Upgrading storage from 1 disk w/1 Data VDEV to 4 disks. Suggestions?

[raybilyk]

I currently have one 5TB disk storage. I recently purchased four 4TB drives with the goal of moving the one Data VDEV over to the other 4TB drives and then keeping the one 5TB drive as a quick replacement drive in case one of the 4TB drives goes south. I can't seem to figure out how to move all of the data off the one 5TB drive over to the four 4TB drives and how I should assign the four 4TB drives. Any help/suggestions please?

 

[c77dk]

do you have enough ports to have all the drives connected at the same time? If so, then you can create a new pool with the 4TB drives and use zfs send | zfs receive to migrate the data to the new pool.

 

[Whattteva]

1. Connect the new drives and create a new pool with them.
2. Take a snapshot of the 5TB pool.
3. Replicate or zfs send | zfs recv the 5TB pool snapshot over to the 4x 4TB pool.
4. Profit.

As for how you should assign the 4TB drives. You can either make a RAIDZ1/2 vdev with those drives or 2x mirrored vdevs. Each one has its own pros and cons.

• RAIDZ1 will give you most total usable space (12 TB), but you can only lose any 1 drive and still be safe.
• RAIDZ2 will give you half usable space (8TB), but you can lose any two drives and still be safe.
• Striped mirrors will give you the same usable space as RAIDZ2, the best performance out of them all and also the easiest path to upgrade in the future (only 2 drives at once instead of 4 at once), but redundancy isn't as guaranteed as RAIDZ2 as you can lose 2 drives, but not in the same vdev.

 

[raybilyk]

do you have enough ports to have all the drives connected at the same time? If so, then you can create a new pool with the 4TB drives and use zfs send | zfs receive to migrate the data to the new pool.

Yes, I have the new drives already installed on the server.

 

[raybilyk]

Thank you @c77dk and @Whattteva !!! I appreciate you both!!!