In service disk burn in test and upgrade possible??

[Last Mile]

I'm upgrading a 3 x 2TB RaidZ1 to ultimately a 3 x 6TB RaidZ1. I plan to connect one of the 6TB drives to the only spare SATA port and start replacing the 2TB drives one by one.

But first I'd like to pre-test the new drives before starting the upgrade process and putting them into service. The rest of my home network is Macs and laptops, so I don't have a system to burn in the new drives. Is it possible to burn in one new drive at a time, while the rest of the system is still in service? The production side is working fine and time isn't an issue. I remember it took 7 days to burn in the 3 x 2TB drives, so I'm prepared to spend an extended interval testing.

Thanks in advance

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Is it possible to burn in one new drive at a time, while the rest of the system is still in service?

Yes, badblocks is installed in FreeNAS, so you can attach a drive and test it before making it part of your storage.

 

[Stux]

Of course,

Are you aware that 3x6TB RaidZ1 is generally considered a bad idea?

Basically... the odds of data loss are pretty good.

If you wanted to get back to decent data redundancy, you'd be better off with 4x6TB in RaidZ2. But at that point you're talking 50% redundancy. And if you're talking 50% redundancy, then you may as well consider mirrors.

And If you start considering mirrors, then you could add your 6TB drive now, burn it in. Then replicate your current array to it. Then add a second 6TB drive as a mirror of the first. Then add 2 of your current 2TB drives as a mirrored pair to the exisitng 6TB mirror for a total of 8TB.

leaving you a spare 2TB.

And then later on, when you actually need some more space, you can replace the two 2TB drives with larger drives, say 8TB, to give you 14TB.

Just an idea.

And because drives do tend to drop in price, may actually save you money both in the short term and long term.