Upgrading NAS - Help please

[josh clare]

Hello all,

I was wondering if someone could please help me?

I currently have a Lacie 2tb Ethernet Disk Nas on our domain, it only has about 50gb free space remaining.

I have purchased a Lacie 8tb Ethernet Disk Nas and plan on replacing the old 2tb Nas with the new 8tb Nas.

I have them both on the domain at the moment and now want to transfer the 1.8tb of data across from one to the other.

The old 2tb nas currently hosts our website along with other things so cannot be dismounted yet until i have the other one ready to replace.

Could someone please advise/help as to what is the best way to transfer the data across.

Thanks,

Josh

[FiB3R]

"Copy" the data, don't "move" it.

Don't rush it by copying all the data over in one hit. Do it in smaller, manageable chunks.

I take it you are running a Windows OS? Use something like TerraCopy to manage the transfer. This should speed up the process, and let you see exactly which transfers failed (if any) so that you can rectify the problem after the rest of the transfer has completed.

[sc302 Veteran]

Why are you hosting a website on a NAS? robocopy works great, if you are using 2008 server or win7 it has a multithreaded copy, otherwise rich copy does as well if you want a gui version of robocopy. I believe the newer version of robocopy in win7 is much better than richcopy.

[+BudMan MVC]

You prob want to either do a push from your old nas to the new, or a pull from the new from the old.

Putting a windows or any box in the middle to do the xfer will really slow it down, since that machine will be the go between, ie file goes to your machine, and then to other nas.

If your not on a gig network, the copy of 1.8TB of data can take quite a bit of time ;) Even if you could scream at 9 to 10MBps -- your looking at like 55 hours to copy 1.8TB at 9MBps ;)

Sure hope you have a gig network, if your on 100mbit connection I doubt you would even see 9MBps if your machine is in the middle.

If on gig direct from one nas to the other, I would hope you could get atleast 25MBps at a min.. So that cuts the time down to like 20 hours ;)

To be honest you might want to connect the old 2TB disk directly to your new if you have an open slot or can connect using esata to speed up the file copy. I would prob schedule some down time over the weekend to do the copy.

[majortom1981]

I would go with budmans suggestion. Connect the nas devices directly from one nic to the other and copy that way. Also if its from one lacie nas to another it should have a utility that can help you do this easier built in to the firmware of both devices.

[+BudMan MVC]

Where did I say anything about connecting nas nic to other nas nic :blink:

But he sure does not want to run say a robocopy command from his computer that picks nas1 and source and nas2 as dest -- that would put his box in the middle of the transfer. He would need to run copy command from one of the nas's

Even with gig network 1.8TB is going to take a while to copy. He would be best off directly connecting the 2TB nas DISK to the 8TB nas via SATA, PATA, eSATA, etc.

[FiB3R]

Wouldn't the disks making up the 8TB be in some form of RAID, making it impossible to swap the drives for direct copying?

[cybertimber2008]

Wouldn't the disks making up the 8TB be in some form of RAID, making it impossible to swap the drives for direct copying?

Yes.

I'd also put a vote in for the xcopy/robocopy using one of your NAS's as the host. Best part is that it will check file integrity, and you can run it again once it's done to grab any changed files (if someone is making changes).

Also, using a dedicated NIC between them would be ideal... because your regular traffic (web, etc), will go out the other NIC and be lesser effected by a full transfer taking up most of the bandwidth. Seperate NIC, seperate bandwidth.

[+BudMan MVC]

"making it impossible to swap the drives for direct copying? "

Who said anything about swapping out drives?? Most NAS that would support 8TB of data allow for connection of multiple disks in multiple arrays. It would seem logical that if he has a spare slot or estata connection that he could add his 2TB drive to the new NAS without making it part of his 8TB array, etc.

I would have to assume that it at worse case has a USB connection he could use, that would be faster than copy over 100mbit ;)

[josh clare]

Hey all,

From what i can see, the Nas doesnt have an esata and doesnt look like it wants to be taken apart either, it does however have usb ports. but this would mean dismounting the old nas from the network which would result in downtime on the website. The website is hosted on a server but there are a large amount of pdf files hosted on the old nas for the website.

I attempted copying a few small folders (when i say small, they were still around 100gb) using terracopy over the weekend but they were still copying when i came back into work monday with a few errors. That would have been going through my computer in the middle :s

When connecting to the nas's remotely, they have a backup and restore option; from what i can see, it backs up all the files/folders to a file, what if i was to back it up to a file on the new nas and then use the restore option on the new nas?

http://jorgecardoso.org/blog/uploads/LacieNAS/RemoteDesktop.GIF

Thanks for all the help guys.

Josh

[+BudMan MVC]

So your a time traveler asking us in the future for help? ;) Your NAS says its 2006 ;)

Please post the exact models of both your devices, so can lookup up exactly what they have and what they can and can not do and what the manual says about features like backup and restore, etc.

As to teracopy, to be honest in my personal opinion that software is total and utter crapola on a stick.. I don't see why people rave about it, every single benchmark I have put it through it was slower than just plain file copy or robocopy.

[josh clare]

Hi Budman,

i dont quite understand what you mean by me being a time traveler asking for future help lol, that screen shot was not taken from my NAS, i found it on google but is the exact same as what i see on ours.

Here is the model:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10351

I have the 2tb model and the 8tb model and am trying to move the data from the 2tb one to the new 8tb one.

Hope this helps, and thanks for the advise on terracopy ;p; (Y)

[+BudMan MVC]

Ok from a quick look at the manual, sure seems to be just running XP, and the images from backup looks like XP/NT backup -- sure just backup your files to the other nas, then on the other nas do a restore. I would pick just one dir or a few files as a test and see what speed you get.

Those clearly support gig network, are you on one?

Also since it looks like you can just remote desktop to XP desktop, why don't you just do that an use robocopy - you can get robocopy for XP here as part of the 2k3 tools

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=17657

or just grab richcopy from MS as well

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx

[josh clare]

Hi Budman,

yes, we are on a gig network i think, not sure it is wired to its full potential thou.

I will try the backup/restore method tomorrow morning and let you know how i get on!

Although i can remote desktop to the NAS's. It does not allow me to run explorer etc, so i am not sure how i would go about installing robocopy/richcopy.

Thanks for the help!

Josh

[+BudMan MVC]

To test if your network can actually do gig, grab iperf and or netio, and just test between to PCs that are on your gig network.. You should be seeing over 800Mbits per second even with crappy home hardware. I see 900+ Mbps on my shoestring home network ;)

See easy 50 to 70+ MBps in file copies just using cheap sata disks!

Whats the point of them stating their stuff runs xp embedded without the ability to even go to command line?? Whats the point of remote desktop if you can not use it for explorer or cmd line, etc.? Blows my mind.

To test your nas you might want to look into http://www.intel.com/products/server/storage/NAS_Perf_Toolkit.htm

[josh clare]

Hey all,

i have tested the backup/restore method earlier on a few small files and it seems relatively quick,

So i am currently backing up the full 1.8tb from the old nas to a file on the new nas.

I also downloaded and run iperf and here are the results:

interval: 0.0-10.0 sec

transfer: 575 MBytes

bandwidth: 482 Mbits/sec

is this good? what speed am i getting?

Thanks,

Josh

[+BudMan MVC]

What do you mean what speed are you getting?? :blink:

Right there in front of you.

You transferred 575MBtyes in 10 seconds, which = 482 Mbits per sec..

To be be honest, for a gig network its not all that great, but it might just be the window size you used for testing.

[156] local 192.168.1.100 port 42454 connected with 192.168.1.4 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[156]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.06 GBytes   913 Mbits/sec

So that is between my a Dell Inspiron 518, and an Dell optiplex GX270 using their native cards, switch is either netgear gs108T (v1 that I picked up for like $79 couple years back) or a gs608, might even be going through both would have to trace the wires to see. Nothing special for hardware that is for sure, and quite old even ;)

Run the commands like this, on your machine being your server use -s -w 256k

and then on client same thing -c ipaddressofotheriperfbox -w 256k

This will bump your windows size up to something more realistic to what would be used on your local lan. Netio is a good test as well.

NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.31
(C) 1997-2010 Kai Uwe Rommel

TCP connection established.
Packet size  1k bytes:  103.96 MByte/s Tx,  84.13 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  2k bytes:  106.85 MByte/s Tx,  89.86 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  4k bytes:  110.21 MByte/s Tx,  102.05 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size  8k bytes:  110.21 MByte/s Tx,  108.16 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes:  110.27 MByte/s Tx,  111.37 MByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes:  110.91 MByte/s Tx,  112.41 MByte/s Rx.
Done.

So you can see getting 110 MBytes per second, which matches up fairly well with the 913Mbits seeing with iperf and did not adjust any window size

BTW were you running that test at the same time you were doing a transfer from your nases -- should not really matter with a good switch. But you never know what the backplane of your switches are, etc.

[josh clare]

lol sorry, had a dumb moment,

i used iperf as opposed to netio as i found instructions online which made it easier for me lol.

here are the results i got when i changed the window size to 256k

------------------------------------------------------------

Client connecting to 192.168.1.5, TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 256 KByte

------------------------------------------------------------

[1912] local 192.168.1.89 port 2842 connected with 192.168.1.5 port 5001

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

[1912] 0.0-10.5 sec 918 MBytes 736 Mbits/sec

This is going through several switches.

Our network has been wired terribly but it also has around 30 users connected to the network, downloading and uploading files to and from our server that i carried out the test on.

So probably not the most accurate results either.

Thanks for your help.

Josh

[josh clare]

progress update

hopefully this works!

[+BudMan MVC]

estimate 5 days ;) Ouch!!!

736 Mbps is better, but still low if you ask me. As you saw from my test even cheap home hardware is capable of much better speeds. Once you get your files moved I would really look into why your not seeing at least in mid 800's if not mid 900's

So you feel you have interference on your wiring? You only need cat 5e, mine is not on cat 6 or anything. How long of runs are you talking?

Once you get your files moved, happy to work with you on getting your gig speeds more where they should be.

[josh clare]

yes and its just gone up :pinch: lol

what about my speed results when changing the window to 256k?

does that seem better for a 1gb connection?

thanks,

Josh

[+BudMan MVC]

see my edits, I clicked post on seeing that 5 day before finishing my thoughts ;)

And sure if the server is BUSY it could show in the network performance for sure, same with your switches if your moving LARGE amounts of data on other ports depending on your total backplane bandwidth on the switches involved.

Once you get this move done we can do some better benchmarking, and would do when off hours, and depending on switches involved (smart or managed) we could look at what load they are seeing that might effect overall speed between 2 clients.

[josh clare]

Cheers for all your help budman!

it will be hard to test out of hours as the company is open 24/7.

Although i could vpn in over the weekend when its closed and do some testing.

If i explain a bit more, it might give you a better understanding and explenation as to why i think the speeds may not be to their full potential.

We are a scanning company and have around 20 fast document scanners that scan to our storage server so there are files constantly being created/moved over the network.

We also host some of the images on our website. Not to mention the fact we have mutiple switches/hubs coming off eachother.

I think a majority of the cableing is cat6+ but some of it is over 100m long.

Surely these factors would explain the poor speed results?

Thanks,

Josh

[+BudMan MVC]

over 100 meters? Yeah that is a major concern, is it fiber? Cat 5, 5e, 6, etc.. is only rated for 100 meters. And to be honest that is total length, the run between jacks is suppose to be no more than 90 meters and then counting 5 meters on each end from the switch to the jack, and then the pc to the jack on its end. You should not have runs of 100 meters. Can it work - yeah ok sure it can work, but it should of never been wired up like that in the first place!

But sure if your network is busy busy busy, server etc. Then for sure we could be seeing lower benchmarks.

[josh clare]

i didnt think that would be good :wacko:

its not fibre, its cat6e i think and is only one cable that goes to an "offsite" building (another building a bit down the road) that runs around 4 computers and a wireless access point :s

I think it would be best to re wire the whole building but the companies finance department would not agree lol.

thanks again budman!

Josh