Moving Data To New Drives, not sure best way in my scenario

[ideal2545]

Hi Guys,

So my testbed FreeNas setup included 3 500 gig drives in a RaidZ1. I've got about at terabyte of data stored on it now including a few jails. I love freenas so much that I decided to invest in 6 3TB drives and build up a raidz2 nas.

Now my server has 8 front bays, and currently occupied by 3 drives, but with 6 incoming I'm going to have an issue.

Would it be possible to basically, pull out the 3rd drive in my current setup and run a degraded raidz1, then pop in my new 6 drives and transfer the data to the new pool that I create?

The other option I would have would be to just copy all my existing data down to my desktop, but what do I do about the jails? Is there a way to export them down off of freenas elsewhere and then copy them back up once I create the new pool?

 

[DifferentStrokes]

You could remove one drive but if something happens to one of the other drives while copying all that data your pool will be toast.

Can you just let one hard drive sit in the bottom of the case while copying all the data? Heck, if you can find room for the one extra drive you could just add the 6 new hard drives to the existing pool and use all of the drives.

Not sure how many SATA ports you have though.

 

[Darren Myers]

How many SATA ports do you have? Do you have a M1015, or 9211-8i? Personally if you dont have enough SATA ports, i would invest in a M1015/9211-8i , SAS to SATA breakout cables, and then i would plug in my 3 500's and have them sit outside the box, and put the 6 3's inside the bays. Pretty much a external migration.

 

[danb35]

Would it be possible to basically, pull out the 3rd drive in my current setup and run a degraded raidz1, then pop in my new 6 drives and transfer the data to the new pool that I create?

You could, but as @DifferentStrokes notes, any read errors will cause big problems since you will have removed your redundancy. A better option would be to just let one of the drives sit loose while doing the transfer. If that's not possible, another option (better than your suggestion, not as good as the second) would be to remove your existing pool entirely, create the new pool on the 6 disks, offline and remove one of the 6 disks, then add your existing pool and move the data. Both the old and new pools would have redundancy in this scenario (even though the new pool would be degraded), and once you've finished moving the data, you'll remove the old pool and replace the disk you removed from the new pool.