, or some enclosures, and a USB hub. I was running 2 4-bay boxes on 2 USB 3 5Gb ports with 8-disk RAIDz2. Peaks at 1.3GB/s.
I haven’t used raidz but a quick search tells me it supports single-drive expansion.
Maybe reconfigure your raidz as a 2-drive system, then copy over all your data into it, and expand it back into a 3-drive system after.
Maybe you could try Syncthing? It’s pretty fast over a local network and can do the job fairly well.
At the root of it, network transfer is the best bet.
That would take 22 hours under ideal conditions on a 1gbit connection. If you copy files and not block data it’ll probably take 24h or more. Not fun.
