BTRFS: Added Drives and converted to RAID1

Troubleshooting
1

I had my install setup with a 2 TB drive and I transferred my data over from my old server (OpenSUSE). I then added my old drives, erased them and added them to the pool and converted it RAID1. The balance started fine, but everything is CRAWLING.

The WebUI menu loads, but the menu selected just shows a loading animation for a long time. Sometime it gives me the following error message, but it also does show some of the panels.

Unknown internal error doing a GET to /api/network/connections?page=1&format=json&page_size=15&count=

There’s only 750GB of data on the drive and it’s been running for 12 hours and the balance is only 13% done. A btrfs fi show from a terminal will show the boot partition and then hang for a couple seconds before giving status on the storage pool.

Running iostat shows some disk activity, but a lot of time spent waiting on IO.

Is this normal? Seems like it should be able to duplicate 750GB to the new disks in a couple hours…

2

Tinny bit of advice. Sometimes btrfs can get stuck in veird limbo when it’s trying to heel it self by going through ref log / rebalancing quietly / de-fragmenting … SO live it for some time …

3

Checking btrfs fi df it looks like it’s rebalancing at about 1GB/hour. At this rate it’s going to take 10 days or so… seems nuts.

[root@rockstor ~]# btrfs fi df /mnt2/Storage/
Data, RAID1: total=109.00GiB, used=108.58GiB
Data, single: total=613.00GiB, used=611.58GiB
System, single: total=32.00MiB, used=112.00KiB
Metadata, single: total=2.00GiB, used=1.06GiB
GlobalReserve, single: total=368.00MiB, used=0.00B
4

Ain’t that a b***** :slight_smile: when I was applying a compression to one pool I’ve went for defrag and since it was not doing anything I decided to run balance, which I canceled due to need to reboot … after that balance did not wanted to start … BUT there was something going on in the background … veeeerrryyyyy slowly … After 2 days it finished and it works ok ever since.