Migrate Zfs-pool to new machine (FreeNas 9.2.5 or 9.3)

[Peter Ewald]

Hello,
I am new to this forum and also new to freenas. I did search for my question, but did not really find an answer.

I want to set up a FreeNas (9.2.5 or 9.3) with new 6x 4TB WD Red in Raid Z2 on a older machine: Celsius W530 with 8 core Intel Xeon 3.40GHz, 32 GB Ram and a Fujitsu D3227 board. The idea is to save the money to buy a new machine now and to do that later when the old is not working anymore. I also have an identically second machine which I could use for replacing broken parts.

I wonder, if once the hardware is broken (like the mainboard), I can migrate the Zfs Pool to another machine without a loss of data or replace a hardware piece in the current machine. In the Documentation as well as here I find the information that you should be able to do it by exporting the pool on the old machine and importing it on the new system where you set up a new freenas installation.

But when hardware stops to work I will not be able to export the pool. Is this a problem? Can you still import the data and maybe only lose latest data not written to the disks? Or will it refuse to import the pool?
Do you think I should rather buy a complete new system than only new disks?

Please tell me, if you need more information. Thanks a lot.

 

[snaptec]

Just make a backup of the config and pull all disks to a new system works flawlessly. Even from 9.3 to 9.10.
then you have the exact same config.
You can also just put the disks in another freenas and import the pool. Then you have to make the share config again.


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[Peter Ewald]

Ok, thanks! So thats works perfectly even if you have immediately power off or mainboard breaks?

 

[Ericloewe]

Ok, thanks! So thats works perfectly even if you have immediately power off or mainboard breaks?

You may lose up to a few seconds of transactions, but should otherwise be fine.

Why are you looking at ancient versions of FreeNAS? 9.3 is a year old and 9.2.1.5 is closer to three years old.

 

[Peter Ewald]

Thank you as well.
If the latest version works with my hardware I'll use it. I didn't check that so far.
I know for sure that FreeNas 9.3 runs on my system, because I had this running once and wanted to be sure, that potential features concerning my question are included in these older versions. I assumed that those would be then in the newer version anyway.