Hello all,
First post, I believe I've searched and haven't found a good answer to my question, but also would like advice on if there's a better way to approach what I'm attempting.
I have a pair of mirrored VDEVs which are backing up my main zpool on my home NAS running FreeNAS 11.2u7 (waiting on 11.3u3 to upgrade). I am receiving two more drives (10TB, matching my existing drives) so I will have a total of 6 drives. My system is getting full, but rather than just add another mirrored VDEV (which was my initial plan), I thought about transitioning to a RAIDZ2 setup.
My DIY Nas has 8 drive bays, so I was reticent to go to a 4+2 since that would make going to a 6+2 later impossible (until way in the future when expanding VDEVs is a thing, still waiting 2+ years so I'm not holding my breath). But I thought going with 4+2 would tide me over until such a time as I want to throw away all my 10TB drives and start over with bigger ones anyway.
I've got everything backed up to another location, but restoring from that backup takes a long long time. I was hoping to avoid having to get data from off-box to speed up the process. But again, I have a backup so I'm not worried about data loss at the moment.
My plan (if I decide to go to RAIDZ2) was to "fail" or "offline" one drive in each mirrored pair. If I understand right, this would leave my array in a degraded state but all my data would still be online. I would then create a new RAIDZ2 array, but use two "dummy" drives using sparse files (found a tutorial on this online), then offline those fake disks right away. I now am running a 4-drive 2x2 mirror with only two real drives, and a RAIDZ2 with four "living" drives but two offline drives.
I would then migrate all my data from the first zpool to the new one, then delete the old zpool, and adopt those drives into the new one and let it resilver.
Is this an absolutely atrocious idea? Is there a better way I could approach this? And again if there's any guides or other resources I should check on how to do this (or a better approach) I would appreciate the feedback.
Thanks very much for reading.
First post, I believe I've searched and haven't found a good answer to my question, but also would like advice on if there's a better way to approach what I'm attempting.
I have a pair of mirrored VDEVs which are backing up my main zpool on my home NAS running FreeNAS 11.2u7 (waiting on 11.3u3 to upgrade). I am receiving two more drives (10TB, matching my existing drives) so I will have a total of 6 drives. My system is getting full, but rather than just add another mirrored VDEV (which was my initial plan), I thought about transitioning to a RAIDZ2 setup.
My DIY Nas has 8 drive bays, so I was reticent to go to a 4+2 since that would make going to a 6+2 later impossible (until way in the future when expanding VDEVs is a thing, still waiting 2+ years so I'm not holding my breath). But I thought going with 4+2 would tide me over until such a time as I want to throw away all my 10TB drives and start over with bigger ones anyway.
I've got everything backed up to another location, but restoring from that backup takes a long long time. I was hoping to avoid having to get data from off-box to speed up the process. But again, I have a backup so I'm not worried about data loss at the moment.
My plan (if I decide to go to RAIDZ2) was to "fail" or "offline" one drive in each mirrored pair. If I understand right, this would leave my array in a degraded state but all my data would still be online. I would then create a new RAIDZ2 array, but use two "dummy" drives using sparse files (found a tutorial on this online), then offline those fake disks right away. I now am running a 4-drive 2x2 mirror with only two real drives, and a RAIDZ2 with four "living" drives but two offline drives.
I would then migrate all my data from the first zpool to the new one, then delete the old zpool, and adopt those drives into the new one and let it resilver.
Is this an absolutely atrocious idea? Is there a better way I could approach this? And again if there's any guides or other resources I should check on how to do this (or a better approach) I would appreciate the feedback.
Thanks very much for reading.