Migrate pool of 4 HDDs to SSDs without needing a second TrueNAS server?

[Steasenburger]

Hi everyone,

I currently have a set of 4x2TB SATA HDDs attached directly to the motherboard of my TrueNAS Scale server that have one pool on them (Raid Z1 array).
Those drives are already quite old, of mixed quality (they were all bought used) and 2 already had to be replaced, so I decided to completely replace all the drives with 4x2TB SSDs.
Those drives have arrived recently, and now I am struggling on how to migrate the data to my new shiny SSDs.

I already did some online research and what I can conclude is that replicating them with ZFS send| receive using the "Replication Tasks" GUI seems to be the most straightforward and safest way.
But the problem is that my server only has 4 SATA ports available, so I cannot simply attach all the new drives to the server and create a pool there.
My question now is, do I really need to spin up a second server and buy SATA cable to attach the drives to it, just to migrate the data to the new SSDs?
Or is there somehow a way to transfer the data of each drive one by one? Maybe using something like CloneZilla - Would this work?

Thanks in advance :)

 

[sretalla]

Are the SSDs of "equal or slightly greater size" compared to the HDDs?

If they are, you can just resilver them in 1 by 1.

 

[abufrejoval]

Resilver is elegant and biting your nails four times, that nothing goes wrong in the mean-time.
If you have backup like you should anyway (because a RAID is no backup), then just make sure it's fresh before you start.

Clonezilla might actually work, since both drives types seem exactly the same size: why don't you try and let us know?

It can't really break anything, but then I don't know how TrueNAS identifies drives: do they use WWNs somewhere or is it in-disk data structures, only?

 

[Steasenburger]

TrueNAS reports my HDDs as 1,82 TiB and according to the Datasheet my new SSDs should be 2 TB each.
I did not have the chance yet to actually connect them and compare the size, but it should fit I guess.

Yeah, I was also thinking of just resilvering the pool 1 by 1 but afraid of something breaking in the meantime and then need to deal with a corrupted pool.
I do make a backup to Azure of the most important files, but I never really tested my (very ad hoc) "disaster recovery strategy" ;)
So I want to go with the safest solution, which might be Clonezilla in this case.

I will check the exact sizes of the drives when I get to it and then decide if I go with CloneZilla or spin up a second server.