Upgrading drives in a RAIDZ2?

[Brian Buchanan]

I have a test FreeNAS 9.1.0 box with a RAIDZ2 on four 250GB hard drives.

I want to replace those four drives with 1-TB drives.

I have two ideas, shutdown and replace 1 drive, the array will be degraded so add the 1-TB as a spare and with for it to rebuild. Repeat until all drives have been replaced, expand the array to use all the space.

The other idea is to replace one drive, add it and copy all the data from the three remaining to it (possible just because it's big enough) then delete and rebuild the three drive array, copy the data to the array and then add the fourth drive into the array.

Well three ideas, replace all drives and restore from backup. The first two I don't know how to do and thus the question.

What's the best way to do upgrade drives in a RAIDZ2 on FreeNAS?

 

[fracai]

You can't add a drive to an existing RAIDZ2 to turn a three drive array into a four drive array, so option two is out.

I upgraded a 6x1 TB to a 6x2 TB one disk at a time, so that will indeed work.

Depending on how much data you have, it might be faster to kill your array, build the new one, and restore from your backup. Make sure it's up to date.