Safest vs. fastest way to increase Zpool size

[AVB]

I'm sure that this has been asked before but I started going blind about 2 years ago and reading my screen is something I can only do for about 15 min before I have to stop for awhile. Makes searching for answers a bit difficult. I know how to replace one drive at a time to eventually increase pool size but I'm wondering if there is something just as safe but faster.

I have 2 pools in my server. The one pool I upgraded just before my eyesight went south and I have a ton of room available on it. The second pool hasn't changed in 5 years and is now at about 84%/ I just ordered new drives which will double its size. What I want to do is copy all the data from the small pool to a directory in the large pool, replace all the drives in the small pool, rebuild it, and then copy the data back. When I upgraded my large pool the "one drive at a time way" it was taking about 18 hours to resliver each drive. Is there a way to do this copy or copy with verifacation that is as safe as reslivering? Just what would the commands be out of the multiple ways available to copy data? If not, I'll just do what I did before. Thanks.

 

[joeschmuck]

Well if you have the space on the pool with little data... This would save you the aggravation of replacing each drive individually, you could setup a copy operation and let it run unattended. It may take a while depending on your transfer speed. You could also setup an Rsync if desired just for this operation.

1. Copy all the data from your old pool to it.
2. Then you could backup your configuration file.
3. Remove all of your old pool drives and set to the side in case you need them to recover any data.
4. Install new drives and create a new pool.
5. Copy back all the data.

This would not be a good plan if you have jails/VM's on your pool and you would need to resilver one drive at a time to retain the jail/VM's.

Remember one thing, the less data on the pool, the faster Resilvering occurs.

Good luck.