SOLVED Upgrading From Mirrored USB Boot Drives to SSD

cinemafunk

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Oct 22, 2016
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I have been using mirrored 32GB USB boot drives for nearly two years, and I've had two sticks die within the last 6 months. I've kept backup drives just incase, but I'm ready for something more reliable. The recent notice here makes me feel like I'm going in the right direction.

I've already purchased two SSD drives of the same models and size (120GB) and I'm ready to upgrade.

From what I understand, I can detach one of the USB drives, and then attach one of the new SSDs and the new SSD will resliver. The documentation states that the "Larger capacity devices can be added, but the mirror will only have the capacity of the smallest device."

My question is, after the first SSD is reslivered, and then the second SSD is reslivered, with both SSDs accept the entire 120GB of space. Or, will they only see 32GB space?
 
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cinemafunk

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Oct 22, 2016
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So I went ahead and performed the boot drive replacements and was able to boot back into my pool no issues. But the boot pool does say:
Size: 28.50 GiB
Used: 13.23 GiB

So I guess the issue is, how can obtain the full size of my SSDs' storage capacity? Although, I'm in an okay spot only using about 50% of the capacity, in another year or so, I would expect it to reach 80%.

My first thought would be to just re-install FreeNAS and keeping the config file which I have meticulously backed up in several places.
 
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Does the output of zpool list freenas-boot look correct?
What is the output of zpool get autoexpand freenas-boot?
 

Spearfoot

He of the long foot
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My first thought would be to just re-install FreeNAS and keeping the config file which I have meticulously backed up in several places.
Since you have copies of your configuration, this would be the easiest way to proceed.

FreeNAS doesn't require very much space at all for it's boot pool, so you'll be fine with the replace-and-resilver approach you took.
 

cinemafunk

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Oct 22, 2016
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Since you have copies of your configuration, this would be the easiest way to proceed.

FreeNAS doesn't require very much space at all for it's boot pool, so you'll be fine with the replace-and-resilver approach you took.

Below is the output of those commands.

Code:
root@maria[~]# zpool list freenas-boot
NAME           SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
freenas-boot  28.5G  13.2G  15.3G        -       83G      -    46%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
root@maria[~]# zpool get autoexpand freenas-boot
NAME          PROPERTY    VALUE   SOURCE
freenas-boot  autoexpand  off     default


These are 128GB SSDs, so I'd expect there be atleast ~110GB usable. I do understand that FreeNAS doesn't require much boot space. However, now that I'm at 50% capacity, with just a few updates, I could see the partition reaching 80%, which is something I'd like to avoid.

I'm guessing that since the autoexpand value is off, that could be the culprit?

Edit & P.S.: I appreciate your FreeNAS scripts on GitHub.
 

Spearfoot

He of the long foot
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May 13, 2015
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Below is the output of those commands.

Code:
root@maria[~]# zpool list freenas-boot
NAME           SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
freenas-boot  28.5G  13.2G  15.3G        -       83G      -    46%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
root@maria[~]# zpool get autoexpand freenas-boot
NAME          PROPERTY    VALUE   SOURCE
freenas-boot  autoexpand  off     default


These are 128GB SSDs, so I'd expect there be atleast ~110GB usable. I do understand that FreeNAS doesn't require much boot space. However, now that I'm at 50% capacity, with just a few updates, I could see the partition reaching 80%, which is something I'd like to avoid.

I'm guessing that since the autoexpand value is off, that could be the culprit?

Edit & P.S.: I appreciate your FreeNAS scripts on GitHub.
I'm pretty sure that, because of the method you used to create your FreeNAS boot partition, it duplicated the boot partition on your USB flash drive. And that's why it's so small. But again, it's probably big enough to use going forward, as FreeNAS doesn't need much space.

If you really want to use the full capacity of your SSD, the easiest way would be to re-install FreeNAS on it and then restore your saved config. That's what I would do.

Or you can increase the size of your existing partition. From the above, it looks like you could expand it by 83GB. I think you will have to do this at the command line: Google the growfs command for details.

RE: my scripts -- you are very welcome!
 

cinemafunk

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Joined
Oct 22, 2016
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23
So, I went an entirely different approach, the one less abrasive and most apparent.

I detached one of the boot drives, then re-attached it selecting "use entire disk" (I did select this originally). After the reslivering, it showed 111.5GB size. Easier than the growfs commands or reinstalling the OS. I repeated these steps for the other SSD drive to make sure.

Hope this information helps someone else in the future.
 
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