Changing Striped to RAID 5

[Vito Reiter]

So, we setup FreeNAS and overlooked the most important setting, the RAID configuration. We found this out when one of our drives failed, however, we were able to get it up and running again and the stripe is working. However, we have 6 SATA ports and one is available. How can we take advantage of the open slot to turn our stripe into parity to avoid data loss again? Is it possible to mirror the stripe onto a huge drive and then copy the mirrored drive into a parity array? Anything will help.

Thanks,
Vito Reiter

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Ugh.

You have a backup, right? Because you may need it. If you have a backup, the best bet is to destroy the pool (and the data), build the pool correctly then restore the data.

I don't think you can convert a strip into a protected pool.

You could add a single large drive, copy all the data to that drive then mirror that drive once you've destroyed the stripe and reclaimed those SATA ports and drive bays for a matching large drive.

Really though, this is crying out for a fresh start and a backup restoration.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[bigphil]

The only way to do that is to copy the data via any number of methods. If you have a drive with enough capacity to hold your current data, the best way to do this would be to create a separate pool on the system with the new drive and then something like this: zfs send tank/data@snap1 | zfs recv spool/ds01

You could then wipe out your original pool, rebuild it with the correct protection level and the perform the same procedure the opposite direction.

 

[Vito Reiter]

So say we have about 1.6TB used data, what would be the quickest way to back it up? Because we had built a second NAS box and tried to use the console and it was transferring at like 200kb/s which would've literally taken forever to complete.

 

[bigphil]

So say we have about 1.6TB used data, what would be the quickest way to back it up? Because we had built a second NAS box and tried to use the console and it was transferring at like 200kb/s which would've literally taken forever to complete.

If you use the zfs send/receive method on the same system, the transfer will be quite fast...probably about 2 hours one direction for that much data.

 

[Vito Reiter]

Thanks bigphil,

We will do our best here to go in that direction.

To all the newbies out there: this is where cowboy coding gets you lmfao...