Solved: decided to avoid the funkyness this would invoke and just bought another drive. all good now👍

About a year back, I moved my internal 8tb and 4tb HDDs from my main Windows machine to my old PC-turned-Linux-server. They hold a bunch of bulk data like Youtube channel archives and torrents that are open to download.

I would like to do an in-place ext4 conversion, if possible. Currently I've just started shuffling data off to an SSD and the plan was to slowly shrink the NTFS partitions and turn the new space into ext4, 500gb at a time (size of the intermediary SSD), but it is taking an unbearably long time. Shrinking the 4tb partition in gparted has been running for 13 hours, with an estimated 22 hours remaining! And I'll have to do it 7 more times for the 4tb, and 16 times for the 8tb!!

Is there a better way to do this?

  • MajinBlayze [any, he/him]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I'm not sure what the chances actually are, but that much rewriting and shuffling data, if it doesn't immediately result in data loss it is going to put a lot of wear on your drives. If your largest drive is 8 TB, I'd look for another 8+ TB drive so that you can copy the data and then reformat. Even a slow external drive is likely to be faster than what you're doing.

    • helpimnotdrowning@lemmy.sdf.org
      ·
      1 month ago

      Yep, I've just ordered another 8tb to copy to and avoid the headache that could be a drive failure. And it'll certainly be faster, gparted is still giving a 13 hour ETA for the first resize! Thanks for the help!

  • gerdesj@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 month ago

    Files are files and filesystems are filesystems. You keep your files on filesystems.

    NTFS and ext4 are non convertible - you cannot turn one into the other directly, in place. However you can take files from one and put them on another.

    Yes, moving TBs does take time, sorry it is unbearable.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    ·
    1 month ago

    you can't get there from here.

    you can convert to btrfs, but no matter what anyone says, there lie dragons.

    if you end up doing big bulk reads and writes to and from your disks, keep them cool. if that means limiting bitrates with the rsync command or just plugging them up to a 802.11g laptop and copying from there to your target then that's fine. if it means making a funnel to direct a box fan's worth of cfm onto your drives then that's fine.