First, I’m not an expert so will need a little bit of hand holding here. Still new to the whole world of TrueNAS having been a basic QNAP user for a long time.
In jumping away from the basic consumer NAS space into TrueNAS, I started with some pairs of disks in mirror. I got burned by the WD Red SMR crud, but wasn’t ready to invest until I had a stable system for a few months.
Now I’m ready to get into a better space with my storage and am planning to buy some refurbished enterprise drives to get my core data away from the SMR mirrors.
I’ve been trying to find good beginner instructions on how to replace my mirror with a RaidZ1 set of disks while minimizing the manual work to get back up and running.
The only thing that I am trying to preserve is my Plex server. I’ve just been (slowly) learning HomeAssistant and Frigate so it’s not critical if it ends up saving time to just tear those down and rebuild from scratch after the upgrade.
Configuration:
Boot Pool - Pair of salvaged 32GB m.2 sata drives in mirror
Pool 1 - Pair of SMR WD Red 6TB in mirror
Pool 2 - Pair of CMR WD Red 2TB in mirror
Everything’s running off motherboard connections. I’m planning on picking up an LSI HBA card to connect the new disks.
Pool 1 has all my apps and data on them. Pool 2 will eventually be dedicated Frigate storage but has nothing on it.
I’d like to replace Pool 1 with a 3x 14TB enterprise drives in RaidZ1 (it’s just a home plex server so Z2 is overkill and I can always re-rip if I need to since I have everything in “cold” backup on their original disks). Then repurpose the disks in Pool 1 back into a mirror just to hold basic Windows and Time Machine backups for our personal computers (in before “SMR is crap”. Cool beans, the backups are nice, not critical, so I’m fine using disks I’ve already paid money for to get “free” extra insurance. If they burn, it will just eat a couple hours reinstalling apps since we have the critical data living in cloud services as backup.)
What’s the easiest way to do this? Do I add the Z1, replicate off the mirrors, then do some tasks to tell the system to look at the Z1 instead? Then destroy the Mirror and re-add those disks as a new pool?
I was initially trying to see if it would work to just add a new vdev of the Z1 disks to Pool 1 then do some tasks to remove the mirror vdev from Pool 1 which would copy the data to the new vdev to keep it intact, but that doesn’t seem to be a clean thing that really exists.
Either way, I don’t know the specific order of actions to take to make either of those work and want to have the plan in place before I make the investment in the larger, safer (yes, refurb, but should be better than the SMR I have), disks.
Let me know if you need other info and how to grab it. I can futz in Shell, but just need to be told specifically what to run.