Can install be done with just boot drive for future raid?

[Dirk]

Have my replacement machine almost done. Two of the six hard drives and a ssd boot are in place.

Can I install Freenas and apps (sonarr radarr plex) to the boot drive to get ahead of things while waiting on the other four disks for the raid?

Thanks

 

[SweetAndLow]

Have my replacement machine almost done. Two of the six hard drives and a ssd boot are in place.

Can I install Freenas and apps (sonarr radarr plex) to the boot drive to get ahead of things while waiting on the other four disks for the raid?

Thanks

No

 

[sretalla]

Can I install Freenas

Sure.

and apps (sonarr radarr plex) to the boot drive

No.

 

[sretalla]

If you want to get creative (and a bit risky with the data you accumulate in the meantime while waiting), you could build a pool on a single disk and then use the resource for creating a degraded pool when the new disks arrive, then copy to the degraded pool, wipe the single drive and use it in the pool.

Creating a degraded pool

WARNING: HERE BE DRAGONS. IF YOU DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE DOING, DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS. IN FACT, IF YOU NEED THESE INSTRUCTIONS, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T FOLLOW THEM. There are a few cases where it may make sense to create a...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[Dirk]

Thanks everyone. I have NO intent on putting any personal data on it until all six drives are in place.

sretella: That's kind ow what I was looking for, just create the pool structure to test the apps communication and permissions and not go any further. My experience is that it will take a week or so of PT work to get things installed and working.

Is this a function of Freenas to degrade the pool?

Thanks

 

[SweetAndLow]

Thanks everyone. I have NO intent on putting any personal data on it until all six drives are in place.

sretella: That's kind ow what I was looking for, just create the pool structure to test the apps communication and permissions and not go any further. My experience is that it will take a week or so of PT work to get things installed and working.

Is this a function of Freenas to degrade the pool?

Thanks

No it's not a supported function the way you are using it. It's meant to be notification that your pool is unhealthy and need a dive replacement.

Another option is just practice setting things up. The best way to really understand something is to do it. Delete it and do it again.

 

[Yorick]

Oh that's brilliant. I was thinking of a way I can expand my raidz2. So, I could, as perverse as it is:

- Buy a 12TB disk
- Transfer all the data I care about over
- Verify it's there
- Do that again
- Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean THEY are not out to get you - verify again
- Blow away the raidz2
- Recreate degraded, with full on export and re-import
- Transfer data from 12TB disk to pool, verify it's all there
- See above, paranoia is a virtue
- Bring the 12TB disk in and resilver

This is crazy, and, doable. I don't know. I need to think about it. It appeals to me for the sheer kinky perversion of the act.

 

[sretalla]

This is crazy, and, doable.

Agree. Care to be taken, but technically feasible.

 

[Dirk]

I should be able to give it a shot this weekend then. No loss if I have to start over with the pool.

So if I understand, I would do the install of Freenas and apps and set my pool and dataset up on one of the drives as What? Would it allow for changing the type of array?

 

[Yorick]

You cannot change at all after you've set it up. Plan carefully, plan ahead. Do read the primer for pools and vdevs, which is here: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/introduction-to-zfs.111/

In a home setup, your pool would have exactly one vdev, with all your six drives in raidz2. That's the most common use case.

If you ever want to expand that, you have two options:

1) Add another raidz2 to the pool. Anything from 6 to 10 drives, ish. Not terribly feasible in a lot of home setups.
2) Replace drives in your existing raidz2 one by one with higher-capacity ones, wait for resilver for each. Once the last drive has been replaced, you have the higher capacity

raidz expansion is not supported at this point in time, is slow work in progress, and might take years, if it ever appears at all.

 

[sretalla]

So if I understand, I would do the install of Freenas and apps and set my pool and dataset up on one of the drives as What? Would it allow for changing the type of array?

You would set up the one "data" drive as a single disk "stripe" pool.

Then do all your setup as you want with shares, apps, jails, plugins.

When you then add your other disks, you set them up as a second pool ("data2" or whatever) according to the resource, landing with a degraded RAIDZ2 or whatever type you wanted. Then stop all your jails/apps/VMs and the sharing services, take a snapshot of your data pool and do the zfs send | zfs recv to get the data into the new degraded pool. Once you have the data there, you export both pools from the gui. import from the cli (zpool import data dataOld) then zpool export dataOld... It may be wise to reboot here, be careful about jails, etc. set to start on boot... then with the degraded pool, zpool import -f data2 data (I think the -f will be needed to import a degraded pool) zpool export data then use the GUI to import data, start all your stuff again and you're good.

After you're comfortable things run OK, you can wipe the disk you used for the original exercise and replace the offlined "fake" disk in the degraded pool and after resilver, you're in business.