Extending 8TB UFS volume to 10TB

[reebzor]

The only answers I've found are about ZFS volumes or involve using growfs, which I have attempted in the past but was unable to use because the volume is larger than 2TB (not sure if that changed though)

I have an 8TB RAID5 array in my FreeNAS box that is full. I have added another 2TB to the array, and it is in the process of expanding right now. Once my RAID card finishes expanding the array, I would like to extend my 8TB existing volume to 10TB, but I am not sure of the best way to do this.

I would ideally like to accomplish this without having to take the volume offline, and would absolutely like to retain the data (don't worry, I obviously have a backup). Any easy way to do this?

Thanks

 

[Caesar]

dude... you need to provide more details. your version of freenas, your hardware. pretty much as much detail of what you have as possible.

 

[reebzor]

FreeNAS 8.0.3, 6 x 2TB WD20EADS in RAID5 on a HPT RocketRAID 2720 on a ECS H55CM with a Core i3 530 and 12GB DDR3-10600, I also have 2 x 1TB disks in a RAIDZ striped array connected to the mobo sata ports. The array was originally 5 x 2TB array, just added the 6th disk and expanded the array using the Web GUI for the RAID card to give the array 10TB of usable space. The 8TB volume made from this array is used as an ESXi datastore via NFS, would like to expand the volume to 10TB as the array has already been expanded to 10TB. Let me know what additional information you require.

 

[Caesar]

I think I understand but I am not 100% so keep that in mind. I think you have a hardware RAID controller that had an 8TB array and now you have expanded that to a 10TB array but now in freenas it is still showing as 8TB??? I think this is one of the reasons why they say you shouldn't use a hardware RAID controller to manage your RAID and that you should let freenas handle your RAID. Someone else would have to answer the question "Will freenas see the new free space if I am using a hardware controller and I expand the array by updating the configuration of said hardware controller."

 

[cyberjock]

I don't believe you can expand it from FreeNAS. You might want to try PartedMagic and see if that can resize UFS. No promises though, and you should have a backup before trying this, because you might lose everything in the process.

 

[reebzor]

I think this is one of the reasons why they say you shouldn't use a hardware RAID controller to manage your RAID and that you should let freenas handle your RAID.

Who says that and why? That does not make any sense...

I don't believe you can expand it from FreeNAS.

Seriously?

You can do this in every OS, even with GUI tools (Disk Management, Disk Utility, Gparted). I'm shocked that an operating system dedicated to storage lacks this functionality. Even other NAS and SAN devices can do this...

PartedMagic and gparted do not support UFS.

 

[cyberjock]

Who says that and why? That does not make any sense...

That's for ZFS. For UFS the rules are different. If you are using ZFS with a hardware RAID and you didn't know better, then you shouldn't have chosen FreeNAS as an OS because you clearly didn't do your homework.

Seriously?

You can do this in every OS, even with GUI tools (Disk Management, Disk Utility, Gparted). I'm shocked that an operating system dedicated to storage lacks this functionality. Even other NAS and SAN devices can do this...

Well, good for them. FreeBSD is not "every OS" and FreeBSD does not support "every other OS' file system". There is no comparison and you appear ignorant for even making that comment. There is alot of risk(and performance penalties) when you resize file systems. NTFS doesn't like it as it has prereserved % of total disk space for the file table that suddenly changes by resizing, FAT32 is fairly agnostic to resizing but is fairly unreliable, etc.

As a general rule, people using FreeBSD are usually extremely fluent with FreeBSD, know the limitations of the OS and file systems, and work accordingly. Companies have used UFS for decades, and, shockingly, its a bad idea to resize your UFS partition. Also most companies don't look to resizing their file server. They look to building an additional server or buying a new one so they have a nice shiny new contract.

Nonetheless, a simple Google for "UFS resize" turns up a command... growfs. FreeNAS appears to have the command growfs. I don't know if it has all the libraries to function properly or will even work. You are the first person I've seen to even pose the question of expanding UFS. If you do try it you'd better have backups.

 

[reebzor]

It looks like growfs would work, but I cant change the bsdlabel on a volume larger than 2TB. I also found some guides to extend the volume with gdisk, but I ended up just corrupting the partition table on the disk. I eventually managed to rewrite the partition table and get the volume to mount.

I think I'm going to cut my losses and just delete and recreate the volume. I'm aware that Unix/BSD is not Windows/OSX/Linux but I'm am still shocked that resizing volumes is not supported in FreeNAS. This is why I left FreeNAS before, and I think it's time to switch to a more flexibile and full featured OS for good this time.

Thanks for your help.

 

[jgreco]

growfs seemed to have problems last time I had reason to try using it. Seems to have been okay for back in the days of 80GB hard drives but doesn't seem to be able to handle substantially larger drives without issues.

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operating system dedicated to storage lacks this functionality.

I'm pretty sure an operating system dedicated to storage will have the functionality. FreeBSD is not an operating system dedicated to storage, it is a general purpose UNIX-derived operating system. FreeNAS is not an operating system, it's a storage platform based on FreeBSD.