I have a 4-bay HP Microserver running FreeNAS 9.10.1-U4.
I recently bought 4 new WD RED drives to replace unreliable desktop drives.
I had two mirrored volumes setup, so copied all data onto one mirrored volume and took all drives out apart from one.
This left me with a degraded mirror with all my data still accessible.
Then I put 3 new drives in and created a raidz1 volume (thinking I could add the 4th after all data had been copied over).
So now that I've discovered I can't extend my raidz1 volume, I'm stuck with what do to with the 4th drive?
If I want to convert to a raidz2 volume, I have to take ALL my data off, re-pool, and copy back on again!
So I thought why not offline disk 3 from the raidz1 and add a new mirrored vdev using disks 3+4 to the volume. No canny do, as vdevs have to be of the same type.
So then I thought ok make a new mirrored volume using disks 3+4, copy data from the degraded raidz1, then add a new mirrored vdev back into the new volume. When I try to create the mirror, I get "invalid vdev specification, disk3 is part of active pool". So the disk is showing as offline, but how do I actually remove it from the pool, to use it in a new pool? (without losing all my data!)
I recently bought 4 new WD RED drives to replace unreliable desktop drives.
I had two mirrored volumes setup, so copied all data onto one mirrored volume and took all drives out apart from one.
This left me with a degraded mirror with all my data still accessible.
Then I put 3 new drives in and created a raidz1 volume (thinking I could add the 4th after all data had been copied over).
So now that I've discovered I can't extend my raidz1 volume, I'm stuck with what do to with the 4th drive?
If I want to convert to a raidz2 volume, I have to take ALL my data off, re-pool, and copy back on again!
So I thought why not offline disk 3 from the raidz1 and add a new mirrored vdev using disks 3+4 to the volume. No canny do, as vdevs have to be of the same type.
So then I thought ok make a new mirrored volume using disks 3+4, copy data from the degraded raidz1, then add a new mirrored vdev back into the new volume. When I try to create the mirror, I get "invalid vdev specification, disk3 is part of active pool". So the disk is showing as offline, but how do I actually remove it from the pool, to use it in a new pool? (without losing all my data!)