Replace old HDD to NEW one

[Mr Prince]

Hi, in my current NAS there are 2 old 500GB HDD and I need to replace them in with a new 2 TB HDD ( WD RED) .
But after hours and hours of work I was able to set FREENAS and Plugins perfectly and everything now works great.

So is there a way to replace the old HDDs with the 2TB without losing all settings and plugin? Freenas is installed on a USB pendrive and I deleted all existing files ( pictures , videos etc ) from the 2 HDD, but
but remain installed plugins and system files...
Thanks

 

[dlavigne]

Yup, assuming this is ZFS follow the instructions in http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool. Never hurts to backup your config first and to backup any data that you would miss in case a drive dies before the resilvering process completes.

 

[gpsguy]

It appears that the OP is only using one 2TB drive to replace 2x500GB drives.

And we don't know whether they are striped, mirrored, or 2 separate volumes.

Mr Prince, please tell us how your disks are configured now.


Sent from my phone

 

[depasseg]

Do you know how your drives are setup (if not, run 'zpool status' at the console and post the results)?

The simplest way is to follow the documentation to replace 1 of the 500GB drives with a 2TB drive. You will still have the same amount of space though until you replace the 2nd 500GB drive with something larger.

 

[Mr Prince]

My actual 2x500GB drive arent't mirrored, but I see them as an unique 1TB HDD and I need to remove both of them and replace only with the new 2TB drive

This is the ZPOOL STATUS report:

pool: HDNAS
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 1h28m with 0 errors on Sun Jun 7 01:28:26 2015
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
HDNAS ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/d6b401e0-5a4e-11e4-8b33-001485a56e39 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/d775fdff-5a4e-11e4-8b33-001485a56e39 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

 

[Ericloewe]

And that's two single-drive vdevs. Not a good choice in any situation I can think of.

Your easiest option is to add a mirror to each vdev, remove the original drive from each vdev and, if you value your data, add a new mirror to each vdev to maintain redundancy.

 

[Mr Prince]

And that's two single-drive vdevs. Not a good choice in any situation I can think of.

Your easiest option is to add a mirror to each vdev, remove the original drive from each vdev and, if you value your data, add a new mirror to each vdev to maintain redundancy.

Why is not a good choice? I use my NAS only as media server where I put film and TV series; if I loose them I don't care. Now each HDD is empty and I simply need to replace them with a new one without losing plugin and settings.

 

[joeschmuck]

Why is not a good choice?

Because it puts you into a situation where a single drive failure will result in a total loss of your pool and it's impossible to simply replace a single drive while retaining your data, including your plugins. The next time you build this up (which I assume will be very soon), build it as a RAIDZ1 at least.

You could do what Eric suggested above or just take some really good notes on your plugins configurations and backup your config file. Start from scratch.

 

[danb35]

Possible, but kind of tricky. Here's the basic process:

• Install the new drive and create a new volume (pool) on it.
• Replicate the data from the old volume to the new volume. This post covers that process.
• From the GUI, detach both volumes.
• Power down the machine and remove the old disks.
• Reboot the machine. From the CLI, run 'zpool import newpool oldpool', replacing newpool and oldpool with the names of the new volume and the old volume, respectively.
• From the CLI, run 'zpool export oldpool'
• From the GUI, under Storage, click Import Volume and follow the prompts

Your result will be that all the jails and such that were on the old, two-disk volume are now on the new, single-disk volume, and the jails/plugins should keep running as if nothing ever happened.

The question, though, is why you're using such a heavyweight NAS system for such a low-demand application. If you don't care about your data anyway, ZFS and its associated overhead are really unnecessary.

 

[Mr Prince]

Possible, but kind of tricky. Here's the basic process:

• Install the new drive and create a new volume (pool) on it.
• Replicate the data from the old volume to the new volume. This post covers that process.
• From the GUI, detach both volumes.
• Power down the machine and remove the old disks.
• Reboot the machine. From the CLI, run 'zpool import newpool oldpool', replacing newpool and oldpool with the names of the new volume and the old volume, respectively.
• From the CLI, run 'zpool export oldpool'
• From the GUI, under Storage, click Import Volume and follow the prompts

Your result will be that all the jails and such that were on the old, two-disk volume are now on the new, single-disk volume, and the jails/plugins should keep running as if nothing ever happened.

The question, though, is why you're using such a heavyweight NAS system for such a low-demand application. If you don't care about your data anyway, ZFS and its associated overhead are really unnecessary.

Very interesting solution. I will try!! THANKS!!

About your last question I chose this NAS system because I only need a home media server and I've installed freenas on my old pentium4 PC (2GB RAM) and it works without spending an euro!! The alternative should be to buy an entry level NAS (spending about 100€)

 

[gpsguy]

With just 1/4 of the minimum RAM requirements, this has the potential for failure written on it. ZFS on FreeNAS 8/9 needs a minimum of 8GB of RAM.

Sure, some users have gotten away with less (like yourself), but some day, you might find that you can't mount your volume. And, in some of these cases, the pool gets damaged to a point where adding additional RAM, won't fix the issue.

 

[Mr Prince]

With just 1/4 of the minimum RAM requirements, this has the potential for failure written on it. ZFS on FreeNAS 8/9 needs a minimum of 8GB of RAM.

Sure, some users have gotten away with less (like yourself), but some day, you might find that you can't mount your volume. And, in some of these cases, the pool gets damaged to a point where adding additional RAM, won't fix the issue.

I know the high risk of failure but I don't understand where the problem is since, as already said, I use the NAS only as home media center... If a failure happen I will loose some film and TV series (nothing important).
Buy component to build a good NAS (new CPU, new motherboard, new RAM) is quite expensive for my purpose (instead I can buy a entry level synology for 120€).
For now I think my actual solution is the best, 0€ and very good NAS.

 

[gpsguy]

I know you talked about the data not being important, but I understood you didn't want to spend additional hours of work fine tuning FreeNAS and getting the plugins working again. Since you understand the risk - I won't say anything more.