raidz drive replacement

[Grandpa]

If I understand what I have read then setting up a raidz with 1x2tb and 2x1tb drives will produce a 2tb raidz (two usable drives and one as a parity drive with the smallest drive in the set being the size used for all drives. Yes that is not an exact description just trying to keep it simple.)

Now, if in the future I decided I want to change that and slowly replace each drive with a 3tb drive allowing ample time for the rebuild, once all drives are at 3tb will the array become a 6tb array showing all available space?

Can you remove a drive hot and swap it with a new 3tb drive and let it auto-rebuild?

Thanks for the help

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Yes. You can replace smaller drives one at a time and eventually get the full capacity of the larger drives.

If your hardware supports hot swap, you can hot swap. FreeNAS itself does support hot swap. So, check your hardware.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Grandpa]

Yes. You can replace smaller drives one at a time and eventually get the full capacity of the larger drives.

If your hardware supports hot swap, you can hot swap. FreeNAS itself does support hot swap. So, check your hardware.

Cheers,
Matt

Thank you, I have hot swap drive bays, just wanted to make sure that the raidZ would work the way I was thinking it would.

 

[garm]

You need to manually replace a “swapped” drive. ZFS won’t just grab any drive it finds and attach it to a pool

 

[Grandpa]

You need to manually replace a “swapped” drive. ZFS won’t just grab any drive it finds and attach it to a pool

Well if Raidz works like Raid5 then removing and replacing a drive in the array should initiate a rebuild. It should be noted that once the old drive is removed and the new one is in it's slot I have had to add the new drive to the array to get a raid5 array to rebuild but it depended on the unit.

 

[danb35]

But "replacing a drive" is the key. ZFS has to be told to start the replacement--unless you've already added the new drive to the pool as a spare, it won't automatically assign some random unused disk to the pool.

 

[Grandpa]

But "replacing a drive" is the key. ZFS has to be told to start the replacement--unless you've already added the new drive to the pool as a spare, it won't automatically assign some random unused disk to the pool.

But in a raidz array the bad drive can be removed first?

BTW, love the vorlon icon. lol

 

[danb35]

But in a raidz array the bad drive can be removed first?

Yes, of course. Though if it isn't completely failed, it might be better to replace it in place so you don't lose redundancy during the process.

 

[Grandpa]

Yes, of course. Though if it isn't completely failed, it might be better to replace it in place so you don't lose redundancy during the process.

I can live with that, it is a home unit and I was going to use the raidz for my home directory share (all linux systems) and a striped volume for my media share with an rsync of my striped volume to spare space on my desktop as a redundancy.

 

[Stux]

The point is that you still need to click a button in the UI to initiate the replacement, but in concept, it works like you hope