Maybe a dumb question. But is this just a matter of copying over? I have 6 hdds I’ve accumulated and want all the data from them on one big drive now. They are all ntfs as they are from windows, but I am going to boot from my mint drive to move the files, just so windows isnt running or accessing anything on the drives while I move the data. I’m transitioning to full linux, but I want to consolidate these drives first. I dont want to clone drives, so no dd here, just copying files from 6 different drives onto 1.
Have you looked into building a simple NAS? Storing files on single disks is generally bad since it is inefficient and can lead to data loss and theft.
It might sound like overkill but it gives you a lot of power and flexibility. Get an old desktop with at least 8gb of ram and then install a few drives. Next install TrueNAS, configure the disks, configure file share and call it a day.
Yep I have 2 nas! But this is just my internal desktop drive . I also backup with bac Ablaze. Thank you!
@possiblylinux127 @applemao I wouldn’t worry so much about efficiency as redundancy, better to have at least two drives and set up a RAID1 array, and given that the Linux kernel already has RAID, NFS, etc, I don’t see the point in being dependent upon additional software such as TruNAS. That said yes it’s just a matter of copying files to move the data over BUT a windows executable often will not work in a LInux environment even with wine, particularly if it contains what is known as a rootkit anti-cheat. You can however fairly easily setup a windows vm under linux.
Raid1 isn’t the most performant by itself. (Thats what I mean by efficiency) It is better to use 4 disks with data being written to two disks at a time.
The benefit of a dedicated NAS is that it works with basically any client OS. Both Windows and Linux have good support for SMB so it is just a matter of mounting the drive. Wine doesn’t matter in this case.
@possiblylinux127 To be sure, but I assume since he was formerly running Windows performance wasn’t an issue. No, it’s obvious he is more concerned with getting the clutter factor down so he stated a preference for a single large drive, and if data isn’t important or backed up some other media fine. If not, then you risk losing your data because sooner later drives fail. If performance was really the goal he’d raid a bunch of nvme drives together. This, by the way, is what I do for the system that runs this friendica node, along with an 18 core processor and 256 gb of RAM.