BitCollider
Cadet
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2016
- Messages
- 9
I’m replacing drives on my TrueNAS machine. The drives are old, one is complaining about a bad sector, and I want more space in my pool anyway. I don’t have enough SATA ports for my old drives, my new drives, and my boot drives, and I’m hoping to get advice.
My motherboard has eight SATA ports. Four are in use for my storage drives, in a single RAID-Z2 pool. Two are in use for mirrored boot drives. I intend to swap out the four old storage drives for four bigger new drives. I thought I would simply create a new pool using the new drives and copy everything over.
But… I’m two ports short! I only need the ports during the migration. Afterwards I’m going to remove the old drives and probably recycle them. I’m pretty sure I should be giving my data drives the eight SATA ports. So what do I do with my boot drives? A few ideas from research.
Buy an HBA. This seems like tremendous overkill. I don’t want to run all eight drives permanently and I’m hoping to avoid the extra complexity of figuring out an HBA.
Mirror my boot drives onto USB sticks then remove the boot drives; boot and run from USB during the pool migration. This seems most straightforward but running from USB sounds risky.
Buy an external enclosure and move one of my boot drives into it. Plug in via USB and boot from the external drive during the pool migration.
Is there a better option? Is plugging in an external enclosure reasonable?
My motherboard has eight SATA ports. Four are in use for my storage drives, in a single RAID-Z2 pool. Two are in use for mirrored boot drives. I intend to swap out the four old storage drives for four bigger new drives. I thought I would simply create a new pool using the new drives and copy everything over.
But… I’m two ports short! I only need the ports during the migration. Afterwards I’m going to remove the old drives and probably recycle them. I’m pretty sure I should be giving my data drives the eight SATA ports. So what do I do with my boot drives? A few ideas from research.
Buy an HBA. This seems like tremendous overkill. I don’t want to run all eight drives permanently and I’m hoping to avoid the extra complexity of figuring out an HBA.
Mirror my boot drives onto USB sticks then remove the boot drives; boot and run from USB during the pool migration. This seems most straightforward but running from USB sounds risky.
Buy an external enclosure and move one of my boot drives into it. Plug in via USB and boot from the external drive during the pool migration.
Is there a better option? Is plugging in an external enclosure reasonable?