Temporarily removing pool drives?

[grante]

I'm planning on switching HBAs in my existing freenas system and adding an expander. I want to test things out for awhile before I start using the new hardware for real with my actual disks installed.

So my plan is:

1. Shut down FreeNAS.
2. Remove all the disks from the current pool. Set them aside.
3. Replace the HBA and add the expander.
4. Install some different disks that don't have anything important on them.
5. Start FreeNAS.
6. Make sure everything works properly, build a new pool, mess around for a bit.
7. Delete the testing pool.
8. Shut down
9. Reinstall the original disks
10. Start FreeNAS again.

Is that a safe plan? Will FreeNAS have any issues with the current pool being missing, and will it detect it again once I reinstall all of that pool's disks? Anything else I should do?

 

[dlavigne]

Did this end up being the steps you followed?

 

[grante]

Haven't tried it on my live system yet, but did try it in a VM and it worked fine. Freenas complained about the missing pool but worked fine once the drives were reconnected.

So hopefully it will all go smoothly.

 

[Christian K]

I am attempting something similar.
Truenas 12

I have a storage rack case with 4 detachable caged drive slots. they comprise a pool "NAS" with 2 mirrored vdevs.

I want to temporarily detach the drives from the slots and set them aside, and put in 4 smaller drives for speed experiments.
Afterwards I want to detach the temp drives and re-attach the original disks again.

my real worries are that if TrueNas detects other drives on the ada interfaces, it might cause confusion and hamper the "NAS" pool.
Also, would off-lining the original four disks be the correct step to begin with? Of course, this will offline the "NAS" pool.