Best Method to convert pool from "stripe" to "RaidZ(1,2,3)" and preserve data and configuration

[mhelms1961]

Hi Folks;

I found a deal to purchase a couple of WD Red 8TB NAS drives that I "shuck" out of Best Buy Easystores for $129.99 each. The ones made in Thailand typically have the Red drives the majority of the time. That said, I currently have a pool made up of 6 8TB red drives in a Stripe configuration in a Dell T3600 workstation with 32gb ram and 8 core Xeon processor with 625Watt Power supply. My desire is to configure the pool from the Stripe configuration to RaidZ configuration to add some redundancy. I am just starting on the current setup so there is just a little over 2TB of data in that pool now. I have about 11TB of storage on a local network drive where I could temporarily store the data while I add the drives and recreate the pool in a RaidZ configuration. I am still a newbie to FreeNAS so I'm trying to understand what method to use make a backup of the data on the stripe pool configuration so that it can be subsequently restored back to the new Raidz pool configuration. I will now have 8 8TB drives available for the new pool. My FreeNAS OS resides on an internal 128GB ssd and I have another internal 500GB ssd available for cache.

Also, I created another FreeNAS instance on a VMWARE VM that is up and running and I can give it as much disk space and number of virtual disks as needed (up to 11TB). I only mention this if you guys think a P2V option is that way to go or some sort of snapshot/replication method.

Thanks for any guidance as I am just not totally sure the method/steps to accomplish this task!

Regards,
Mark

 

[m0nkey_]

There's no direct way from a stripe to RAIDZ. You will have to backup your data, rebuild the pool as RAIDZ and restore your data.

 

[mhelms1961]

There's no direct way from a stripe to RAIDZ. You will have to backup your data, rebuild the pool as RAIDZ and restore your data.

Thanks for the reply. I was trying to understand the method to use to backup the server. I have plenty of space on a network share to backup the configuration. I have read through the documentation and not sure if/how to use snapshots/replication to backup to a share or alternatively backup to another FreeNAS server on the same LAN. I did fire up another FreeNAS server as a VM and can give the vDisk enough storage to backup the physical server but I don’t want to bark up the wrong tree. Hopefully I am not overthinking the whole thing!