Resizing pool vs copy to a new one

[_Shin_]

Hi everyone,
my system currently have an encrypted zpool with 6x4TB disks, in a raidz2 configuration.
The capacity of the volume is currently at 86% and I need more disk space.

The six disks currently saturates all six of my motherboard SATA ports.
The boot drive is currently a USB stick.

So far I've bought 6 new 10TB HDDs, and an SSD I plan to use as the new boot drive.
I have also bought a SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9207 card, in order to free the on-board SATA ports, then use one for the SSD boot.

Q1)What do you suggest is the best course of action?

Grow the current pool by replacing and resilvering all of the 6 disks one at a time?
(add new disk on the HBA - replace disk in pool - wait for resilver - remove old disk)

Or just slap the 6 news disks on the new controller, make a new pool and copy the data from the old one?

One one hand I read that the resilvering way is best for data integrity.
On the other hand I am worried to mess up something because of the encryption, and it also takes more time.

bonus question:
Q2) are the 32GB of RAM still enough with a 6x10TB pool? The system will be used just for backups, archiving, and media center (plex/transmission/radarr/sonarr/etc)

Thank you

 

[danb35]

Neither, if you can keep all 12 disks in your system at the same time. I'd choose door #3 and extend the pool with the six new disks. See https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2-U6/storage.html#extending-a-pool

 

[_Shin_]

Forgot to say I plan on using the 6 old disks on another machine, so no, only 6 disks on this NAS.

 

[danb35]

Then in that case, I'd grow the pool by resilvering.

 

[_Shin_]

May I ask you why?

And, is it a problem if the new, bigger drive is on a different controller?

 

[danb35]

May I ask you why?

Biggest factor in my mind is that nothing in your configuration needs to change--your pool layout, datasets, permissions, shares, jails, etc. all stay where they were and you don't need to change anything.

is it a problem if the new, bigger drive is on a different controller?

Not at all.

 

[_Shin_]

Actually, I am still running freenas 9.3 with a bunch of jails and VMs that I will defer to another server, keeping the NAS to act just like a NAS

My idea was to just save the data, start with a new freenas 11 version and rebuild any shares or jails i need.

To be specific, I am moving all the Virtual machines to a new server and plan to keep the NAS only for file storage and media center.

Correct me if I'm wrong: I could just boot with a new drive, on a freenas v11 os and eventually decide to either rebuilding all the previous configuration or revert to the old USB stick and keep going with the old one

Hope this is clear enough , I'm on my second red wine bottle and here in Italy it's just 3.30 pm

 

[_Shin_]

so the real questions turns out to be:

- is there a risk of loss of data integrity by copying the data from a pool to another?
vs
- how big is the risk of messing things up by resilvering 6 disks of an encrypted volume?