What's the best way to upgrade my pool?

[kpeng]

Hi, I currently have Freenas 11.2-U8 set up in my Dell T20 server. I have 1 pool with 3x4TB drives in RaidZ1. I want to upgrade it to 4x8TB in RaidZ1 so that I have 24TB usable storage space. My goal is to do the storage upgrade and preserve all my share, jails and replication, snapshot settings.

My plan is to add a pool with a 8TB drive. Replicate the old pool(tank) to the new pool(new_tank). Then destroy the tank, add one 3TB drive in to create a new pool also called tank. Now the tank is a 3x4T+1x3T RaidZ1 with 9TB usable storage. Then replicate the data from new_tank back to tank. When all these are done, I should have a pool called tank with 4 drives RaidZ1 and 9TB usable storage. After that, I can replace the drives with 8TB one at a time to upgrade the storage space. Does this procedure sound okay? Do I miss anything?

I plan to follow the procedure in the post below.

Howto: migrate data from one pool to a bigger pool

There have been a lot of posts recently about how to move data from one pool to another. Usually it's because folks want to upgrade to a much larger pool and the drive-by-drive resilvering process will take too long. I've recently gone through this as well. Here are the steps that I followed...

www.ixsystems.com

But I don't know what step 1 means. I can't find my system dataset on tank. I used a 60G SSD as by Freenas boot drive, does that mean my system dataset is on the boot drive and not in tank? On the GUI, I can't see the boot drive show up in any pool. There is only one pool (tank)

 

[sretalla]

On the GUI, I can't see the boot drive show up in any pool

Look under System | Boot Then click on Actions, Boot Pool Status.

I can't find my system dataset on tank.

What does it say under System | System Dataset?

Does this procedure sound okay?

Sounds like it will work if you take care of the system dataset.

You might want to consider stopping all jails, VMs and sharing services like SMB while you're in transit.

 

[Pitfrr]

I want to upgrade it to 4x8TB in RaidZ1

Just to be sure, you're aware that a RAIDz1 volume with drives >1 or 2TB is not advised?
So I wouldn't recommend it.

 

[kpeng]

Just to be sure, you're aware that a RAIDz1 volume with drives >1 or 2TB is not advised?
So I wouldn't recommend it.

I am aware of that. This NAS is mainly for movie, TV shows, not really important data.

 

[kpeng]

Look under System | Boot Then click on Actions, Boot Pool Status.


What does it say under System | System Dataset?


Sounds like it will work if you take care of the system dataset.

You might want to consider stopping all jails, VMs and sharing services like SMB while you're in transit.

Found that, now I moved it to my SSD, the boot drive. Hope that's okay

 

[sretalla]

That is fine.

 

[Philip Robar]

Assuming that you have enough ports and all the 8 TB drives already I would use a two drive mirror for the temporary new_tank pool just to be safe. (Restoring from the mirror to the expanded pool might also be a little faster.)

Also, remember to move your System Dataset back to your pool after the expanded pool is in place.