Swapping to new drives with limited sata ports

[Protopia]

No - you don’t, but I was responding to…

@Stux

If you can install 2 drives (for the mirror) then you can make a degraded 4-wide RaidZ2 with just two drives.

Replicate everything. Remove the old pool (a backup) and then replace the two degraded disks with new disks.

Job done. One copy.

and this process creates a new non-redundant fully-degraded RAIDZ2 pool, and before restoring the redundancy with resilvers, the original pool is destroyed.

With my process both the old and new pools have single redundancy during the migration, and there is never any point at which there is zero redundancy.

[Stux]

@Protopia

and before restoring the redundancy with resilvers, the original pool is destroyed.

The original pool is never destroyed

8wZ2 with 4TB disks → 4wZ2 with 14TB disks.

None of the original 4TB disks are reused. The old pool can go on a shelf as a backup.

[Protopia]

Ah - I get you now. A physical offline backup on the old disks.

[CaptainDerek]

Just wanted to give an update!

I ordered a PCI SATA card with 4 slots and a PCIe power extender. I’m currently in the middle of doing a ZFS replication to the new pool. Fingers crossed that the replication goes smoothly, and then it’ll be time to point all my apps to the new pool.

Thanks, everyone, for all your help!

[Protopia]

Be sure that your PCI(e?) SATA card meets the recommendations for such cards made on both this forum and the old community forum when used with ZFS as many PCI SATA cards create problems.