Reusing HDD From Old Pool to New Larger Pool

[Waffelen]

Hi,

I have a an Lenovo Thinkstation S20 Intel Xeon X5650 - 6 Core, 48GB ram with a mirrored 4TB ironwolf pro in. I want to increase the capacity so wanted to buy another 2x of the same drives giving me 4x in total and go for raid Z1 giving me 1 drive failure buffer.

The current data on the mirrored drives is what I will be putting onto the new Z1 array so wondering is there an easier way than wiping the current drives, installing the 2 new drives, setup the array, then copy all the data down from online backup/external hard drive plugged into the same network?

There is 1.6TB of data on there in upwards of 1,000,000 files so the copy could take forever and it is used for business so want as little downtime as possible.

Once the array is created and ready to copy the data over, do I need to recreate all the datasets structures I had first, along with all the settings and permissions or can I just upload the config file and it will set all up with empty datasets with their permissions as there will be no data and I can then just transfer into each of the folders or does the config file not have pool dataset info in there?

Hope I explained what I am trying to achieve clearly.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

 

[sretalla]

You should either copy with a replication task through the GUI or using zfs send | recv at the CLI. This will ensure you get a proper replica on the other side including datasets/permissions, etc.

The config file doesn't contain anything regarding dataset structures or permissions, those all reside on the data pool itself.

Depending on the risk you're prepared to take... seems quite a bit if you want to use RAIDZ1 with 4TB disks... you could use the most risky method of creating a degraded 4-disk pool out of 3 disks, then replicate/copy over the data and resilver in the original to "fix" the degraded new pool at the end.

Creating a degraded pool

WARNING: HERE BE DRAGONS. IF YOU DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE DOING, DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS. IN FACT, IF YOU NEED THESE INSTRUCTIONS, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T FOLLOW THEM. There are a few cases where it may make sense to create a...

www.truenas.com

The warnings written at the top should be understood.

 

[Waffelen]

Thanks for this sretalla. I will do as you advise and use a replication task.

I think I may have actually a second temp system I can just stick truenas onto, with some normal HDD's in and replicate the data to it, put the new drives into the original system and wipe the current drives when combine them into a new pool, then do the replication task to copy the data onto that from the temp system with all permissions etc intact.

No, dont really want to start messing with the degraded pool to be honest but at least I know it is there as an option.

Thank u for the info and advice!

 

[Davvo]

Buying an external device to use for the transfer would reduce the risk, but obliviously It means a bigger investment.