Mirror boot Environment SSDs of Different sizes

[Alister]

This is a Do I have to reinstall? question

I'm using two SSDs a Samsung 830 120GB and a OCZ Vertex 3

I've installed on the Samsung and it's running fine

I went to attach the OCZ to the boot pool to mirror and I've now found that the Samsung is showing as 119 Gb and the OCZ as 111 GB

There's shed loads of space there (6% in use) but it won't mirror over as the samsung > ocz size wise.

As the recommendation is to now use SSDs and the size of even a cheap SSD (can you buy less than 60GB drive?) means that the drives aren't anywhere near full. I can understand the issue when you had 8GB or 16GB USB sticks but ~120GB SSDs @ 6% full?

What are my options?

• Reinstall on the OCZ and add the Samsung
• Swap in a another SSD and hope it's 119 or Bigger?
• Anyway to do this via the command line

 

[dlavigne]

How did you resolve this?

 

[HoneyBadger]

• Reinstall on the OCZ and add the Samsung
• Swap in a another SSD and hope it's 119 or Bigger?

Either of these is a viable option. There is a long, convoluted way to "shrink" a ZFS boot environment but it involves copying it to a new pool, renaming the pool, and a lot of fragile command line work that might end up breaking on your next FreeNAS update.

I'd go with the "reinstall on OCZ, mirror to Samsung" - although you can select both during the installation process and it will size to the smaller of the two automatically.

@dlavigne is there some consideration perhaps for a future installer to limit itself to a smaller maximum size eg: 32G in order to make the boot device shuffle/mirror easier?

 

[Alister]

Found a third SSD and installed on to that and ocz leaving the Samsung as a cold backup

One thing I'm loving is the speed of updates on the SSD Vs the USB pen drives.

 

[Alister]

Either of these is a viable option. There is a long, convoluted way to "shrink" a ZFS boot environment but it involves copying it to a new pool, renaming the pool, and a lot of fragile command line work that might end up breaking on your next FreeNAS update.

I'd go with the "reinstall on OCZ, mirror to Samsung" - although you can select both during the installation process and it will size to the smaller of the two automatically.

@dlavigne is there some consideration perhaps for a future installer to limit itself to a smaller maximum size eg: 32G in order to make the boot device shuffle/mirror easier?

This would be good but I'd personally default to either 53 or 108 GiB so that 60 or 120 GB drives are used

At 8gb per boot environment, that leaves space for several environments?