Best practice to upgrade drives (larger size)

[wags22]

My FreeNAS is currently configured with 3 1 TB HD in a RAID 5. I want to upgrade to 3 2 TB drives. Looking at the guide for 9.3 section 8.1.1 shows how to add additional drives and expand the pool. However, I don't want to leave the 1 TB drives in after installing the 2 TB drives. Is it possible to shrink the pool after installation? Would it be better to the put the 2 TB drives in as replacements to the 1 TB drives or will the size difference cause a problem?

Thanks for any assistance.

Version: FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201509022158
System: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5130 @ 2.00GHz
RAM: 32 GB
Number of Hard drive ports: 6 SATA

 

[depasseg]

You were so close. Look at section 8.1.11: http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool

 

[depasseg]

And, no, it's not possible to shrink. but it is possible to replace your 1TB drives with 2TBs one a drive at a time to expand your capacity.

 

[wags22]

I did look at 8.1.11 obviously didn't read it thoroughly. After having reread it a couple of time, I see that I can shutdown my system, put the new drives in, boot it, then "replace" each of the 1 TB drives one at a time with the 2 TB drives. When done, I can shut it down and remove the 1 TB drives.

Thanks for the help.

 

[depasseg]

How many drives do you have? You will need to let the pool resilver after each disk replacement. If you can figure out a way to temporarily hook up your new disks at the same time, you can just use snapshots and replication to copy all your data to the new pool.

 

[wags22]

I have 6 sata ports in the tower. I'm replacing 3 1 TB drives with 3 2 TB drives. So I should be able to put all 3 2 TB drives in, and then replace the 1 TB drives one at a time......Replace - resilver; Replace - resilver, Replace - resilver. Correct? Is there a better way to replace the drives and keep the data intact?

 

[depasseg]

With only 3 drives to replace, the 1 by 1 resilver option is probably the best. Unless you'd like to play around with snapshots and replication (it's pretty easy, create a snapshot (click), configure replication from one pool to another).