Convert Stripe to Mirror

[mjpatera]

While initially setting up my FreeNAS, I had a few old drives that I setup as a stripe to give me more space to play with a PLEX server. This was only for testing at the time but has grown into my main PLEX storage with about 50 movies. It's now time to upgrade the drives but I want to use a mirrored pair instead of the strip. Is there a way I can replace the stripe with the mirror without having to create a new volume and copy everything over? I just replaced my other mirrored volume and it was very simple, just selected a drive, click replace, then select the new drive. I was hoping there would be an easy way to replace the striped volume as well. My current box has 2 spare power and data cables so I can have all of them running at the same time if that makes a difference.

Thanks
Mark

 

[Ericloewe]

Yes. The catch is that the GUI doesn't support this yet. Since you probably don't want to wait for 11.1, I recommend you search the forums for the step-by-step guide to doing this with the Unix shell.

 

[Stux]

While initially setting up my FreeNAS, I had a few old drives that I setup as a stripe to give me more space to play with a PLEX server. This was only for testing at the time but has grown into my main PLEX storage with about 50 movies. It's now time to upgrade the drives but I want to use a mirrored pair instead of the strip. Is there a way I can replace the stripe with the mirror without having to create a new volume and copy everything over? I just replaced my other mirrored volume and it was very simple, just selected a drive, click replace, then select the new drive. I was hoping there would be an easy way to replace the striped volume as well. My current box has 2 spare power and data cables so I can have all of them running at the same time if that makes a difference.

Thanks
Mark

Fairly easy to do, but not in the GUI yet. Should be. But isn't.

Instructions: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/create-zfs-mirror-by-adding-a-drive.14880/

 

[Ericloewe]

Should be. But isn't.

Yup. First thing I did when Corral died (when I finally had a quiet 5 minute break from Corralpocalypse) was to file the feature request for this.

 

[mgd]

@Ericloewe if I am reading right, your feature made it to 11.3:
https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/23391
However, it does not seem to be in 11.3-RC1 (tried it out in a VM).

Posted this in a related tread:

Create zfs mirror by adding a drive?

First disk gptid/deeff679-6414-11e9-b71e-3464a99a3b70 N/A ada0p2 gptid/dee51a10-6414-11e9-b71e-3464a99a3b70 N/A ada0p1 My mistake - I can't edit my previous post.

www.ixsystems.com

 

[Ericloewe]

You're looking in the wrong place. The old bug tracker exists only as an archive.

It was pushed back yet again: https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-100033

 

[mgd]

Thanks for the pointer. A pity this is pushed forward forever.

 

[seanm]

Considering the amount of discussion on the forums about this, it's disappointing there are only 3 votes for https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-100033

 

[mgd]

@seanm I see 5 votes now, and even better (as I wrote on this thread) it seems something is happening after all:

https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-103926

The final comment points to this pull requests:

NAS-103926 / 12 / Introduce pool.attach for extending STRIPE/MIRROR vdevs by sonicaj · Pull Request #3863 · truenas/middleware

github.com

…which seems to have been merged to FreeNAS12.
(or maybe I misunderstood).

 

[revoman]

Oh man. Any way I could help with this feature?

 

[felippe]

Is this feature implemeted in TrueNAS-12.0-U1.1?

I am currently getting used with TrueNAS. The server has only one 2TB HDD and another one is on its way from CCL Computers.

One data pool <- one vdev <- one disk.

Another vdev will be created using the second HDD. Instead of inscrising the ZFS pool's capacity by striping this new vdev to the existing one, is it possible, using the Web GUI, to mirror the existing vdev to the new one?

 

[sretalla]

If you go to status and select extend on that single disk, it will actually create a mirror with the disk you then specify.

The language in the GUI is terrible on this topic and it seems the whole time like it will add another drive in stripe to make the pool capacity larger, but that's not what actually happens.

 

[RegularJoe]

This is an awesome feature!

Not very intuitive but it worked!

I did a lab laptop 8gb RAM with FreeNAS 11.3, moved to another laptop with more cores and 16 gb ram and then when my RAM came in I moved it to the workstation with 32gb of ram and two 3.5" drives for ZoneMinder upgraded to TrueNAS Core 12.0-U2 before the test. I was able to make a 3 way mirror from a single striped disk and after the sync/scrub was finished remvoe the laptop drive.

Perfecto! Kudos to the developers!