Upgrading to 9.3......

[zoltronix]

As you may have gathered i'm very, very new to FreeNAS. Although I can setup shares and jails etc, my problem is a venture into the unknown and I can't afford for things to go wrong as I could end up losing around 5tb of data.

For over a year my FreeNAS system has been running very stable, however today it appears my motherboard has failed. I was running FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 and luckily I have a copy of the config file saved in a safe place.

My question is can I setup FreeNAS 9.3 as a new install on a larger 32gb USB bootable drive as my previous USB boot drive was only 4gb without affecting the data stored on the 3 drives in a 7tb pool, and then import the 9.2.1.8 config into FreeNAS 9.3 without any problems?

Sorry if this question has been answered before, but I have searched and can't take the risk with the data.

Regards

Lee

 

[zoltronix]

Forgot to mention my setup is

Gigabyte GA990XA-UD3
AMD FX4150
16GB RAM
3 x 4TB WD Red's
4gb usb boot drive, soon to be 32gb

 

[Bidule0hm]

Yes ;)

But since you have 3 drives I can guess you're using RAID-Z1 and from the data size I can guess you're using drives that are bigger than 1TB. The thing is: RAID-Z1 with drives bigger than 1TB are not recommended.

So if you can't afford to loose your data: first do some backup regularly and second add a drive to use RAID-Z2 ;)

 

[zoltronix]

I'm not sure how the drives are allocated, when I set the system up initially FreeNAS recommended the current setup for me.

I'm certain their is some redundancy in the system as their is 12tb from the 3 drives, but only around 7.4tb available or am I missing something? I thought I could lose 1 drive, but obviously not 2.

Or is what you are saying I can afford to lose 1 drive, but when it comes to replacing the failed drive there is a chance I could have a 2nd failure of an existing drive when integrating the new drive into the existing pool?

Adding another drive isn't a problem, but can a raid-z1 pool be changed to raid-z2 without data loss?

 

[Bidule0hm]

Or is what you are saying I can afford to lose 1 drive, but when it comes to replacing the failed drive there is a chance I could have a 2nd failure of an existing drive when integrating the new drive into the existing pool?

Exactly. The problem is that with drives bigger than 1TB the chances to have a read error on another drive is pretty high and with RAID-Z1 you don't have enough parity to correct it. If the error is in metadata you can lose the whole pool...

Adding another drive isn't a problem, but can a raid-z1 pool be changed to raid-z2 without data loss?

Unfortunately no, you need to copy the data elsewhere, delete the current pool, recreate a new pool and copy the data back. But it shouldn't be a problem as you should have the space needed for at least one backup elsewhere.

 

[danb35]

Is that hardware config with your dead motherboard? If so, that will give you the opportunity to upgrade to recommended hardware. Consult the hardware recommendations thread for details.