Sanity check for increasing HD capacity

[William Bravin]

Hello all

Please be patient with me. I will be increasing the size of my storage shortly.

As per my signature I have 2 freenas servers

Both with 4 X 2 tb drives

I would like to increase on one server from 2 to 3 TB drives.

I read the manual and I want to ensure i do not screw this up more than i normally will.


On one server
1) I put a drive offline

2) remove the drive from the server

3)turn server off

4) Insert the 3tb drive

5) turn server on and make new drive online. ....Now the server has 3 X 2TB and 1 X 3 TB drives

6) wait until new drive is populated

Once complete step 1 , 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6

7) repeat the process for each additional rive

now the server will 4 x 3 tb drives


I will the add the 4 X 2 tb to the redundant server making it 8 X 2 TB and rebuild the pool on a Z1

Rsync all my media from server A to the redundant server
Am i correct?

Thank you for confirming (or Not)

 

[Jailer]

It would be awesome if there was a resource for this or a manual that explained how to do it.

 

[William Bravin]

Thank you for your help

simple and clear this step by step should be in the user manual so even an simple minded individual like myself can understand

 

[William Bravin]

Hello all

Just an update for you all and my learnings

I just started to grow my pool from 4 X 2tb to 4 by 4TB. I must say that the first disk that i am upgrading the resilvering is taking an enormous amount of time to perform. The resilvering of the first replaced drive took 9 hours. Resilvering of drive 1 completed i now am starting drive 2.

In my opinion this process is valid for those who have a single server environment. For all those who ha a backup or better yet a fully redundant environment I would avoid this process and would just scrap the old pool and rebuild the pool with the new drives and then just perform your backup or your mirror and you are done.

I estimate that this process will finish in 36 hours (all 4 disks). I may still scrap everything and just go to rebuild

C'est la vie Cheers

 

[IQless]

If you have available sata ports I believe you could replace multiple drives at once :)

 

[William Bravin]

Thank you for you input

My rig is in Z1 configuration so i cannot replace more than one drive at the time otherwise i will it not destroy the pool?

The issue That i am having is although all is proceeding correctly with the resilvering (i'm at my 3rd disk) i noticed that when i look at my pool on my supermicro server It shows me that i have 3.74 tb of used data and 1.36 available. The same data on my main rig shows 2.28 tb used and 2.82 available. Note that these 2 systems are a duplicate of each other. If i add the datasets in my supermicro I get 2.26 TB in use,

Where does the 3.74 come from ? how do i find it? and how do i delete it?

Thank you

 

[William Bravin]

Hello all

The resilvering process was taking far to long. The first disk took 9 hours the second disk to 8 hours, the 3rd disk has been at it for 15 hours so far and still needed 8 hours to complete. Because I have a fully redundant server I decided to rebuild the the server with the new drives from scratch. This was completed this morning in an hours and now I am copying all my data from one server to the other.

In this way i also resolved the issue of the different usage values

Thank you all

 

[William Bravin]

Hello Folks

As i mentioned here above I rebuilt my supermicro server now with 4 X 4tb SAS drives. My other server has 8 X 2TB SATA drives. Bothe have the exactly same data. Yet my supermicro is showing 6.08 TB available and my is showing 7.92 TB Available.

Furthermore

If I add the datasets on my supermicro server I get the following usage:

Documents 168 GB
TV shows 2 TB This should be 1.5 TB this issue is not relate to this post. I need to investigate this However Freenas is running rsync at the moment
Movies 494GB
Music 77GB

This would make a total of 2.74 TB so why is the dataset total show 4.13 TB

On both servers the drives are in a z1 configuration

Any thoughts

 

[otpi]

z1 = 1 drive redundancy. With 2 TB drives that's 2 TB, with 4 TB drives it's equal to, *drum roll*, 4 TB.

 

[William Bravin]

Hello

Thank you for your reply
Sorry but i do not understand your point

 

[otpi]

Using the sticker capacity of your drives (i.e ignoring any TiB to TB and other misc. differences). In raidz1 you loose one hdd worth of capacity to redundancy:

4 x 4 TB = 16 TB of spinning rust, in z1 that is: 3 x 4 TB = 12 TB available
8 x 2 TB = 16 TB of spinning rust, in z1 that is: 7 x 2 TB = 14 TB available

 

[William Bravin]

Thank you for your reply

If i understand you correctly I would lose 1 drive of capacity of my configuration In each of my configurations. OK

However this does not explain the usage Issue.

If both servers have exactly the same data, Then both server should have the same usage value correct?

Both of my servers show a total capacity of about 10.2TB. Which is OK

Furthermore this does not explain why the total amount of usage on my supermicro server does not equal to the total of my datasets

each dataset shows the following usage
Documents 168 GB
TV shows 2 TB
Movies 494GB
Music 77GB

This adds to 2.74 TB so why is the dataset total showing 4.13 TB for total usage

 

[otpi]

Are those all your datasets? Or just the ones you have created?
Snapshots?
Jails? plex, if configured for optimization/timeline scrubbing use a lot of extra TBs?

 

[William Bravin]

Hello

These are the datasets I created and all the datasets in the system

This rig in particular has no jails and no snapshots