Replacing a single drive, with 2 new drives

[neagle392]

Hello,

I searched around on this topic and while I did find quite a few topics about replacing hard drives, most of them were for people who already had multiple drives in raid configurations.

A bit of information on my setup:
I'm running freenas on a decently powered old PC. (Intel i7 920, 16gb of ram etc). I figure this is going to be much more efficient than most affordable consumer NAS boxes that can't even stream via Plex due to lack of power.

I have freenas booting from a flash drive connected to that PC, and only a single hard drive for storage.

My dilemma is that I want two things, 1. More storage space, and 2. Raid 1 mirroring.

I want to buy two 4tb NAS ready hard drives (like Western digital red series) and put them in Raid 1. But I would also like to NOT lose all of the data on the old drive.

I saw one post about imaging the old drive to the new drive with a Linux boot CD, (which is easy enough), but it got confusing when they started talking about how freenas didn't recognize the new storage size and still had the old hard drive storage size etc.

At this point in my server, it's not too hard for me to just start over. Maybe install freenas OS on one of the new drives this time instead of on a flash drive, or install freenas on a new flash drive and just remove the old flash drive and hard drive.

In theory, if I ever needed data off of the old drive, I could install that drive, plug in the old flash drive and boot right up, correct?

If I started fresh, with two drives in RAID 1, could I then install the old drive as a 3rd drive and somehow copy the data over to the new drives within freenas all together?

I'm just trying to figure out the easiest and quickest way to get the job done. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

 

[styno]

The procedure would be to create a new mirrored pool on with the new drives and 'zfs send' all the data to the new pool.
Then export both the old and the new pool and import only the new pool again, but this time with the name of the old pool.

After this you can shut down the machine, physically remove the old disk and keep it aside for a while as a backup.

Before we can go into more detail, please provide a detailed list of hardware components and FreeNas version.

 

[neagle392]

Thank you for the quick reply styno,

Im running build "FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201605170422" on a flash drive boot

Hardware specs:
RAM: 18gb DDR3 1600
CPU: Intel i7 920 (quad core 2.66Ghz)
GPU: Nvidia GTX 260
HDD: Single 2TB (I forget exactly what hdd it is, but its either seagate or WD)

 

[Arwen]

Actually perhaps using one of the new 4TB drives and using the GUI equivelant of;

zpool replace POOL OLD_DRIVE NEW_DRIVE

would work. It should copy all the data over and then expand the pool to fit 4TB.
Whence done, simply remove the 2TB disk from the computer and add the second
4TB disk as a Mirror. Even if the pool did not auto-expand, the new drive might be
faster, such that performing the ZFS send / receive might run faster.

 

[neagle392]

There actually isn't much on the 2tb drive anyways. Around 200gb I believe. I never really got around to using the sever as I originally intended. The reason for the jump to 4TB is because I have a ton of pictures and video on my other PC from my photography over the years (plus old family photos etc) that I really don't want to lose. I have a 2TB drive in that PC that is currently almost maxed and coming up on a couple years of age. My plan is to get these 4tb drives on the NAS and run RAID 1 Mirror. Then get all of these files over to the NAS as a backup. If all goes well, I can wipe that 2tb drive that is currently in the NAS and use it as additional storage for my almost filled up PC.

Even though there is only around 200gb of data currently on the nas, it is still data that I don't want to lose.
So since there isn't much actually on the NAS right now, it shouldn't take long to replace the pools I would assume?

I don't have much experience with freenas, other than the setup that I did on this one a year or so ago. I do have a degree in computer networking and some linux experience etc... so it shouldn't take me long to catch on (I hope).

Thanks for the help so far everyone

 

[styno]

I am sure you'll figure it out. When family pictures and other important data is involved you also may want to step away of the game-rig and invest in some hardware that is more appropriate to running freenas and keeping your data safe.

 

[neagle392]

I am sure you'll figure it out. When family pictures and other important data is involved you also may want to step away of the game-rig and invest in some hardware that is more appropriate to running freenas and keeping your data safe.

So the "zpool replace POOL OLD_DRIVE NEW_DRIVE" seems to be the way to go? I just don't want to mess up and lose data. As far as the rig, I know this was a gaming rig but its literally never used anymore and I figured that it had a pretty decent processor and ram for the job compared to a lot of ready to go cheap NAS boxes. Is there something specific about the hardware that I should be looking at that would be more appropriate?

 

[Jailer]

ECC memory if you care about your data.

 

[neagle392]

ECC memory if you care about your data.

That's easy enough, any downside to dropping down to double channel? Quick searching looks like I'll probably end up with 2x8gb sticks. I doubt that freenas would even benefit from triple channel anyways?

 

[styno]

So the "zpool replace POOL OLD_DRIVE NEW_DRIVE" seems to be the way to go?

I would still recommend to build a 2nd pool, mirrored from the start and move to the new pool as I outlined a few posts up. That way your data goes from 1 to 3 disks and not from 1 to 1 and then to two. procedure: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...te-data-from-one-pool-to-a-bigger-pool.40519/

That's easy enough.

If your motherboard/cpu combination supports it.
May I suggest on moving the data to (at least) a mirror first and then read up on hardware?

 

[neagle392]

I would still recommend to build a 2nd pool, mirrored from the start and move to the new pool as I outlined a few posts up. That way your data goes from 1 to 3 disks and not from 1 to 1 and then to two. procedure: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...te-data-from-one-pool-to-a-bigger-pool.40519/


If your motherboard/cpu combination supports it.
May I suggest on moving the data to (at least) a mirror first and then read up on hardware?

Good point, I didn't even think about that. This old Asus rampage ii Gene probably does not.

I just so happen to have an actual server sitting in my basement. A Dell PowerEdge with dual xeons. But they are dual cores for a total of 4 cores with less processing power than my one i7. But the server works and has ECC ram and dual power supplies etc. I just never wanted to use it because it is so damn big and loud and probably power hungry LOL.

 

[neagle392]

So according to Intel, this processor does NOT support ECC memory. So I'm out of luck there. I also can't afford to buy a new motherboard, processor, ram, plus hard disks. So now I either go without ECC, or rethink everything (other option is to go with a cheap home NAS box, like synology or qnap and not freenas). Which sucks because unless you spend a bunch of money, those boxes have pretty poor processing power.

Just how bad is it to use non ECC memory? I currently don't even leave the freenas box running. I was only turning it on when I needed to backup more files to it, or to stream something. And even then it was pretty rare. Although I do plan on using it a little more frequently in the future.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

If all you need for storage is a mirrored pair of 4TB drives, consider something like a PowerEdge T30 or T13o, or Lenovo TS150.

 

[styno]

consider something like a PowerEdge T30 or T13o, or Lenovo TS150.

Just make sure that the cpu can use "Intel® VT-x with Extended Page Tables" or you won't be able to do *any* virtualization on FreeNas 10.
(I am in the market as well for a cheap motherboard/cpu/memory replacement on my test server - see sig)