Zpools
So my FreeNAS/TrueNAS box has gone through a couple iterations now due to trying to resolve issues that came up with the original build from 2015 or so. Iteration 1.5 “Vault” involved an old Dell PowerEdge 2950 III that I hadn’t taken to be recycled yet, which I outfitted with six 2 TB drives (max capacity for the PERC controller according to documentation) and 40 GB of DDR2. These drives were set up in a 3 vdev mirror primarily to house the VM data so that they wouldn’t have to be rebooted, while the rest resided on the original box. I eventually procured a 15 bay chassis and a PCI-Express HBA which was installed in the 2950. Unfortunately when I joined Vault to Active Directory ahead of bringing over the original pool it didnt use the same user/group id mappings which resulted in permissions issues. I was looking at expanding the pool, but WDs documentation talks about a max of 8 drives in the enclosure for the 3TB CMR WD Reds, and the higher end model doesn’t come in 3TB. I picked up 5 6TB Seagate IronWolf drives which are configured in RAID-Z2 with the plan to eventually buy 10 more drives to add to the pool. I’ve since migrated everything to the 2.0 box which was a refurbished R720xd w/ 128GB of RAM which will eventually be added to. All of the data has largely been migrated off of the WD Reds with the exception of the system dataset. Which is where I’m now running into an issue as I get an error about Active Directory if I try to move the system dataset back to the boot pool (which is now a hard disk instead of thumb drives) or to the IronWolf pool. To carry out my original plan I need to be able to remove the Red drives from the system as they are occupying about half the enclosure (the system bays are all 2.5″ with the idea being those are used for SSDs eventually). I’m not sure if theres a way to get everything off the Reds or if I should just alter the plan and just replace the Reds a disk at a time and add the IronWolf drives as an additional vdevs (once I pick up a couple to add to that as the WD Red pool is a 7 disk). Since I’m also using this system as the storage for my VMs running in XCP-ng I may end up having to build an additional pool in a mirror for the VMs (the 2TB drives are currently unused so I could reconstitute it with those once I add an additional enclosure). Things to ponder..