Removing Mirror And Storing Physically

[Leviwarkentin]

------Background-------
I have a - what seems to be - fairly unique question and solution that I would like some feedback on. I use my NAS for backing up videos (I have a production company). I have a small number of bays and quite small hard drives. Before my NAS I would use a cloning tool to clone two hard drives. Store one HDD physically and then keep the other connected to my computer so I can access the footage.

------Main Question-----
Now that I acquired a NAS my thinking is to continue with the same strategy to conserve bay space and continue using my small drives (2 tb). Would there be a problem in the future if I fill two drives using mirroring, then remove one of the drives and store it physically and continue using the other drive in the NAS to access my files. Is this safe? Will there be potential problems reconnecting the drive down the road?

I'm aware that having a dead drive sitting around is not safe because you can not detect the health of it, I do plan on routinely plugging it in to view the status and check for potential failure.

-----Side Note-------
I have 8 bays in my PowerEdge T320, I am currently using 8 2tb drives, 4 of the 8 are drives I was using before I got my NAS and so I have two of those 4 drives connected to my NAS as Raid 0 and their cloned pair stored physically. I know I need bigger drives, I just bought a pair of 10tb drives, but I would like to make use of the ones I have.

Thanks

 

[Etorix]

Would there be a problem in the future if I fill two drives using mirroring, then remove one of the drives and store it physically and continue using the other drive in the NAS to access my files. Is this safe?

Yes, but it's better not to "fill" a pool more than 75-80%. You can get into serious trouble if you ever reach 99-100%.

You can add and remove members in a mirror vdev at any time, using ZFS as your cloning tool.
There even is a command to split a mirror pool as a whole. Type man zpool-split in a terminal for details.

Will there be potential problems reconnecting the drive down the road?

Once the stored drive gets out of sync with the active pool, putting it back would trigger a resilver. I suppose you rather want to use the disconnected drive on its own to restore files from backup.

I have 8 bays in my PowerEdge T320, I am currently using 8 2tb drives, 4 of the 8 are drives I was using before I got my NAS and so I have two of those 4 drives connected to my NAS as Raid 0 and their cloned pair stored physically. I know I need bigger drives, I just bought a pair of 10tb drives, but I would like to make use of the ones I have.

ZFS does not require all drives in an array to be of the same size. You can have a pool with 2*10 + 2*2 + 2*2 + 2*2 for 16 TB of raw space, but performance will suffer because ZFS writes data in accordance with free space, so when filling the newly created pool almost 2/3 of the data would go the 10 TB drives while the rest would be split among the three 2 TB pairs.
And zpool split tank tank_copy would let you take every second drive to store as a cold backup of the whole array.