Drive replace question / clarification needed...

[WW1 Flying Ace]

I have a 8x6TB RaidZ2 system.
I purchased 8 new drives to increase capacity.
There are spare drive slots available in the system.
The system allows hot swapping (I can see the new drive.)

My intention is to insert a new larger drive into an open slot, then tell the system to replace one of the existing ones.

Do I have to _offline_ a drive before I replace it? I read a post somewhere that explained that drive replacement is (safer) if the drives are all online while the new drive resilvers. That is not specifically offered in the manual that I can see though.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Hi @SomeGuyInSandy, welcome to the forums. With RAIDZ2 you're quite well protected either way so you don't really have to worry about it.

Do you have enough space to use all of the drives? You could add another vdev.

 

[WW1 Flying Ace]

@PhiloEpisteme Thank you for the reply. I could just add the eight new drives into my 16-bay case, but the current 8 drive volume contains iSCSI targets for a half dozen servers and also provides several file shares. I don't really want to go through configuring all of that again when I can simply upgrade.

I went ahead and kicked off a replacement process. As of this writing resilvering is 86% complete. All that remains is to see if FreeNAS will automatically offline /dev/da2 or not. When this is all set and done I will likely create a second volume with the old drives for less critical data.

 

[WW1 Flying Ace]

I am pleased to report that FreeNAS rocks!

When the resilver process completed, /dev/da2 simply disappeared, which is very nice. I expected to have to set it offline, but that is not necessary. All that is left is to rinse and repeat seven more times.

 

[WW1 Flying Ace]

I am unable to mark this post [SOLVED] , but it is.

 

[Jessep]

Had you added a second vdev to your existing pool, you would not have had to reconfigure anything. Your pool would simply have been bigger with increased IOPS.

 

[WW1 Flying Ace]

Had you added a second vdev to your existing pool, you would not have had to reconfigure anything. Your pool would simply have been bigger with increased IOPS.

I appreciate it, thanks.