Advice on upgrading hard drive

[dkorman]

I need to replace a hard drive that contains my iMatch target files, as I will be running low on space.  As I do not want to have iMatch reindex 300,000 files, I could use some advice on how to best accomplish the task from someone who has had experience doing this.

Thank you in advance.

[loweskid]

Once you've copied the files to your new drive just use the 'relocate' command - right click on the original folder, select 'relocate' and then navigate to the new drive.  All your data, categories etc will be transferred without having to reindex the files. 

Search for 'relocate' in the help file for more info.

[dkorman]

Thank you.  Let me see if I understand the steps.  Let's say that I want to replace Drive G:

    1. Attach new hard drive to system and initialize.  Let's say it becomes Drive H: for now
    2. mirror all the files on Drive G: to Drive H:
    3. Remove Drive G:, replace new drive with cabling with Drive H:
    4. In rebooting, make sure the new drive is assigned drive letter G:
    5. Start iMatch
    6. Will iMatch show the old Drive Folders as being offline, as the old Volume ID was different than the new one?
    7. Use iMatch's relocate command to "re-point" the Folders to the new Drive G: (which, of course, will have a different Volume ID than the old Drive G:
    6. Everything should work fine?

Thanks.

[Mario]

Will iMatch show the old Drive Folders as being offline, as the old Volume ID was different than the new one?

Just relocate drive G: to drive G: (there is a Relocate command in the context menu of drives).

Make a backup copy of your database before. Then nothing can go wrong.

[dkorman]

Upgrade finished!

So, as a followup for those interested, I did upgrade my storage from 6tb to 10tb drive (amazing capacity). By the end, iMatch performed perfectly relocating my index path. 

Thank you Mario, for making this part of the process so pain free and effective - as always, your implementing so much considered functionality in iMatch is appreciated. (iMatch did take ~15 minutes with no messages while relocating, which made me slightly concerned, but with patience, iMatch came through absolutely fine).


As a side note for those interested:  newer hard drive SATA standards can present problems:

For those thinking of upgrading to newer large capacity hard drives, I ran into one issue that I was not aware of or prepared for, and I will share:  there is a new SATA standard (3.2+ and 3.3) that makes some of these newer drives incompatible with legacy SATA power connectors - it's called "Power Disable Pin."  The new standard, is designed to make managing these drives easier for data managers, allowing for a "hard reset" of the drive remotely, instead of having to physically touch the drive.  It does this by changing the meaning of voltage on pin 3 of the power connector.  With the legacy standard that I presume many of us have, the hard drive simply will not spin up; it will not be damaged, it just will not spin as it's in continual hard reset (which of course, when one attaches a hard drive and gets what appears to be a DOA brick, all sorts of thoughts and delays come to mind, none good).  While there is a "workaround" in using a molex to SATA adaptor (which I used successfully in my desktop), hardware such as backup NAS or USB cases do not have the space for the converter.   Some manufactures are making two versions of their drives, but online and in store documentation seems missing/incomplete on this subject.  Unfortunately, there is no jumper on the drives to handle the issue, so be careful with your part numbers (I noticed even vendor online documentation is problematic; for me, using a Hitachi drive, even the part number on the drive at retail was not listed in the vendor documents).  Here's a brief discussion on Tom's Hardware:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-sata-power-disable-feature,36146.html

Now to deal with the problem of Windows updates (as always) screwing up network discovery!  (For the first time, with the April update, machines don't even see themselves on the network - ahhhh!)

Happy computing!  And, thank you again, Mario.