Drives upgrades - Best way to do it

[Dergonic]

Hi

I'd like to upgrade my HomeLab TrueNAS setup, but I'm not sure how I should do it.

My current situation is the Follow. I run the last version (TrueNAS-12.0-U3) on a custom hardware.
I have a Dual bootpool (2*SSD 120Gb) and one unique storage pool with a bunch of old drives (RAID Z2 with 8*2Tb HDD on PCIe HBA card + 256Gb M.2 NVME cache on the motherboard).
On those drive, I have one unique pool with 2 vdev. One is Isos for my proxmox and the other is my main data share
I'm using about 1.5Tb of raw datas on the share and less that 500Gb on the proxmox

I'd like to change my storage drives to 3 brand new 6Tb HDD on raid Z1
The plan is
- to use more recent drives (Some 2Tb are failing - reporting unreadable sectors)
- to use less drives (to spare some money on my electricity bill)
- to have room for additional capacity later
Of course, I want to keep all current shares, datas and so on.

I was thinking of 2 plans :

Plan 1 : New HBA card and new pool
- I can purchase a simple PCIe HBA card and add the 3 new drives on this card
- Then setup a new pool
- Reconfigure all shares and mapping
- Move all datas to the new pool
- decommission old drives and the old HBA card
--> This solution require a HBA card just for the migration time and a full reconfiguration I would have love to avoid

Plan 2 : Expand the current pool and then reduce - possible ?
I would have loved to get a solution approaching this :
- Convert raid Z2 to Z1
- reducing the pool to 3*2Tb HDD (The data volume should be ok on ~3.5Tb storage) and disconnect the other drives
- replacing one 2Tb drive with one 6Tb and reconstruct raid Z1
- replacing second and third 2tb drive with 6Tb drives the same way (one at a time)
- expand the pool to use the full 6Tb storage of each disk to reach the ~11.5Tb storage

Is plan2 anyhow possible or do you have another idea on how I can do the changes ?

Thanks

 

[sretalla]

Convert raid Z2 to Z1

Not possible.

reducing the pool to 3*2Tb HDD (The data volume should be ok on ~3.5Tb storage) and disconnect the other drives

Not possible at this time. (maybe never)

- replacing one 2Tb drive with one 6Tb and reconstruct raid Z1
- replacing second and third 2tb drive with 6Tb drives the same way (one at a time)
- expand the pool to use the full 6Tb storage of each disk to reach the ~11.5Tb storage

That you could do, but needs the first 2 which can't happen.

do you have another idea on how I can do the changes ?

Since it would seem that all your data will fit on one of the 6TB drives, you could:
Remove one disk (assuming you even need to do that based on space in the chassis... you didn't specify anything about it)
Insert one of the new 6TB disks
Make a temporary pool on that one disk and copy the data to it
Remove all other drives from the original pool
Insert 2 new 6TB disks
Create a new (degraded) RAIDZ1 pool on the 2 disks (see link below on how to do that)
Do your move operation again to the degraded pool (jails won't activate on a degraded pool, so you'll need to just copy over the datasets at this point)
Make sure your data is in good shape (remember you still have all the old disks from the 8*2TB pool, so you have a backout plan if something fails)
Destroy the temporary pool on the single 6TB disk and wipe it
Replace the dummy disk in the degraded pool with the last 6TB disk you just wiped
Re-activate jails (although not needed if the degraded pool has the same name as your original one)

Enjoy life with your new (not entirely recommeded) RAIDZ1 setup. Note that RAIDZ1 is discouraged for disk sizes above 1TB.

Link:

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.truenas.com

 

[pschatz100]

I will second the comment that RaidZ1 with 6TB drives is not recommended. Read up on this to see why.

Be sure you have a good backup of all your data...