Server move sanity check (2x HW RAID + 1x SW RAID to ZFS)

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Jun 12, 2020
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This post is intended to be more of a sanity check then anything else.

I admit that I've made a several poor choices that are adding lots of complications to this project, however my hindsight is 20/20 and it needs to be done at some point.
When I first setup FreeNAS I didn't read through enough and wound up using a hardware raid controller and created 2 different sized RAID 1 volumes for redundancy (2x6TB SMR + 2x8TB CMR).
This server is a Dell R310 with a PERC H310 (LSI 9211-8i in IR mode).

I also have a Windows 10 machine with 2x4TB (SMR) drives in Windows soft raid. I'm planning on moving my FreeNAS onto this one eventually, although I'm waiting on parts, so this will take some time.
The machine will have an LSI 9361-8i raid controller in IT mode to pass the disks through properly.

I also have a pair of 10TB drives (CMR). I was originally going to try extending the pool on my (Dell) R310, but there aren't any more hard drive bays so I've opted to switch servers.
I picked up the drives based on price, so half of them are SMR, and half are CMR. I know this will make resilvering very slow, but there's nothing I can do about that now.


The plan:
When all the hardware I've ordered have arrived, I'm going to install FreeNAS on an SSD to go in the current Win10 machine.
The following steps are planned:
1) Install FreeNAS on the new server's SSD
2) Create a 10TB mirrored volume with the new 10TB drives
3) Move 6TB of data off the old server
4) Remove the (HW Raided) 6TB volume from the old server's zpool. This should copy all remaining data on the 6TB drives to the 8TBs and should cause a resilver on the CMR drives. I'm hoping this will be faster.
5) Format and move the 2x6TB drives to the new server
6) Mirror the drives in ZFS and add them to the new zpool
7) Copy the remaining data off the old server
8) Format and move the 2x8TB drives to the new server
9) Mirror the 8TB drives and add them to the new zpool
10) Move the 4TB drives from the new server into a windows machine to retrieve the data on the softraid
11) Move the data to the new servers
12) Format and move the 2x4TB drives back into the new servers
13) Mirror the 2x4TB drives and add to pool

Can anyone see any fatal flaws with this? The NAS isn't very active, as I'm the only user, and I'm not running any VMs off of it. It may in the future though....
 

sretalla

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Can anyone see any fatal flaws with this?
Using SMR drives. You will be in for a lot of pain with resilvers (if it even completes at all, reports with these are from bad to apalling).

As long as you get to each step with your data in a known state that you trust, looks like nothing else is wrong.
 
Joined
Jun 12, 2020
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Using SMR drives. You will be in for a lot of pain with resilvers (if it even completes at all, reports with these are from bad to apalling).

As long as you get to each step with your data in a known state that you trust, looks like nothing else is wrong.
Yeah, I intend on phasing them out over time. Thanks for the feedback :)
 
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Jun 12, 2020
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Update:
I proceeded with the move onto a Supermicro CSE-826. Move went fine. So far the weirdest problem I've had in the last year of operation has been that a power bump caused an SMR drive's controller to disconnect from the SAS backplane. Unplugging/replugging it fixed it. The drive tests fine although the resilver time is taking forever as expected of SMR.

SMR drives are being moved into a data backup NAS. That way they won't be holding anything mission critical, just backups.
 

ChrisRJ

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Oct 23, 2020
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SMR drives are being moved into a data backup NAS. That way they won't be holding anything mission critical, just backups.
I would consider a backup to mission-critical ;-)
 
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