I currently have a NAS with 4 drive bays with 4x4TB drives in a RAID 10 but I’m running out of space. I have two 12TB drives I would like to use to increase the capacity of the pool but I’m not sure on the best method of upgrading the drive sizes without an extra slot to add the new drives to the pool before removing two of the older 4TB drives. I do have an external hard drive enclosure I can plug into the NAS via USB but not sure if adding the drive to the pool that way before removing one of the others is a good or bad idea as the drive name will change once moved into the actual NAS.
Any help would be appreciated
System info: ROCKSTOR 3.9.2-28 & Linux: 4.12.4-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64
Rockstor tracks drives via the serial number so it may well be just fine to have it connected via USB, name wise, for as long as the USB enclosure successfully passes the drive serial through OK then you should be OK.Some enclosures tend to override the disk info and put their own serial forward instead.
You could always attach the drive and see who it looks serial wise in the Disk overview page. And if the serial matches what the drive has written on it then you will likely be just find taking this approach.
Note however that you really need USB 3 for this type of thing. And to make sure you don’t have anything else on the USB bus, ideally, at the same time as if the bus is re-set which is prone to happening with USB then that would be bad for the array as in-flight writes to the drive will be lost. How about a temporary PCI sata add in card, is that an option?
Hope that helps, at least with the drive tracking bit.
The latest CentOS based Rockstor version now available in Stable channel is 3.9.2-57. But if you are due to do a fresh install some time then we now have a DIY release candidate phase Rockstor 4 installer which you can build with all updates included via the instructions in the following repo:
Just in case that is of interest. You would then get the newer and much improved btrfs stack from our new distro base of Leap 15.2. May be worth considering if you have a lot of drive changes to do as the newer stack is generally faster and more reliable.
Thanks for the quick reply. It looks like unfortunately the external drive hub I have does put it’s own serial number through instead of the drive’s serial number.
With that in mind what would be your next suggestion and would updating to the latest stable version, which I guess it isn’t updating automatically anymore, help with this process as it sounds like I may need to just pull a drive and replace it with a new one which is what I was hoping to avoid.
If you system is not offering you 3.9.2-57 then let me know via PM here on the forum, along with your Appliance ID and order email and I’ll look into why this is, and we can get you sorted one way or another. A subset of our longer term subscribers were affected by a migration bug when we moved to Appman (https://appman.rockstor.com/) that unfortunately need an admin to fix. We note this in the following forum post:
That would at least get you the important Rockstor package fixes but you might also want to consider re-installing to get the new Rockstor 4 and the newer btrfs which is known to be much faster. But as mentioned you will have to build you own installer currently which may not be to your taste / available time. Either way best make sure you aren’t affected by this known update bug.
Agreed it’s bad to put a pool into a degraded state, if that is what you were considering. But if there is room you can remove a disk via the Web-UI (given the above update) and once done add the new one.
But if not room then best to explore other temporary means of adding a sata port. Does the machine have any pci slots?