Creating a Data Transfer Drive that is EXT4 or NTFS formated

TrueNAS General
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Hello, first post for a new user of the community forum. I’ve reviewed posts and did a lot of google searches for this issue but something is not working. My goal is to take my 20TB WD SATA drive and mail it to my brother-in-law so he can copy family files and send it back to me. He has a Synology NAS. Seemed like EXT4 or NTFS was a good common format for transfer since Synology seems to handle that. Now that there isn’t a Disk Import function in the release I’m on, 25.10.1, I’m having some difficulties. I created a windows VM as recommended by some posts, but don’t see the /dev/sdb disk (listed in truenas as the device name) available to import into the Windows VM. For the VM (not started) I go into Devices and edit Disk. Since the 20TB drive is not a Zvol its not listed in the drop down. How can I define it as a Zvol without wiping out what is on it? Any help appreciated!

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wasn’t sure how to edit my original post so I’m doing a reply. I did try the procedure to create a Zvol via the Create Pool option. In the drop down there are a lot of RAID type options, but nothing for a single disk! Can’t get post that procedure without knowing what I should choose for a single disk.

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A single disk is a stripe.

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You cannot. Mount this drive on your desktop and copy files to the Network Attached Storage over the network.

1 Like
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You can do it with either.

Easiest is, format/prepare disk in Windows or Linux.

Mount the drive in TN.

Use cp, move or sync to copy/move files.

This is the fastest way. Using the network will slow it down, but ok if nothing else.

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The original flow was, the plan at least, was to mail my 20TB drive to my brother-in-law where he puts it in his Synology NAS and formats as an NTFS or EXT4. Then, he copies the 10+TB of files to it. I get it mailed back to me and load it into my TrueNAS install (JONSBO N3) NAS at the original position. Then, copy those files from the 20TB drive to my 6 drive ZFS filesystem.

I’m feeling like this is no longer possible. Am I missing something?

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Truenas officially only supports ZFS as a file system.

The option to import data was removed a while ago.

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And a request to allow external backups to exFAT has just been turned down…