Questions Regarding Hardware Swap - New Chassis, Boot Drive, and HDDs

[Midshipman]

Greetings. I have a FreeNAS build running FreeNAS-11.2-U5 that I'm going to do a few upgrades to:

1. Move all internals into a new case. (UNAS NSC-810A)
2. Replace my boot drive. (Its currently a cheap USB memstick and I am upgrading to an HP SSD S700 Pro)
3. Update FreeNAS to the current version.
4. Replace my entire HDD set. (Its currently seven 3TB WD Greens with two parity shucked from external cases back in 2013 and I'm *most likely* moving to four 12TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro with one parity, or possibly 6 or 8 drive with two parity.)

Questions:

1. Per this thread it seems I don't need to worry about which ports on my Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard I reconnect all of my drives to. Always good to get a confirmation though!
2. What's the best way to move to a new boot drive and update? Save my config, fresh install current FreeNAS on new drive, load config? Or should I not mix step 2 and 3 above? Per boot section of manual it looks like I can Clone my system to the new drive, but if I did that would I first update to current FreeNAS? or update after the Clone? Might there by any problems cloning from an 8GB USB stick to a 128GB SATA drive? The manual isn't clear.
3. What's the best way to move all my data to a new pool? I've searched the Forums but haven't found a good definitive answer. I have enough SATA ports to attach all of the drives I'll need simultaneously.

 

[sretalla]

Per this thread it seems I don't need to worry about which ports on my Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard I reconnect all of my drives to. Always good to get a confirmation though!

Yes, correct, good to go.

What's the best way to move to a new boot drive and update? Save my config, fresh install current FreeNAS on new drive, load config? Or should I not mix step 2 and 3 above? Per boot section of manual it looks like I can Clone my system to the new drive, but if I did that would I first update to current FreeNAS? or update after the Clone? Might there by any problems cloning from an 8GB USB stick to a 128GB SATA drive? The manual isn't clear.

Mixing is fine, but not necessary to change at all if you don't want to. Don't clone the drive, there's no value in the install itself outside of the config and encryption keys if you have an encrypted pool.

What's the best way to move all my data to a new pool? I've searched the Forums but haven't found a good definitive answer. I have enough SATA ports to attach all of the drives I'll need simultaneously.

Have a look here:

Howto: migrate data from one pool to a bigger pool

There have been a lot of posts recently about how to move data from one pool to another. Usually it's because folks want to upgrade to a much larger pool and the drive-by-drive resilvering process will take too long. I've recently gone through this as well. Here are the steps that I followed...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[Midshipman]

Great, thanks for 1 and the post for 3.

Regarding 2, just to be sure I understand: I should just install fresh and load my configuration since everything important is in the config?
I am using encryption, but I've previously exported the keys, etc., so I should be good to go there. (I am able to bring the volume back up after a reset, so if I save and reload this configuration on a new drive, I should still be able to, right?)

 

[Yorick]

everything important is in the config

Most everything. Cert private key is not, so you’ll need to re-import your https cert after restore of the config. That at least has been my experience.