Best way to upgrade hardware

[MartynW]

Hi,

I've just brought all new hardware to upgrade my aging NAS. I was wonder what would be the least painful way to upgrade?

Old System
FreeNAS 9.2.1.3
HP Microserver N40L 8GB non-ECC
2 x 3 TB RAID 1
2 x 1 TB RAID 0
CIFS Shares
iSCSI Targets
FTP Server
RSYNC Jobs
UPS Service

New System
Supermicro Motherboard MBD-X10SL7-F-O
Intel I3-4340
4 x 8 GB Hynix Memory
6 x Seagate NAS HDD 4TB SATA
Sandisk 4GB Cruzer USB Stick
Fractal Design Newton R3 600-Watt Power Supply
Fractal Design Arc Mini R2

Would this be the best way?
1. Burn new Hardware in for 2 weeks
2. Install FreeNAS 9.2.1.3 on USB Stick
3. Move old HDDs from old system into the new one
4. Restore config from old system (Hope this picks up the old drives?)
5. Set up new RAIDZ2 on new disks
6. Copy data from old drives to new
7. Re-point file shares, iSCSI targets, Rsync tasks, FTP Server, UPS USB Port
8. Remove old disks

Will that work?

Thanks in advance

 

[cyberjock]

Seems reasonable to me.

 

[MartynW]

Hi,

I've completed the build and are burning in as we speak. I've getting quite nervous about steps 3 and 6 due to my lack of zfs and unix knowledge.
1. Can I and should I move only one of the mirrored disks? Would that work?
2. The new disk are da0-da5, adding the old disks to the system will put them at da6+ at a guess, will that cause problems?
3. What is the best way to copy the data across? I'm a bit scared of dd, but guess the command would be

dd /mnt/{old zfs volume name} /mnt/{new zfs volume name}​

4. I hope to encrypt some or all of the new drives, does that change anything?

Thanks in advance

 

[cyberjock]

1. I'm not sure what you are asking with regards to mirrored disks.
2. The daXX means nothing for ZFS. Even if you rearrange them later they will work. :)
3. Why are you dd'ing anything? Just mount the 2 pools and use the "cp" command.
4. The only additional steps will be unlocking the pool before you copy files. I don't recommend the encryption generally because it's been a problem child for some people. I consider it relatively safe though. But I could fix almost any major problem that comes up. Your average user probably can't. And trying to do it yourself if you've never done it could cause permanent loss of your data. We've seen it from quite a few people on the forum unfortunately. Note that you can't encrypt "some drives" in a pool. If you want encryption you have to do it for the entire pool and you have to set that up on pool creation. There is no simple way to encrypt a pool after it's been created(and they are somewhat dangerous).

 

[MartynW]

Thanks cyberjock, you've been very helpful

1. I'm not sure what you are asking with regards to mirrored disks..

We the disks are mirrored on my old system, to me, it seems safer to move just one of the disks to the new system, hence reducing the risk of loosing the data? Is that possible? I've done it before with hardware RAID?

The whole process has taken a rather urgent note as the old system JUST started registering these
Apr 28 15:30:12 freenas smartd[2350]: Device: /dev/ada2, 42 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Apr 28 15:30:12 freenas smartd[2350]: Device: /dev/ada2, 19 Offline uncorrectable sectors
Eeek!

 

[cyberjock]

No, move them all. There's no real risk with moving disks to a new system. FreeNAS is designed to allow for that seamless transfer. Not to mention you'd be removing redundancy from a pool that is having problems. You probably want as much redundancy as you can get right now so I'd consider it more risky to move only 1/2 the disks.