This might be a really stupid question…but need to know:
I have the EX4100 with 4 x 10TB drives set up as JBOD…on occasion I need to transfer or copy files from 1 of the drives to a different one within the same enclosure.
What is the quickest way to do this?
At the moment I can use any of my windows or Mac computers and goto the network tab and browse the drives as normal…select what I want and copy from one drive and paste to the other no problem.
I just don’t know if that is the best way to do what I am doing?
Depends on your network (and I have pretty much the same setup as you) but I find although “easier” to do it your way, it’s probably faster to go in to the backup section of the Ex4100 and do an internal backup of the file or files. With that said, I rarely do that and just do it the same way you do…it doesn’t that much time for me and I can be doing other things on the computer while the files are copying.
My EX4100 and ALL my desktop computers are connected to a 24 gigabit switch via cat6 cable.
Just seems like a long route for the data to go…A file from say Drive 1 off the NAS…through a windows or Mac desktop…and onto Drive 2 of the same NAS.
If the desktop is just acting as a passthrough then fair enough…but if the desktop is having to kind of copy/save it in a buffer so to speak as it is passing it to the second drive then that would affect the transfer speeds I guess?
What you are suggesting will work. . .but it’s basically the computer doing the copying. . .which is hardly efficient. . .and crippling if you have the computer on a wifi connection.
I believe the “USB backup” app will utilize the NAS’s processor for the copying and would be a good way to go. Only flaw is that the directory structure that results on the target drive will be a bit wonky. … but easily corrected once complete.
Also, a program like WinScp (in the windows world) I believe works via SSH into the NAS; and I believe will utilize the NAS brain for the copying (since it executes commands on the NAS brain; not the PSA brain)
Under OS5, go to Webui - Apps - install Internal Backup if you haven’t done so…Use Internal backup to backup files/folders. You can do backup, synchronize, increment…Hope that help.
Under OS3, I believe that is something similar too…
Thanks for the replies folks…I can’t believe this option has been staring me in the face for a couple of years and I didn’t look into it until now.
So I tested the NAS transfer by going to the “backup tab” then selecting the internal backup option, created a job by selecting a media folder to copy (TV show consisting of 10 episodes, folder size of 28.15GB) from 1 drive to another drive within the same NAS enclosure set up as JBOD (4 x 10TB WD Reds) and got the following speed results:
2018 Mac mini - 6 minutes 57 seconds.
Custom build windows machine - 5 minutes 7 seconds.
Internal backup option - 3 minutes 45 seconds.
Not sure why the Mac was so slow…35% slower than windows & 85% slower than the internal backup.
This will be my preferred method from now on…it does need a couple extra steps once its completed as it adds extra folders for some reason…but that is easy to sort out.
Edit: I am still on OS3…did not notice this thread was created in the wrong place.
