On creating my RAID-Z pool on ZoL I assumed, I could easily just drop-in additional disks later on. Meanwhile I learned that this is yet not possible.
But... I had a similar problem on creating my initial pool. Only 4 free SATA ports, but an old RAID5 with three 2TB disks and a new RAIDZ1 with three 4TB disk. The solution was to a) degrade the RAID5 and b) build the initial RAIDZ with a sparse file as "virtual third drive", which was taken immediately taken offline after pool creation:
- Create sparse file:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/zfs1 bs=1 count=1 seek=4100G
- Create the raidz pool:
zpool create zfspool raidz /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2 /zfs1
- Immediately take off the sparse file:
zpool offline zfspool /zfs1
- Migrate data to
zfspool
. Uninstall old RAID5 disks, add third, new 4TB disk - Replace & resilver the sparse file in the pool with the actual, third drive:
zpool replace zfspool /zfs1 /dev/disk3
This worked out really great! Now I learned that though ZFS does not directly support adding a single disk to RAIDz, but that it supports one-by-one replacing disks with larger ones.
So here is my plan. Does anybody see a flaw in it?
- Buy a fourth 4TB disk and take one disk offline from the existing pool
- Create 2x2TB paritions on these two, free disks.
- Build a RAIDz out of these four "disks": 3x2TB = 6TB net storage.
- For performance reason: Take one of the 2nd partition immediately offline
- Migrate max. 6TB data to the new pool & destroy the old pool
- Replace offline "2TB disk" with a real 4TB one of the old pool. Wait to resilver.
- On the drive with 2 active partitions: Take the 2nd 2TB partitions offline and replace it with the second 4TB disk from the old pool. Wait for resilvering.
- One-by-one: Take a remaining 2TB partitions offline, grow the partition with 4TB and re-add the disk the pool. Wait for resilvering.
- Rinse & repeat for the very last 2TB disk/partition
Will this work? I know that I'm higher vulnerable to data loss due to the missing redundancy during the process, but I will have backup of the most important data. Just not enough for the whole 6TB payload.
And will ZFS automatically grow the pool to (3+1)x4TB = 12TB after the last step?