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?
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.