Built system with 1 drive, now want to add second drive and set to raid 1

[thagrandcow]

Just like the title says, I originally built a system with a single 500GB drive. I'm worried about disk failure so I picked up a second 500GB drive. The drive is detected and I can create a volume from it, but I have no idea what to do so that Raid 1 is enabled.

 

[gpsguy]

In a nutshell, you can't add the drive and mirror them after the fact. It's a limitation of the OS. Assuming you have a backup, I'd destroy the existing pool and start over.

Even if you were doing a RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 pool, one still can't add drives to the pool after the fact.

 

[Brand]

In a nutshell, you can't add the drive and mirror them after the fact. It's a limitation of the OS. Assuming you have a backup, I'd destroy the existing pool and start over.

Even if you were doing a RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 pool, one still can't add drives to the pool after the fact.

Through the CLI interface it is possible to add a drive and set them up as mirrored drives without losing data.

 

[gpsguy]

I stand corrected.

Through the CLI interface it is possible to add a drive and set them up as mirrored drives without losing data.

 

[thagrandcow]

Through the CLI interface it is possible to add a drive and set them up as mirrored drives without losing data.

Can you tell me which commands I need to be using? Or point me to the page about it?

 

[thagrandcow]

Can you tell me which commands I need to be using? Or point me to the page about it?

Ok, after doing some research I think I've got it. I attached the new drive to the current zpool with 'zpool attach Campus ada0p2 ada1p2'
I'm now looking at

There's only about 50 megs of data on it already, so am I reading it right that attaching the second drive caused it to mirror automatically and it copied over the 51.4MB?

In the GUI, I'm showing

I *think* I've got it working correct now, am I right? Everything will be mirrored automatically from now on?

EDIT: When I go in to add a SMART test, I only see the first disk available. Shouldn't the second disk be in there also?

 

[StephenFry]

There's only about 50 megs of data on it already, so am I reading it right that attaching the second drive caused it to mirror automatically and it copied over the 51.4MB?

It certainly seems that way!

I *think* I've got it working correct now, am I right? Everything will be mirrored automatically from now on?

By what your zpool status says (both in GUI and CLI no less), I'd be confident of that, yes.

Since there's so little data on it anyway - if you want to be 100% sure, do what I did and remove first disk0 and see if all data is available. Then plug it back and remove disk1 and check again.
Takes 10 minutes of work and you'll be feeling super confident of your mirror.

EDIT: When I go in to add a SMART test, I only see the first disk available. Shouldn't the second disk be in there also?

Yes, it should be.
However, I've had so many problems with the GUI that were GUI-specific, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Yes, it's an annoyance, but shouldn't be an indication of something going wrong.
Hopefully someone will have a workaround.