Upgrading vdevs from 2-mirror to 3-mirror on encrypted volume.

[Chase Farrant]

I've done quite a bit of searching pertaining to this problem and it's seems like quite the doozy. I seem to be alone in my endeavors.

I currently have an encrypted volume with 4 vdevs - each with 2 mirrored hard disks. The hd's are 2TB each giving me a whopping storage total just shy of 8TB. I'm trying to add 1 more drive to each vdev, giving me triple mirrored vdevs (better fault protection). The gui seems unable to automatically do this, as it is only capable of expanding and not adding mirrored drives (I think).

Questions include:
Are the commands similar to creating a mirror on an existing single disk vdev?
Do I add the drives 1 at a time?
What about formatting them first?
What is the expected build time for each hard disk?
Also, I'm pretty sure I have need to regenerate my keys.

If someone could point me in the right direction, that would be great!

 

[cyberjock]

Oh Chase, how you make me shed a tear of beauty for you.

1. You are correct in that the WebGUI doesn't let you do 3-way mirrors. You can't follow the normal instructions for adding a 3rd disk to a mirror. You have to do some geli magic to encrypt the pool first.
2. I'd add them one at a time.
3. You don't need to format them, but they do need to be partitioned.
4. Build times depend on factors like amount of data, speed of the disk, fragmentation of your data, and usage of your server during the rebuild. So nobody can say for sure. :(
5. You will.

I actually don't even know what direction to point you in. To be honest, I have no clue how I'd even begin trying to do but if I had to "rank" it on riskiness I'd give it like an 8/10 (pretty risky). Let me email someone and see if they have the answer. If I don't reply to this email before Friday post back so I can get the "how about now" message. I don't want to forget to respond.

I wouldn't proceed with trying to do the 3 way mirrors yourself until we have more info.

 

[dlavigne]

You are correct in that the WebGUI doesn't let you do 3-way mirrors.

Really? Is there a feature request for this? If not, there should be.

 

[Chase Farrant]

Alright, well it's good to see my hunch about the difficulty was correct. I'm really tempted just to say screw it and add 2 more vdevs. I'll hangout here for awhile and see what comes of it. In the meantime, I'll try to compile some online sources that looked semi-helpful.

 

[cyberjock]

Really? Is there a feature request for this? If not, there should be.

I created one loooong ago. It was shot down on the premise that it wasn't an important feature or was set to "future". "future" usually means more than 12 months in the future... :/