Evening,
My home server has got to the age I need to replace the HDDs so I'm migrating the storage pool to a set of SAS SSDs. The original pool is 8 x 3Tb WD Red HDD in raidZ2 layout and the new pool will be 5 x 1.9Tb SAS SSDs (PM1633a) - Yes, a lot less but my circumstances have changed since the original build and I no longer need as much storage, so I'm going for lower power & quieter.
I am following the procedure given by https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/howto-migrate-data-from-one-pool-to-a-bigger-pool.40519/ and I've done a test run which appears to have worked fine, but did throw up a couple of questions I haven't found answers on the forums to.
1. When creating the partition on the new SSDs, do I need to apply any specific parameters to optimise the layout? There are quite a few forum posts about configuring block sizes and 4K sectors, etc, but they are quite old. Is it reasonable to assume gpart in FreeNAS 13 is aware and will 'do the right thing' in terms of sizes and alignments ?
The drives are EMC units which report their physical block size is 4K in SMART.
2. On the original drive setup I've got a swap partition of 2G on each drive which shows up in swapinfo as 2 mirrors giving a total of 4Gb swap.
I forgot to consider swap and haven't created any on the SSDs.
Do I need to create a new swap area?
The system has 64Gb RAM which seems more than enough. Realistically the existing 4Gb swap is not going to make much difference if something manages to consume all the RAM. But opinions seem divided on whether a swap partition of some kind should always be made available 'just in case'.
3. After the migration, if I look in the GUI under Storage -> Disks, the SSDs are not shown as in use by the new pool.
I assume this is because I created a degraded pool through the shell as I don't have enough ports to connect all the drives at once. (I used instructions from https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/creating-a-degraded-pool.100/ - to create the new pool in a degraded state while I perform the migration. )
Could this cause issues down the line?
Is there a way to get the GUI to recognise these drives are part of the new pool?
Thanks
Ben
My home server has got to the age I need to replace the HDDs so I'm migrating the storage pool to a set of SAS SSDs. The original pool is 8 x 3Tb WD Red HDD in raidZ2 layout and the new pool will be 5 x 1.9Tb SAS SSDs (PM1633a) - Yes, a lot less but my circumstances have changed since the original build and I no longer need as much storage, so I'm going for lower power & quieter.
I am following the procedure given by https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/howto-migrate-data-from-one-pool-to-a-bigger-pool.40519/ and I've done a test run which appears to have worked fine, but did throw up a couple of questions I haven't found answers on the forums to.
1. When creating the partition on the new SSDs, do I need to apply any specific parameters to optimise the layout? There are quite a few forum posts about configuring block sizes and 4K sectors, etc, but they are quite old. Is it reasonable to assume gpart in FreeNAS 13 is aware and will 'do the right thing' in terms of sizes and alignments ?
The drives are EMC units which report their physical block size is 4K in SMART.
Code:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Vendor: SAMSUNG Product: PA33N1T9 EMC1920 Revision: EQL8 Compliance: SPC-4 User Capacity: 1,920,924,123,136 bytes [1.92 TB] Logical block size: 512 bytes Physical block size: 4096 bytes LU is resource provisioned, LBPRZ=1 Rotation Rate: Solid State Device Form Factor: 2.5 inches Logical Unit id: 0x5002538a0754ace0 Serial number: 9VNA0J502933 Device type: disk Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-3) Local Time is: Sun May 28 18:51:45 2023 BST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled Temperature Warning: Disabled or Not Supported
2. On the original drive setup I've got a swap partition of 2G on each drive which shows up in swapinfo as 2 mirrors giving a total of 4Gb swap.
I forgot to consider swap and haven't created any on the SSDs.
Do I need to create a new swap area?
The system has 64Gb RAM which seems more than enough. Realistically the existing 4Gb swap is not going to make much difference if something manages to consume all the RAM. But opinions seem divided on whether a swap partition of some kind should always be made available 'just in case'.
3. After the migration, if I look in the GUI under Storage -> Disks, the SSDs are not shown as in use by the new pool.
I assume this is because I created a degraded pool through the shell as I don't have enough ports to connect all the drives at once. (I used instructions from https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/creating-a-degraded-pool.100/ - to create the new pool in a degraded state while I perform the migration. )
Could this cause issues down the line?
Is there a way to get the GUI to recognise these drives are part of the new pool?
Thanks
Ben