Complete Pool replacement

[Emmanuel_perez]

Hello again guys,

Its Manny bothering you again!
Hey so I’ve been doing some reading here on the rockstor forum and I’m wanting to replace my 4x2tb SMR drives for 4x4tb CMR drives.

Similar to what Hooverdan was trying to accomplish in this post here

Advice needed on All-Drives replacement

Hi Rockstor afficinados, I am planning on upgrading the drives of my current Rockstor appliance to higher capacity HDDs. Since I am intending on replacing all disks (since the chassis can only hold 4) I would like to ask the community for advice on how to best go about it. I am running RAID5/6 (yeah, I know, I know, but I took the risk a few years ago and -knock on wood- did not have any catastrophic failure). My current box looks like this: Rockstor Version - 3.9.2-48 Linux: 5.4.1-1.el7.elr…

But my approach would be a little different and I’d like to run it by yall to see what yall think.

So first my current mobo has 8 sata ports on it, I’m currently using 7 of the ports. The drives that I’m wanting to replace are more important than the “other three” (plex, random data drives).

My idea is:

1. Temporarily unplug the “other three”
2. Mount the new 4x4tb drives
3. Set up a new pool with new drives
4. Copy data from old pool to new pool
5. Remove old pool and replace with “other three” drives

Would there be any issues with this?

Like Always TIA!

Sys Info

Repository : Rockstor-Stable
Name : rockstor
Version : 4.0.4-0
Arch : x86_64
Vendor : YewTreeApps
Installed Size : 74.0 MiB
Installed : Yes
Status : up-to-date
Source package : rockstor-4.0.4-0.src

[Emmanuel_perez]

Alright, well I’ll be trying the above method, I’ll report back when done. Fingers crossed.

[Emmanuel_perez]

Above method worked fine. For anyone attempting something similar remember to delete “old pool” shares and removing the pool from rockstor before unplugging the drives.

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@Emmanuel_perez Thanks for the update and glad you got it sorted. Always a worry this kind of thing.
Re:

… to delete “old pool” shares and removing the pool from rockstor before unplugging the drives.

Yes, Rockstor has to wipe all subvols and the pool when you request a pool delete and if the drives are no longer attached then it errors out on trying to comply. But a warning to folks doing this. It does not just removed db (database) entries, it does what the warning before-hand states, it removes the data from the drives. But if the above procedure of copying over the data has completed successfully, and it’s been verified, then all should be OK. Plus of course we all have those essential 2 backups I’m sure (fingers crossed) .

Thanks again for the update.

@Flox I think we may still have some very old technical/developer wiki entries that suggest otherwise re pool removal that are overdue for an update. We should probably schedule an update to those soon.