Use USB to SATA adapter to replace disk?

[Phill23]

Happy new Year!

Time for new hardware too!

I want to upgrade my pool. I got 4 drives in my HPe MicroServer which I’d like to swap for bigger ones.
I don’t want to go through resilvering and was wondering if it is possible to attach the new drives one by one externally and replace each of the old disks and than swap the old disk physically with the new ones.

I could only find a post from 2013 where it did not work but a lot has changed since than.

 

[jgreco]

post from 2013 where it did not work but a lot has changed since than.

About the only thing that's changed since 2013 is that USB3 is now seriously fast enough that this might be feasible.

If you were going to do this, I would turn it around: move an existing drive to a USB3 dock, and install your new disks directly as SATA. The USB3 enclosures are flaky in that they often do not handle the finer points such as identifiers correctly, but the NAS should be able to cope with that more easily on an already-partitioned-and-identified hard disk. Running a bunch of new disks through a USB3 dock would seem to be likely that all your new disks end up with a single shared identifier, etc.

Either way, you're going to end up needing to resilver.

 

[Phill23]

About the only thing that's changed since 2013 is that USB3 is now seriously fast enough that this might be feasible.

If you were going to do this, I would turn it around: move an existing drive to a USB3 dock, and install your new disks directly as SATA. The USB3 enclosures are flaky in that they often do not handle the finer points such as identifiers correctly, but the NAS should be able to cope with that more easily on an already-partitioned-and-identified hard disk. Running a bunch of new disks through a USB3 dock would seem to be likely that all your new disks end up with a single shared identifier, etc.

Either way, you're going to end up needing to resilver.

My idea was not to attach all new disks in an enclosure but to attach them one after the other by usb to sata adapter cable.

 

[jgreco]

My idea was not to attach all new disks in an enclosure but to attach them one after the other by usb to sata adapter cable.

Correct. Such a strategy is already assumed in my answer, except that you need to do it with all the OLD disks, and always hook fresh disks up directly to real SATA ports. Otherwise you run into the problem where TrueNAS may keep seeing the same disk serial number, over and over, because many USB-SATA bridges lie about the disk's serial number, etc., and that may cause problems with the generated topology for the pool. Don't do that.