I have a system with 2 NVME slots and 2HDD bays. Right now I am booting from a 256GB SSD in a USB enclosure and I have 1 1TB NVME (striped) that has a couple of apps installed (tailscale, Home Assistant & Plex) and running.
I just got 2 2TB NVME drives and 2 12 TB HDDs and want to upgrade the box. What’s the best way to do this? Can you hot insert the 12TB HDDs? or do you need to shut down
Similarly, I want to go from 1TB striped NVME to 2x2TB NVME mirror. What’s the best way to do that?
You would be smart to always power down and disconnect the power cable before working inside a machine.
I’m making an assumption (you should not let us do that, provide better hardware details) that you have at least two drive bays, power, and data cables. Install those drives, create a MIRROR. Then back your NVMe drive data to the new pool. Then replace your NVMe drives.
Or, the NVMe Stripe that you have, if you only have two NVMe slots, the data must be backed up, the pool destroyed, install the new NVMe drives, recreate the stripe. Assuming that is your goal.
And as always, backup your config file before doing anything.
On a side note, if you can replace the boot drive with a non-USB connected drive, you would be better off in the long run.
If I understand correctly that you have a free NVMe slot, install a 2 TB drive in it, extend the 1 TB to make a mirror with the new 2 TB, then replace the 1 TB with the second 2 TB and resilver.
Thanks both. I ended up powering down, installing the 2 HDDs and also both 2TB NVMEs. I put the 1TB NVME into a usb-c hub enclosure and booted the system that way. mirrored the 2 HDDs and then the two 2TB NVMEs. Then I migrated ix-applications from the 1TB pool to the 2TB mirror. My reason for the question is I wanted to minimize the number of times I cycled the system. For sure one power down was needed for the NVMEs, I just didn’t want to do it twice. The reason for the hot mount was one thought was to hot mount the HDDs, migrate ix-applications to it, then shut down to install the two NVME’s and then migrate ix-apps to the NVME mirror. Instead I used the hub to mount the 1TB app drive.
I would love to move off of booting the SSD from USB but I only have two NVME slots and I don’t want to use one of them for that.
