When rebuilding my home office this summer, my fiancée and I used an IKEA kitchen unit for extra storage and to keep my 3D printer out of the dust. I also had a free 40cm high draw for a home production server!
Here is the current build list:
Asus P9X79 WS motherboard
Intel Xeon E5-2695 v2 (12 cores/24 threads)
48 GB DDR3 non-ECC RAM
Dell PERC H200 flashed in IT mode
nVidia NVS 295 for host
nVidia Quadro RTX4000 for VM (transcoding with jellyfish)
Crucial BX500 240 GB SSD for truenas OS (host)
3 HDD raidZ1 (4TB drives)
7 HDD raidZ2 (originally all 2TB but one failed and only had a 4TB cold spare).
couple of m.2 SSD. one used for L2arc on the raidZ1, the other for VM OS.
The VM is a basic Debian server with a dedicated NIC, GPU, and a pair of Blu-ray drives for jellyfin fun. It also runs portainer, traefik reverse proxy, a couple of Wordpress instances, Nextcloud…
Both of the Zpools are shared through SMB for files, photos. Still need to do some auto backups of our gaming rigs and using ZFS snapshots and exposing them through windows restore (need to look and Wendell’s guide on that).
But first, I need to get rid of the raid Z2 pool. It’s full of old second hand enterprise HDDs I bought for 10 bucks but they can’t stay in production.
The ideal solution would be to only use my 4TB drives (I have 5 of them on hand at the moment). but I don’t want to loose any of the data.
Transition would look like this:
Step 1: ZFS snapshot of raidZ1 datasets to raidZ2.
Step 2: remove raidZ1 and the 4TB drive in the raidZ2 (should still have all the data available.
Step 3: Wipe the 5x4 TB drives and create a new raidZ1 pool.
Step 4: ZFS snapshot all of the datasets to the new array.
Step 5: remove and burn all of the old drives. Done!
Let me know if you find anything wrong with the process!
Sounds like a good plan and setup, but make sure the computers have enough airflow
Also, with 4TB and soon 8TB SSDs becoming affordable (though not yet dirt cheap!) you might want to start thinking of migrating to those for an all SSD storage solution, and retire the HDDs. But that is just a suggestion from my part.
Since you already have a Z2 pool set up… Why not just replace the HDDs one by one and wait for the resilvering to be complete, then replace the next one, and so on? Then just power off your old machine and install the drives fresh.
The other option, set up the Z1 pool and simply do a data transfer, should only take ~1 hour per TB with a dedicated 2.5 Gbps cable. Then run a checksum verifier on the transfer, once done.
I was looking on eBay yesterday and found some reasonable 8TB Kioxia CD6 drives at around 400€ a pop… but I would need at least 3 and the drives will be limited to PCIe 3 but might be an option for a v3.0. I will wait for the wedding to be paid for
The two pools are on the same machine. Here tank 1 and tank 2.
I would like to move everything to a new "tank " using drives from tank1 and add 2 more drives to it…
Remember that any operation involving data storage involves some risk, so proceed with caution, and having a backup is essential. And remember, to buy proxies, you need to know where to do it safely and cost-effectively) If possible, seek advice from the ZFS community or forums, where experienced users can provide additional advice tailored to your system.
Looking around I’ve seen a new feature coming to ZFS soon, RaidZ Expansion where I could expand my pool on drive at a time! Hopefully, it will come to truenas soon.
