How to move HDDs to other bays

[macx979]

Hi,

I use Freenas with a 16 Bay rack mount case. I'd like to move 4 HDDs to other empty bays in the same machine. I am wondering I there are any precautions I have to consider.
Do I have to take these 4 drives offline first via the Pool menu?
Or is it as simple as shutting down the Freenas Server move the HDDs and boot it up again?
Is it even possible to do this as hot swap while Freenas is running? This case supports Hot Swap.

thanks for helping me out.

 

[MikeyG]

Safest is to shut down and then move the drives. FreeNAS doesn't care where they are, as long as it can see them all. This is the no brainer solution if you don't mind down time and don't want to think about anything else.

Assuming you have enough redundancy in place (you need to understand the layout of your vdevs), you can also offline a drive from a pool, move it, then online it without shutting anything down (and while keeping the pool in use). It may resilver a little bit of data once back online but then should be good to go very quickly. I've done this a few times without problems.

 

[Heracles]

Hey Macx,

Even if you are 100% sure that your setup is hotswap, don't do it this way or at least, not in one shot. Should you do it this way, each drive will ended up degraded for a moment and will need to be re-silvered. Should you do it all the 4 drives at once, it will be the equivalent of loosing 4 drives, something your pool will probably not tolerate.

If everything is hotswap and your pool is RaidZ2 or RaidZ3, it is pretty safe to do it one drive at a time and resilver after every drive.

But the safest by far would be to power done and do it offline.

FreeNAS does not mind the hardware position of a drive. It will recognize the drive from its content.

 

[macx979]

Hey,

thanks for your answers.

Best
Macx