Staged drive upgrade using interim external USB drive enclosure

[Pebble]

I am currently still running FreeNAS 9.10 and have 6 x 3TB drives in a RAID-Z2 pool. I would like to replace all of them with larger drives but I do not have any available space in the case. Rather than pulling one drive out, installing a new one, letting the resliver process rebuild it, and then doing that for each, I was hoping it would perhaps be possible to use an external USB enclosure to perform a "graceful" replace of one drive, shutdown FreeNAS and swap the drive, and then repeat for each one. The documentation (https://www.ixsystems.com/documenta...rage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool) talks about the method when using a free SATA or eSATA port, but does not mention whether it is possible to do using a USB enclosure.

Any one know if that would be possible or would there be some issue with using a drive temporarily in an external USB enclosure?

Thank you

 

[Chris Moore]

The reason for RAIDz2 is that it has two parity drives. Just pull out a drive and replace the missing drive.
Someone else, just a month or two ago, tried what you are suggesting and the system did not recognize the drive as being part of the pool when it was moved from the USB connection to the SATA connection. The likelihood is that you will need to do double work, like the last person to try.
No refunds

 

[Chris Moore]

USB enclosures usually mask the raw drive data that ZFS needs access to.

 

[Pebble]

Thanks for the responses Chris. Would using an eSATA external enclosure likely have the same limitation or does it just depend on the eSATA enclosure itself?

I'm just hesitant to pull each drive and replace it as all the drives are going on six years old now, and the last time I replaced a failed drive it took almost four days for the ZFS volume to resilver, but if that ends up being the only option then I guess I may have to do it that way.

Thanks

 

[Chris Moore]

I have used eSATA many times and it is perfect, as long as it doesn't include port multiplyer hardware. Port multiplyer hardware sometimes works and it depends on the exact chipset in the hardware.