Increasing size of Raidz

[ozzyman778]

Just wanted to post my experience with increasing the size of my Raidz.

I was running 4x500g in Raidz with approx 1.3T of storage space. I am currently up to about 1.1T of total storage and so opted to try the method of resilvering one disk at a time until the entire pool was all new drives. Storage is the name of my zpool

First I checked that Auto Expand was turned on

Code:

# zpool get all Storage | grep autoexpand
Storage  autoexpand     on        local

Cool so Auto Expand is enable if it wasn't you would run:

Code:

# zpool set autoexpand=on Storage

So I opted to do everything using the Wed GUI

First I plugged in my new drives (well 2 of them cause I only have 6 Sata ports)

I then went to "Storage" and clicked on the last button next to my Storage volume titled "Volume Status"

On this page you have the option to replace any of the current drives. It automatically only allows you to select new drives outside of the zpool or the current drive already in use. Obviously I picked one of the new 2tb Drives.

Using

Code:

# zpool status | more

I can see that there is a new indented pair of hardrives which are being replaced and re-silvered. I can also check on the status of the re-silver. My first two drives going from 500g to 2tb drives took about 1hr and 10 min each

When the resilver is complete just simply "detach" the old drive on the "volume status" page and then it can be removed from the system to make room for more drives.

I made a horrible mistake on my third drive and, trying to cut corners, disconnected the sata cable and then disconnected the power. Well it was drive #1 on a 4 drive chain ooff the power supply and I also removed power from 3 other drives. Whoops! I plugged them all back in and recieved errors stating that the drives could not be mounted due to I/O errors. My pool was gone, or so I thought.

I pulled the 2 old drives out that had already been resilvered and put my 4 total 2T drives along with the remaining 2 500g. turned the system back on and bam! my Storage volume was complete with zero errors. I ran a scrub with zero errors, continued to replace the next two drives and now have a massive storage area for all our media.

ZFS rocks! and Freenas is awesome!

Just wanted to share from a total newb to Unix/Linux that Freenas and ZFS have made it really easy!