 So let's talk about FreeNAS and what happens when you have some old hardware and you go Hey, I got this other hardware and it's better and I want to move everything over there But I'm afraid that if I move it everything will break when I put it over here Well, let's talk through this real quick And it's this is short video because this is actually pretty simple of FreeNAS I almost think some people are conditioned to the way Windows works And I know it's gotten better with more recent versions of Windows But changing hardware prompts the device manager to go crazy, especially older versions of Windows In case you just not work you can't easily just take I'm just gonna move everything from here Especially because this is Intel architecture. This is an AMD board. I'm moving this to This has a Raider right here. We're gonna get to the second. This just has SATA ports. How does that all work? Do I have to back it up? Will I break my ZFS pools? Why be able to import them? How do you know? Will any of this work? Good news FreeNAS FreeBSD Linux based distributions generally don't have problem moving from hardware platform the other Things you do have to note first. We'll talk about the network We will have to reset the network now if you have it programmed to a network card And you use the same network card in both devices that actually makes it really easy So if I had a network card, I move it over here It'll go. Hey, I know the settings for that network card because I had it over here and it'll work We're actually going to walk through how to change the network settings is Purposely for this video demo. We're swapping network cards now when it comes to the rate array If you followed proper guides for building your FreeNAS You would not have set this up with the BIOS RAID Never set up FreeNAS on a BIOS RAID the ideal way to do it is to pass each hard drive through most RAID cards Have that option like to pass the drives through over to the motherboard or directly to the OS I mean so they can control it. This is the ideal way to set up FreeNAS So if you have one of the you know, let's say you have a Dell with one of the perk controllers you don't want to Use that controller to set up your RAID array you want to have each drive passed off to the operating system Now, I know there's going to be some weird exceptions There's probably some weird cards That are out there that maybe don't support that well Then also makes them less than ideal for setting up with FreeNAS FreeNAS should be in direct control the hardware That's how ZFS and you get all the benefits out of the entire NAS operating system as it's built is to have everything Directly interacting and they sell lots of different cards. You can find on some of the guides I'm going to do a guide pretty soon on Custom building your own FreeNAS with one of those. So let's get back to this. So this machine Works perfectly fine. I'm actually switching it because this has more memory I don't have more memory laying around for this and I have some demos coming up on FreeNAS So let's get to switching now. First thing is obviously I could if I really felt inspired pull this whole J-Bot thing out Which hard to do from this side Over is going to remove all the drives from here They're all SATA drives on the interface so the interface is the same we're just going to pop them all into This system here now the boot drive good news is this thing actually is I only have one I know you should run around redundantly, but it has one USB drive that's loaded with FreeNAS. We're just going to remove that drive and put it over into the other machine So no big deal This one also has internal connectors for it So nice and convenient and I'm going to move all the drives over here And I'm going to show you and walk you through the networking step that comes after this because when we swap it It's going to not see the same network cards and we're going to get this set up. All right, so let's get moving All right for purposes of video Please ignore the disastrous cable management because I'm not going to take the time right now to mount the hard drives Because I actually have some different drives will probably use for this demo specifically. So here's our FreeNAS machine It's ready to boot probably the network won't work. Let's find out Press center. Whoops, better. I just had paused it so I could Do the video here so it's booting up now first thing you may have noticed The drives are just sitting here. You're probably going Tom. Did you take them out in order? Did you plug the first drive in the cable one? It's second drive in a cable two good news FreeNAS. Don't care The way ZFS works is not by saying port one on the SATA controller goes to this specific hard drive And port two goes to that specific hard drive. You can mix and match the hard drives around to different ports FreeNAS is fine with that That's not how logical the ZFS is. Each drive has the data for the pool written to it So they can pull through and it's going to go through and import the pools excuse me, and as it imports the pools It doesn't care where they're plugged in so if we move them all over one port and reboot this machine It's not going to matter if you do it live You're going to have problems But you're going to see it's going to boot up here and find the volumes have all the information We got our USB drive plugged in right here and away we go Actually link state changed up. Let's see if the networking actually just picked up and worked on this If not, I'm going to walk you through how to reset the networking Which is pretty easy is do it from the command interface here Coffee is an important thing to have while you're waiting for FreeNAS to boot up here We have our volume import Successful ZFS import complete. No link DHCP, wow it actually found the network card So apparently these boards have the same network interface so there's not actually any interface changes I need to do but I'll walk you through real quick if you need to do them. You just simply choose option one Choose the interface you want to configure. We're not going to delete it I'm not going to reset it We can configure it say yes Give it a name type in an IP address Netmask no one needs IPv6 And away we go So that's it for moving FreeNAS from one machine to another and we've now crossed over architecture types That was an Intel. This is an AMD opt-a-ron chip completely different motherboard HP versus Believe this is super micro and also, you know going from the architecture tips means even the controller is very different One has the rate controller, but the drives were set to pass through Right to the FreeNAS, which that's an important aspect. This would not have worked if that was not the case But that's it. You can swap it This is also one of the reasons I like FreeNAS because importing a ZFS pool even if I were to lose this The thumb drive with the boot information on there as long as I had the passwords for the hard drives the key file If the drives were encrypted when I have a video on how to back that up, which is highly important You could still recover to ZFS This is an advantage you have over proprietary NAS systems and I seen a video the other day It was someone tagged me and and I've complained about this before when you buy some of these Uniquely proprietary NAS systems that if there's a failure, it's not as easy to recover from you now You should always have backups. What we know People don't always back up they put data on there and they didn't get to backing it up yet So that's can be an issue, but you can feel confident that as you do upgrades your FreeNAS will upgrade with you and We've done that to our FreeNAS. It has been in place since Persian Eight or nine. I've been so long and so many years and no parts are really the same It's the same names of the servers, but we've swapped out hard drives over time We've completely changed out the body of it. We put it in a larger J-Bod So it FreeNAS has grown with us and each of the drives has traveled along the way or even the ones that didn't make it It didn't survive were placed out and the ZFS array is the same It's like that acts the 200-year-old acts that the handle and the head have been replaced so many times same concept Thank you for watching and hopefully this was helpful and give you a little bit more confidence in FreeNAS and moving things around between different hardware that you don't have to worry as much I still recommend backing up in case it all goes wrong because anytime you're messing with computer hardware and Stacking hard drives in a messy way like this things could go wrong, but it does work Thanks for watching if you liked this video go ahead and click the thumbs up Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing a feedback Or if you just want to say thanks leave a comment If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know That you're interested in notifications. 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