Best option for migrating drives to new system?

[jettech]

Hi folks! New to Proxmox and this is my first post on the forum.

My old unit, which is outdated and power hungry, was running Windows server and has a couple of 4TB HDDs I'd like to move to the new unit. This means that they're currently NTFS. They're set up in RAID 1 which I know will have to be re-done. The current plans for this new unit will simply be NAS, Plex, Minecraft, and experimenting. I've used VMs and hypervisors before but not at this level, and not for useful reasons.

I've been researching and I think there are a few options but I'm not sure which would be best:

1. Install the drives as-is and pass them through to a Windows VM, maintaining the data and file system - this would probably mean running my NAS and Plex on this VM to store and utilize the data, but my concern is power consumption. My understanding is that Linux-based options would be lighter on the system.
2. I read that using "ntfs-3g" will allow Linux-based systems to read and write to NTFS, but it seems that performance is reduced and supposedly there's a higher chance of corruption.
3. Transfer all of the data to an extra drive, format the two storage drives for use in the system, set them up in whatever way I want and then transfer the data back to those drives. As far as I can tell, this would be the way to give myself the most flexibility in using these drives for VMs and whatever I want. The downside is the time to complete these transfers and complexity. I'm not familiar with data storage with Proxmox so I'm actively researching this.

EDIT: Forgot to add specs:

HP Elitedesk 800 G4 (SFF)
Core i7-8700
16GB RAM, 2666 (waiting on additional 16 to arrive)
Proxmox is on 256GB NVME

Any advice is greatly appreciated. TIA!

 

[myrmidon]

Can you provide more information on how the current system is set up?

Are you using a hardware raid card, or software 'raid' with windows storage spaces?

Is the system currently running windows server bare-metal? or are you using another hypervisor with windows server running in a VM?

Ideally you should set up the new system with the old one running in tandem, and transfer the data over. But, if you want to preserve the data on the drives, while moving them to the new system and running a different operating system, you may run into some concerns like you have mentioned.

Ideally, you should set up the drives from fresh, and turn them into a proxmox datastore using something like ZFS. From there you can define the virtual disks to use when creating your new NAS VM, and then your VM will use the virtual disk(s) you create/the proxmox datastore, rather than passing the physical disks or RAID array through directly to a virtual machine, which could cause you lots of headaches.

You can then transfer the data over from the old server to the new NAS VM.

 

[jettech]

Can you provide more information on how the current system is set up?

Are you using a hardware raid card, or software 'raid' with storage spaces?

Is the system currently running windows server bare-metal? or are you using another hypervisor with windows server running in a VM?

Ideally you should set up the new system with the old one running in tandem, and transfer the data over. But, if you want to preserve the data on the drives, while moving them to the new system and running a different operating system, you may run into some concerns like you have mentioned.

Ideally, you should set up the drives from fresh, and turn them into a proxmox datastore using something like ZFS. From there you can define the virtual disks to use when creating your new NAS VM, and then your VM will use the virtual disk(s) you create/the proxmox datastore, rather than passing the physical disks or RAID array through directly to a virtual machine, which could cause you lots of headaches.

You can then transfer the data over from the old server to the new NAS VM.

The old system I'm replacing runs the same things the new one will be; I use it for NAS, Plex, and a Minecraft server.

The current system has Proxmox installed fresh - nothing else going on. I haven't moved the drives from the old unit yet; it's still fully intact and usable. It uses software RAID and running windows server bare metal. No hypervisors.

Since I have a spare hard drive big enough to store the data, I should be able to transfer everything via network to that spare drive OR pull one of the two RAID drives out of the system, format it, and transfer to that, then follow up with the second. Important considerations are that the storage drives are paired since new, so they have identical reads/writes/cycles, etc and I'd like to stick as close to that as possible. The spare drive I have isn't the same size so it wouldn't be ideal to keep using, only as a temporary offloading through the transfer process.

 

[jettech]

Update:

I've been messing around and added TrueNAS Scale and Debian VMs. I think I'll wind up using TrueNAS for NAS/Plex, and Debian + Docker for the Minecraft and other things.

Using TrueNAS means I'll need to format those drives of course, so I'm probably going to:

1. Back up the data to another drive in the old server
2. Install the storage drives into the new server and format for use
3. Network transfer the data from the spare drive to the new server

If there's a better way to handle this process or anyone has advice on making the transfer as easy as possible considering it'll be a move between Windows and Linux, please let me know!