I am looking to setup NAS with 4 1TB drives from Windows Home Server version 1. I want to keep the data currently stored on spanned drives intact. Does anyone have suggestions on best method to copy data (and to what) so I can restore to NAS once drives are reformatted?
First - ReadyNAS questions might get more of a response if asked in the ReadyNAS forum - there is a link to it on the first page of these forums.
Second - I'm not certain I understand what you're attempting here - but I believe that you intend to retire the WHS and reuse the disks in a ReadyNAS, if that is correct, you're probably going to need to ask some questions in a Microsoft forum, or invest in some disks, or both.
I haven't used WHS since it came out of beta, I know it allows for redundant storage without using traditional RAID technologies, and I believe it should be possible, provided you have enough available storage to remove the disks one by one and transfer them across to the ReadyNAS and reformat them there - the challenges will be in moving the data from one to the other and maintaining enough available space on both sides to perform the task - it's not going to be as simple as move 1TB of data, so 1TB of space available.
My question is this - how much of this data do you have backed up elsewhere? Many WHS users used the WHS to backup PCs - if this is what you were doing, much of the data on the WHS would be on your PCs, which would mean you only need to backup and transfer your "shared data".
Part of the reason behind that question is this - both the WHS & the ReadyNAS will also need to be backed up - so if you don't have the available capacity to do that, which I suspect is the case, then my suggestion is you buy a large USB external drive - backup your WHS to it - transfer that drive to a PC and make sure the data is accessible - pull the drives from the WHS, install them in your ReadyNAS, plug the external into the ReadyNAS and restore the data - it should be accessible, but, just in case it's not, that was the reason I suggested you check it from a PC.
Buy a 4 TB drive and then you can copy all your shares to it. The formatting is different between a NAS and a PC. If you used SPANNED this will further complicate things too.
Your safest bet would be to buy a 4tb drive and connect to a PC then copy shares.
