Replacing a striped drive

[my95z34]

So, I will admit, I'm very new to freenas, (2 weeks in, lol). Due to my hodgepodge of disks, I have two volumes, one mirror, and one stripe. I was wanting to replace one of the striped drives with one of higher capacity, but have been unable to find out how. I've spent the past few days searching and reading, and all guides I see are all regarding replacing drives in a mirrored pool. To clarify, the drives are all still good, none are failing, I just want to increase the capacity of the pool.

Is this possible?

Thanks in advance!

 

[SweetAndLow]

Not possible to replace a drive that is in a stripe. You should copy data off then rebuild the pool with the bigger drive and move your data back. I also hope your two vdevs aren't in the same pool. If they are and you lose one disk you will lose everything.

 

[danb35]

As @SweetAndLow said, it isn't possible to replace a drive that's in a striped vdev. If you think about it a bit, that makes sense--when you replace a drive in a vdev, ZFS restores the appropriate data to that drive based on what's on the redundant (mirrored or RAIDZ) devices. In a striped vdev, you have no redundancy, so ZFS wouldn't be able to restore the data to the new disk. You could add another disk to the striped vdev (for example, turn a two-way stripe into a three-way stripe), which would increase your capacity, but also increase your risk of losing all data on that pool--if one disk in a stripe fails, the entire vdev fails, and you should expect that it will be impossible to recover any data. The more disks you have, the higher your risk of one of them failing.

Since the whole point of ZFS is data integrity, striped vdevs are pretty strongly discouraged. Is there a particular reason you're using one?

 

[rs225]

Can't you attach a 2nd drive to the stripe drive you want to replace, upgrading it to a mirror? Then detach the first drive after resilver is complete?

 

[Ericloewe]

Can't you attach a 2nd drive to the stripe drive you want to replace, upgrading it to a mirror? Then detach the first drive after resilver is complete?

Two things:

1. It sounds like we're endorsing stripes with no redundancy, which is a bad idea in any situation (at best, time wasted recovering from backups, at worst data is lost)
2. Autoexpand probably won't work, making for a rather... interesting situation.

 

[cyberjock]

Can't you attach a 2nd drive to the stripe drive you want to replace, upgrading it to a mirror? Then detach the first drive after resilver is complete?

Technically, yes. But not using the WebGUI, so it's basically unsupported.

 

[my95z34]

Thank you all for your replies. I guess, in theory, I was hoping the OS could move all of the data from the drive I want to remove, to the one staying, allowing me to remove it and replace it, then move the data back. Basically, I have two volumes, one is essential (mirrored) and non-essential (striped). The striped one is literally just 2.1TB of TV shows and movies. Stuff I'm not worried about losing. The other has all of my stuff I don't want to lose, lol.

Also, I'm out of internal sata ports, so I think I need to invest in a sata enclosure, sata card, and a few large hard drives to set up a fully redundant pool. If only I could afford it right now, lol.