migrating from 3.5" HDD to SSD

[ddaenen1]

One of my 2 FreeNAS servers is a Supermicro X8SIL-F with a Xeon 3430 CPU and 32GB ECC RDIMM RAM. FreeNAS is installed on a 64GB SanDisk tumbdrive and my ZFS pool consists of 2 Toshiba 2TB 3.5" HDD's configured in zmirror. This setup only houses Nextcloud installed as a plugin in a jail.

What started as a try out, turned into an essential tool within the household. I feel however, that the tumbdrive is a liability. The challenge is though, that the Supermicro SC512 housing can only take 2 x 3.5" HDD's or alternatively, 4 x 2.5" SSD's so in order for me to replace the tumbdrive by 2 120Gb SSD's, i need to free up space in the housing, e.g. get rid of the 3.5" HDD's and i don't want to do an entirely new install from scratch as everything is running like a charm.

In order to have a more solid setup, here are my thoughts:

1. replace the 2 x Toshiba 2TB HDD's by 2 x 2Tb 2.5" SSD's. This should be possible by bringing 1 HDD offline, replace by the SDD, and bring the SSD online and let it mirror again. I have done this before when i expanded the pool some time ago and that worked really well. After that, bring the other 3.5" offline, replace by a 2nd 2Tb SSD
2. Install one 120Gb 2.5 SSD and add it to the boot pool. Once it mirrored, bring the tumbdrive offline and replace by a 2nd 120Gb SDD, bring online and mirror.

Anything i missed in this approach?

 

[sretalla]

1. replace the 2 x Toshiba 2TB HDD's by 2 x 2Tb 2.5" SSD's. This should be possible by bringing 1 HDD offline, replace by the SDD, and bring the SSD online and let it mirror again. I have done this before when i expanded the pool some time ago and that worked really well. After that, bring the other 3.5" offline, replace by a 2nd 2Tb SSD
2. Install one 120Gb 2.5 SSD and add it to the boot pool. Once it mirrored, bring the tumbdrive offline and replace by a 2nd 120Gb SDD, bring online and mirror.

Looks like something that will work.

 

[cobrakiller58]

1. replace the 2 x Toshiba 2TB HDD's by 2 x 2Tb 2.5" SSD's.

Will that be enough space in a year or two?

 

[ddaenen1]

Will that be enough space in a year or two?

Good question. Fact is though that Nextcloud is predominantly used to sync mainly photos and videos from 3 iOs devices. In essence, we don't keep all photos and video's on it but they are regularly moved over to a Synology where i categorise them on albums (unfortunately FreeNAS doesn't have an app that can do that so the Synology needs to stay )

 

[ddaenen1]

Reviving this old hag as i need advice.

What has changed since the: moved to a bigger 2U enclosure with 4 hot-swap 3.5" bays. Changed the mainboard to X9SCM-F with E3-1230. Added 2 x 2.5" 240GB SSD's hosting TN in zmirror. 4 x 3.5" 2Tb SAS HDD's in zraid1 hosting the jails and data on a SAS backplane connected to an LSI HBA.

What i want: swap the 4x 3.5" SAS HDD's with 4 x 2.5 SATA SSD's with same or larger storage capacity. After reading up, it should be possible to swap a SAS drive with a SATA drive on a SAS backplane. Vice-versa is apparently not possible. Plan of attack would be to exchange them one at the time, resilver and after success, swap the next.

Anyone can think of any risks or reasons why this wouldn't work?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Anyone can think of any risks or reasons why this wouldn't work?

During the time when you're resilvering your RAIDZ1, you won't have any additional redundancy on your pool. If possible, is there a way you can take a short downtime and use an extra SATA connector to bring the first SSD online - even temporarily mounted internally? Once that's up, you can do an online replace, then remove the "old HDD" from the front and use its bay for the next drive. Once you've got everything moved over, take a second downtime to move your "first swapped" SSD to the hot-swap bays, and you're off to the races without having left your data unprotected at any moment.