Looking for advise - coping files to an external USB HDD via its USB interface

TrueNAS General
1

I’m running TrueNAS Community Edition v.25.04.2.4 in a zraid cfg. The motherboard its setup on is a AMD 8845HS 8-core NAS Motherboard with Dual 10G Ethernet Ports. (Motherboard +2*SFF8643+JONSBO FAN) How could I copy data, files ranging in size from 1gb to 5gb and there being about 1500 of them to an external HDD with a USB 2.0 interface.
My LAN is 2.5GbE at its slowest point.

Ideas ?

2

Whats the file system on the usb hdd? If it’s anything but zfs then your only option is to connect it to another pc and copy over the network directly to the usb hdd

3

@LarsR The TV that it had been plugged into “touched” is format and it got borked. Its currently getting a full format to validate it integrity.

4

Also researching running the copy directly on the TrueNAS host via the CLI inside a persistent terminal session to ensure the transfer finishes without interruption. Or would the “juice be worth the squeeze”?

5

You won’t be able to mount the USB drive via the web UI, but you can mount it manually via CLI. You can also use rsync to run the copy without using tmux.

6

1 - Pull the drive from the USB 2.0 enclose, install it on a workstation via SATA, use FreeFileSync to copy the files from the NAS over NIC.

2 - Pull the drive from the USB 2.0 enclosure, install it on the NAS, copy the files over.

USB 2.0 is painfully slow. You could connect to a client using USB and use FreeFileSync for copy operations as FreeFileSync can continue from disrupted file transfer sessions.

7

Sry my bad USB 3.1 but the pull the media from the enclosure had also crossed my mind.

If I installed it in the NAS - wouldn’t it become part of the storage vault? I need it to be plain vanilla and seen by a simple device (like a TV)

8

If USB 3.1 5Gbps, you can connect to a pc and use FreeFileSync for 1:1 copy. If the copy process is interrupted, FreeFileSyc will continue from the last known.

9

Thanks then that will be my less painful way to do this.

10

drop to the command line, and do this:

  1. do a “lsblk” command to list the block devices attached to your NAS.
  2. locate the name of the external usb drive (let’s assume it’s /dev/sdd1)
  3. sudo mkdir /mnt/usb_drive
  4. sudo mount -t (exfat,btrfs,xfs,etc) /dev/sdd1 /mnt/usb_drive
  5. execute command “mc” to open Midnight Commander
    1. (or, use rsync to copy the files).
11

That looks close what Jarvis (my AI) suggested I do.

FreeFileSyc was the “blue pill”

12

Either option will work. If using command line I would ssh into your nas to allow an uninterrupted processing of the file copy or you could extend the time out session for the shell interface.

I use FreeFileSync since it supports multi-threading for parallel read/writes if your hardware configuration supports it.