On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 07:13:25PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Jul 2013, Craig Sanders <[email protected]> wrote:
> > my main zpools (4x1TB in RAIDZ1) are about 70% full.  I probably
> > should start thinking about replacing the drives with 4x2TB
> > soon...or deleting some crap.
>
> 2*4TB would give you twice the storage you've currently got with less
> noise and power use. 

and faster than raidz or raid5 too, but it would only give me a total of
4TB in a mirrored/raid-1 pair. seagate ST4000DM000 drives seem to be the
cheapest the moment at $195...so a total of $390.

noise isn't an issue (the system fans are louder than the drives, and
they're low noise fans), and power isn't much of a concern (the drives
use 4.5W each idle, 6W in use)

i've been reading up on drive reviews recently - advance planning for
the upgrade - and while the ST4000DM000 has got good reviews, the WD
RED drives seem better. 4TB RED drives aren't available yet, and 3TB
WD30EFRX drives cost $158 each. 

> 3*4TB in a RAID-Z1 will give you 3* the storage you've currently got.

my current plan is to replace my 4x1TB raidz backup pool with one or
two mirrored pairs of either 3TB or 4TB drives. i'll wait a while and
hope the 4TB WD REDs are reasonably priced. if they're cheap enough
i'll buy four. or i'll get seagates. otherwise i'll get either a 2
x 4TB drives or 4 x 3TB. most likely the former as I can always add
another pair later (which is one of my reasons for switching from raidz
to mirrored pairs - cheaper upgrades. i've always preferred raid1 or
mirrors anyway).

i'm in no hurry, i can wait to see what happens with pricing. and i've
read rumours that WD are likely to be releasing 5TB drives around
the same time as their 4TB drives too, which should make things
"interesting".


my current 1TB drives can also be recycled into two more 2x1TB pairs
to put some or all of them back into the backup pool - giving e.g. a
total of 2x4TB + 2x1TB + 2x1TB or 6TB usable space.  Fortunately, I have
enough SAS/SATA ports and hot-swap drive bays to do that.  I'll probably
just use two of them with the idea of replacing them with 4TB or larger
drives in a year or three.

i don't really need more space in my main pool. growth in usage is slow
and I can easily delete a lot of stuff (i'd get back two hundred GB or
more if i moved my ripped CD and DVD collection to the zpool on my myth
box which is only about 60% full - and i could easily bring that back to
30 or 40% by deleting old recordings i've already watched)



> How do you replace a zpool?  I've got a system with 4 small disks in a
> zpool that I plan to replace with 2 large disks.  I'd like to create
> a new zpool with the 2 large disks, do an online migration of all the
> data, and then remove the 4 old disks.

there are two ways.

1. replace each drive individually with 'zpool replace olddrive
newdrive' commands. this takes quite a while (depending on the amount of
data that needs to be resilvered). when every drive in a vdev (a single
drive, a mirrored pair, a raidz) in the pool is replaced with a larger
one, the extra space is immediately available. for a 4-drive raidz it
would take a very long time to replace each one individually.

IMO this is only worthwhile for replacing a failed or failing drive.

2. create a new pool, 'zfs send' the old pool to the new one and destroy
the old pool. this is much faster, but you need enough sata/sas ports to
have both pools active at the same time. it also has the advantage of
rewriting the data according to the attributes of the new pool (e.g. if
you had gzip compression on the old pool and lz4[1] compression on the
new your data will be recompressed with lz4 - highly recommended BTW)

if you're converting from a 4-drive raidz to a 2-drive mirrored pair,
then this is the only way to do it.



[1] http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/LZ4+Compression



> Also are there any issues with device renaming?  For example if I have
> sdc, sdd, sde, sdf used for a RAID-Z1 and I migrate the data to a
> RAID-1 on sdg and sdh, when I reboot the RAID-1 will be sdc and sdd,
> will that cause problems?

http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatDevNamesShouldIUseWhenCreatingMyPool

using sda/sdb/etc has the usual problems of drives being renamed if
the kernel detects them in a different order (e.g. new kernel version,
different load order for driver modules, variations in drive spin up
time, etc) and is not recommended except for testing/experimental pools.

it's best to use the /dev/disk/by-id  device names. they're based on the
model and serial number of the drive so are guaranteed unique and will
never change.

e.g. my backup pool currently looks like this (i haven't bothered
running zpool upgrade on it yet to take advantage of lz4 and other
improvements)

  pool: backup
 state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using a legacy on-disk format.  The pool can
        still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'.  Once this is done, the
        pool will no longer be accessible on software that does not support
        feature flags.
  scan: scrub repaired 160K in 4h21m with 0 errors on Sat Jul 20 06:03:58 2013
config:

        NAME                           STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        backup                         ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz1-0                     ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST31000528AS_6VP3FWAG  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST31000528AS_9VP4RPXK  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST31000528AS_9VP509T5  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ata-ST31000528AS_9VP4P4LN  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

craig

-- 
craig sanders <[email protected]>

BOFH excuse #193:

Did you pay the new Support Fee?
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