Patrick Ryan
Dabbler
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2014
- Messages
- 25
By way of background, I have two iXSystem Mini 2's configured as office file servers, running very old versions of FreeNAS (9.10). They were nearing full capacity, so I recently built a new one from scratch using a spare chassis and new WD Red 8TB x 4 drives in a RAID Z2 configuration. (I know the Mini 2 is EOL, but since I had a spare one, I figured I could keep using them until at least one failed and I cycled in my spare.) The replacement is now up and running with the latest version of TrueNAS, so all good. I now still have a spare (just a different chassis), so I'll go ahead and repeat the process with the other in-service old configuration. I don't intend to let the versions lapse on them this time, so I'm hoping that this kind of bare-metal build won't be necessary with any future upgrades. If I get to the point that we're nearing full capacity again, and I still haven't had to replace a permanently failed chassis, I'd like to just swap out the HDD's - which leads me to my questions:
1. Is that architecture true hot swap? That is, pop out the existing drives one by one with no power cycling?
2. Should I offline each drive first? Or just yank the drive with no warning to the system?
3. Assuming I let every new drive fully resilver before moving to the next in line, but have the server shares disabled so no new data can be written, what condition are the (working) removed drives left in? Could I theoretically stuff them into a different chassis and have a working RAID array? I like the idea of having an archival copy of the existing array as a hedge against future data loss, so this would be nice.
1. Is that architecture true hot swap? That is, pop out the existing drives one by one with no power cycling?
2. Should I offline each drive first? Or just yank the drive with no warning to the system?
3. Assuming I let every new drive fully resilver before moving to the next in line, but have the server shares disabled so no new data can be written, what condition are the (working) removed drives left in? Could I theoretically stuff them into a different chassis and have a working RAID array? I like the idea of having an archival copy of the existing array as a hedge against future data loss, so this would be nice.