My current data volume consists of 4x4TB disks in RaidZ2. The disks are old, with greater than 70,000 power on hours. I am planning to upgrade to four 10 TB disks (retaining RaidZ2 configuration.) None of my existing disks are currently showing errors but I feel they have exceeded a reasonable lifespan and don’t want to wait for an actual failure.
I do not have enough Sata ports to simply attach four new drives, create a new volume and copy data to the new volume. So my options are to 1) perform a drive replacement one drive at a time, or 2) remove the old drives, put in the new drives and then copy data from backup.
Any thoughts as to what would be the most efficient way to move forward would be appreciated. I have good backups, so I’m not worried about losing data.
How many spare SATA ports do you have. An ‘in place’ replacement would be the safest option. Add as many dissk as you have spare ports and perform a replacement on old disks. If you have only one spare SATA, you are only replacing one disk at a time. You want to keep as much redundancy as possible during the replacements.
The motherboard has six sata ports and I am using five of them. I can certainly replace the old drives one at a time using the remaining sata port. I just wasn’t certain whether or not this was the most efficient way to accomplish the task.
It would be the safest way. I would suggest doing the in place due to how old your current drives are. You won’t see the additional space until all the drives are changed and you do the final EXPAND. Managing Pools | TrueNAS Documentation Hub
Make sure you have a good back up, but this is 100% the safest way. Someone mentioned above, but make sure you do a good burn in on the new drives before putting them into service.
