Upgrade Hard drives

[jackal077]

Hi All,

I'm new to Freenas. I've setup about an year ago 4 x 4 TB hard drives in a mirror 0 and 8 x 146.00GB hard drives in Mirror1. The problem is I've run out of space and what i want now is to get rid of the 8 x 146GB drives and replace them with 4 x 4 TB hard drives. The question is how should I go about this, I'm afraid not to loose my information.

 

[BigDave]

Right off the get go, you need to backup your data before attempting changes to your pool.
Next, you need to post your full system specs and list which version of FreeNAS you are running.
At this point, you have not provided enough information to allow anyone to help with an answer.

 

[jackal077]

Right off the get go, you need to backup your data before attempting changes to your pool.
Next, you need to post your full system specs and list which version of FreeNAS you are running.
At this point, you have not provided enough information to allow anyone to help with an answer.

BuildFreeNAS-9.2.0-RELEASE-x64 (ab098f4)
PlatformIntel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz
Memory24546MB

what else do you need?

 

[gpsguy]

Please post the results of "zpool status" in code tags (see insert menu). Doing so, will preserve the formatting of the output, which is absolutely necessary.

 

[jackal077]

the problem is I can't remember if I added the other 8 x 146.00 disks. By the look of it I haven't. If i go to Volume Status:

View disks:

Can I just add the new 4 x 4 drives and create a new zpool or what is the best way?

 

[jackal077]

Code:

[root@freenas] ~# zpool status
  pool: Data
state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 12h10m with 0 errors on Sun Dec 21 12:10:58 2014
config:

        NAME                                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        Data                                            ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/df8051bd-848e-11e3-996d-0025b3a747d2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/dfff407d-848e-11e3-996d-0025b3a747d2  ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/038dc991-848f-11e3-996d-0025b3a747d2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            gptid/0433b305-848f-11e3-996d-0025b3a747d2  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

 

[gpsguy]

That's correct, you're not using the other 8 drives, just your 4x4Tb drives.

Yes, you could create a new pool, or you might want to add (stripe) additional mirrors to your existing pool (mirrror-2, -3). It's up to you.

 

[jackal077]

Thank you. If I decide to add additional mirrors to my existing pool is there any chance to damage the pool? I presume if I just create a new pool it would be more safe.

 

[gpsguy]

One could argue that a new pool would be safer, but adding additional mirrors to an existing pool is a common occurrance. Striped mirrors generally offer the best performance and allow one to grow their pool with a few disks at a time. If you have separate pools, should one fail, it won't affect the other one.

If you don't need the absolute best peformance (for iSCSI, etc) and you had a place to back up your existing data, you might consider blowing everything away and starting over with 8 disks in RAIDz2. With it, any 2 disks could fail and you'd still have your data. With typical mirrors, if you lost 2 disks in the same mirror, you'd also loose your pool. 8 disks in RAIDz2 would give you more disk space than 4 sets of mirrors.

Do you have access to a virtual environment, where you could "play" with different scenarios? VMware Player and VirtualBox are free.

 

[Z300M]

Thank you. If I decide to add additional mirrors to my existing pool is there any chance to damage the pool? I presume if I just create a new pool it would be more safe.

If I am not mistaken, you are using 4 x 4TB drives but have only 2 x 4TB drives-worth of storage capacity. If you add (stripe together with your existing drives) another mirrored set of 4 x 4TB drives, you'll end up with a total of 8 drives but you'll have only 4 drives-worth of storage capacity. This seems terribly wasteful. If you can backup your existing data, you could destroy your existing pool and add just two more 4TB drives to create a RAIDZ2 pool that will give you 4 drives-worth of storage capacity. You could, of course, add the four 4TB drives you already have in mind and create a larger RAIDZ2 pool, but I have seen suggestions that the ideal number of drives from a performance point of view is n^2+m, where m is the "redundancy count", i.e., m=1 for RAIDZ1, m=2 for RAIDZ2, m=3 for RAIDZ3. So, if that suggestion is valid, for RAIDZ2 you would want 4+2 or 8+2 drives.

 

[L]

This should be really easy.. Just do disk replaces for the 146GB drives with bigger drives. Do them one at a time and wait for resilver. You will have to leave in 4 of the 146gbs but.. they can be a placeholder for next upgrade

 

[gpsguy]

Linda, look at the pix and output from zpool status. The OP isn't using the 146GB drives.