SOLVED Adding a drive and using zpool to change existing stripe to mirror

[joeschmuck]

I thought a stripe pool would normally tell you that it was a stripe in the zpool status. Guess I learned something new again.

 

[Terry Pounds]

Wow, not what I was expecting for an output. So how was your Media pool created? I was expecting it to tell me that it was a RAID-Z1 or something but it didn't. Well I could just be out of my knowledge zone too.

My advice would be right now to copy off all the data and destroy your pool and then rebuild it, that is the one way to ensure it is built correctly and it's likely to take less time, provided you have local places to store your data. I myself would store my data on a few extra hard drives either on other computers or by adding single disk RAIDZ1 drives to FreeNAS and copying the data over. Another way is to use DVD-R media to store your data on. I like doing this periodically for my photos and financial records, stuff that is truley important.

Pool was created over time through the GUI using the volume manager and I just kept adding the new drives and extending them to the pool.

 

[Terry Pounds]

I thought a stripe pool would normally tell you that it was a stripe in the zpool status. Guess I learned something new again.

Yes, this is a stripe. Sorry I thought I said bastardized stripe in my initial post. I was hoping to do a shotgun wedding but I guess you're saying that is not possible.

 

[SweetAndLow]

You need 4 new drives and follow the steps that the previous poster did to add a disk to a stripe and make a mirror. You will just have to do it 4 times. It also seems like you only have jails on this system, why not just nuke it and start over since you don't have any data(no real datasets exist).

 

[Terry Pounds]

You need 4 new drives and follow the steps that the previous poster did to add a disk to a stripe and make a mirror. You will just have to do it 4 times. It also seems like you only have jails on this system, why not just nuke it and start over since you don't have any data(no real datasets exist).

I am thinking I will just backup my files to client and nuke it all. Two questions I have left.

1. When I reconfigure this as a mirror after nuking it will have 4 3TB drives and the current system has 8GB Ram which is maxed now and no more can be added. So is 12TB space too much to handle with on 8GB Ram? I run the following plugins Transmission, Couch Potato, Sonarr and Sabnzbd.
2. My plan is to buy a new motherboard that supports 32GB Ram. Can I simply swap the motherboard out after configuring under the old motherboard first? Or will it complain or crash the system? I currently boot from an 8GB USB jump drive. My hopes is to plug-n-play my new motherboard in other words with no issues or re-configuring. I am swapping the motherboard in a few months as it is currently out of my budget.

 

[joeschmuck]

You got the wrong idea here, if you mirror four 3TB drives then you will have just inder 3TB of storage, not 12TB, but you will have high fault tollerance. What do you really want to do or have when you are done? You could shoot for a RAIDZ1 with the four 3TB drives and get about 8TB storage. I have links to two different RAID calculators in my signature, check them both out.

As for the RAM, 8GB is fine for normal FreeNAS use but you might need to add more RAM to prevent a lot of disk caching form happening.

Yes, you move the hard drives into another motherboard and all your data would remain in tact, that is one of the nice features about FreeNAS and not using a hardware raid. You would also be able to use the same USB flash drive, just plug it in and power on the computer. The only catch migth be to tell the computer what to boot from in the BIOS.

 

[Terry Pounds]

You got the wrong idea here, if you mirror four 3TB drives then you will have just inder 3TB of storage, not 12TB, but you will have high fault tollerance. What do you really want to do or have when you are done? You could shoot for a RAIDZ1 with the four 3TB drives and get about 8TB storage. I have links to two different RAID calculators in my signature, check them both out.

As for the RAM, 8GB is fine for normal FreeNAS use but you might need to add more RAM to prevent a lot of disk caching form happening.

Yes, you move the hard drives into another motherboard and all your data would remain in tact, that is one of the nice features about FreeNAS and not using a hardware raid. You would also be able to use the same USB flash drive, just plug it in and power on the computer. The only catch migth be to tell the computer what to boot from in the BIOS.

Yes, I knew that I would not have 12TB on a mirrored system. I thought I would have half or 6TB. I was thinking that basically I would have two sets of duplicate drives.

The 8TB you speak of with RAIDZ1 sounds better than 6TB but isn't that more risky? I am assuming switching to RAIDZ2 from RAIDZ1 is not possible and that going with what I am going to stay with is the best option. I am probably going to do a RAIDZ2 but that is going to leave me with no space left currently when complete. A budget for 2 more drive right now would be tight. The RAIDZ1 would leave me a little space though.

 

[joeschmuck]

Choosing the type of pool will be up to you and trust me, I understand the financial aspects of buying more hard drives. I myself expect the life of my drives to be coming up but fortunately I have three older 2TB drives which I could stick in for failing drives and then start purchasing new drives. I only require 7TB of storage capacity for my needs and I'm starting to consider what I can do to change from six hard drives down to maybe four or five drives. I guess I could do three 8TB drives in a mirror and that would be fine too. Of course I might end up back at six 2TB hard drives because replacing one drive at a time does spread the financial pain over time. I will always resort to a two drive failure safe system (RAIDZ2 or 3xMirror).

If the budget is tight then maybe you could purchase 1 drive now and 1 drive next month. You don't need to buy it all up front and you can play the long game.