Best way for migration

[thorgrim]

Hi guys !

I've been running FreeNAS on some (very...) basic hardware for a while and since a couple of month been thinking to upgrade that. I've been pushed lately by the fact I've been getting the same behaviour described by Alan in this thread: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/is-it-safe-to-reboot-during-a-resilver.55599/

Here is my setup :

Build FreeNAS-9.2.1.2-RELEASE-x64 (002022c)
Platform AMD E-350 Processor
Memory 8Gb
HDD 5 drives mix of 2TB and 3TB in RAIDZ2

One of my drives (ada3) shows as removed very frequently. I've had reports in the daily mails always on the same drive for a couple of months now. Some read or write errors. I am pretty sure this comes from my MB and/or RAM but as I didn't have time/money to do a full replace I tried other things first. I replaced the disk a couple of times and each time the problem came back after some weeks. I also changed the PSU and the sata cable but no luck with that, the same port always ends up with a dead disk...

I already had some issues back in the days, similar to the ones I am facing now. I described everything there: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/track-down-hdd-issue-if-any.11790/

So now I am sure I'm going to change the hardware. I'm going for some Supermicro MB, probably an i3 and ECC RAM everything following the hardware recommendations from the forum. But the question is how do I transfer my disks ? In the beginning I had 5x2TB drives and I was in the process of upgrading to 3TB drives before changing the underlying hardware. So now, I have 3x2TB drives and 2x3TB drives, one of the latter being the dead one.

Can I simply order my new hardware, build it up, install the latest FreeNAS and then plug my actual disks and somehow FreeNAS will find my pool ? Or is it best for me to one more time replace the failed drive in the current setup, replace all the drives to 3TB and expand the pool and only then move to the new hardware ? I already have the other 3TB drives, I would have to order one to replace the failed one obviously but I could easily upgrade the other ones now.

What do you think is the best way?

 

[danb35]

Can I simply order my new hardware, build it up, install the latest Freenas and then plug my actual disks and somehow Freenas will find my pool ?

At a minimum, it should do so with 9.10. There seems to be a bug in 11 in importing degraded pools, so if all the disks aren't online, your pool may not import with 11.

 

[thorgrim]

At a minimum, it should do so with 9.10. There seems to be a bug in 11 in importing degraded pools, so if all the disks aren't online, your pool may not import with 11.

Ok so it's time to choose my new hardware.

Do I have to keep the 5 drives as is when booting the new system or I can only use the 4 working drives and directly replace the failing one ? And does the order of the drives have importance when putting back in the new system or is ZFS/FreeNAS intelligent enough to recognize the pool anyway ?