NASLite Network Attached Storage

My NAS is curently full and when I set it up initially I used smaller drives that I already had. 100GB, 120GB, 160GB, 160GB. What is the best way to add newer drives and move all my data? From routine use, I have noticed that to transfer from one drive to another within the NAS is painfully slow. I thought of removing the oldest drive, putting in a new large drive and transferring from the 3 older drives to the new drive, however, I think this will take forever. Any other options?

You can move your old drive to a linux box and transfer to the new drive or put the old drive in a Windows machine and run software that allows Windows to read linux partions and transfer from there.

The other option is to do as you mentioned, just start it before you go to bed and it should be done by morning

If I was doing this, and I will be, my plan would be to take one HD drive out and replace it with the new HD, copy all the folders and files to the new HD. Then do that for each old HD.

Your first problem is that you are doing this on NL1.x, My advice is that you upgrade to NL2.x. This way you get the increase in performance and flexibility of NL2.x.

When you do a transfer from drive to drive in a NL box the data is shuffling between the computer accessing the NL box and back. At 100Mb/sec speed this will be slow.

The smart way to go about this is to pull the drives from the NL box, temp mount them in your main machine (disconnect your boot drive) and boot a live distro like Knoppix or Ubuntu. Then install the new drive/s in the UPGRADED TO 2.x NASLite box and bring it on line. Now copy data from the drives to the NAS. At 100Mb/sec the best transfer rate you will get is around 8MB/sec (assuming that the old drives can sustain this) so you can figure the rough time needed to make this happen.

An upgrade to Gigabit NICs is also a good idea, expect transfers of upwards of 50MB/sec if the drives are up to it.

End RANT,

Mike

Agree with just about everything mentioned above (version 2, gigabit, etc). But additional hint: if you are starting with larger new (i.e. empty) drive(s), an easy way to copy existing data is to use the built-in MIRROR function (it will be all local, fast & reliable). When finished, disable mirroring & pull out the old drive that was mirrored. This only works ONCE for each new drive you are planning to install, since mirroring overwrites the destination (your new blank large drive). But if you mirror the old drive with the largest amount of data on it, you'll at least have made some significant headway.
The suggestion about booting LiveCD: yes ! But you should also be able to do that on the NL hardware, no need to move the old drives to another PC. (And if you have just a little familiarity with Linux, you can copy data from the old drives to the new one(s) that way. And again it's local and should be fast.)
One word of caution with this method: I am not sure about permissions / ownership of the resulting files copied to the new larger disk with LiveCD (someone else needs to help here ...)
Georg