Ageing out old drives, got to be a better way??

[DavieC]

Hoping there is a better way to manage hard drive life cycles.
We are very happy TrueNAS users, and have been using zfs in one form or another to present bulk storage to our users for over a decade.

In the last 5 years or so, we have been buying the 84 drive JBOD's, and we might have 2 - 4 of these attached to a single head unit, presented as a single pool.

We have 4 or 5 years of vendor support on the hardware, but eventually we need to replace the enclosure and drives.

Our process is normally to create a whole new pool and migrate the data to it, this can take a very long time (months). Our pools span over the enclosures.

We have also tried taking out 1 or 2 drives at a time, and bringing on new drives from a new enclosure, but this also takes a very long time.

Was wondering if there is any way to evacuate a whole set of drives (an enclosure worth) in one go. (Add a new enclosure, evacuate the data off the old one.)

I've previously worked with other storage technologies that offered this, but this doesn't seem to be part of the zfs / TrueNAS feature set.

Is there a better way?

Thanks,

dave

 

[Arwen]

In some places I've worked, they have "mis-managed" file systems and stuck hundreds of thousands, (or millions), of files in a single directory. That too can take a long time, (days to weeks), for either restores or migrations.

One solution is to manage your data in such a way as the data is in separate, smaller ZFS Datasets. Then, when needed to migrate them, you migrate a single ZFS Dataset at a time. The overall time is still the same, months, but you start getting the benefit of the new storage sooner.

Other than that, I don't have any suggestions at present.