How can I move from ZFS to hardware RAID?

G

ghell

I want to ditch my ZFS and splash out on a decent RAID card, for 12 drive RAID 50.

I currently have 8x 1TB in ZFS (2x raidz of 4 drives each)



Can anyone suggest a way of doing this without spending a ridiculous amount on temporary drives that will never be used again?

I would like to reuse those 8 drives if I can and buy another 4 drives but I need to get my data off and have nowhere to put it.


What I'm thinking so far is this:
- I buy 4x 2TB drives and copy all my data to them, with checksums.
- I destroy the ZFS
- I build a raid with 8x1tb drives and 4x random small drives that I can find (I have a few 250 and 500GB drives lying around), just to build the raid with the correct the geometry (12 drives, raid 50).
- I start copying the data off the 2TB drives into the raid array. When a disk has been copied, I remove the smallest drive from the array and replace it with the empty 2TB disk, expanding the array.
- I keep doing that until the array is 8x 1TB + 4x 2TB, with all my data on it.


Is there a better way of doing this? It seems very messy but it's all I could think of.

Maybe I could remove one or two drives from the ZFS and use them at some point, as the ZFS should still operate with a few drives missing?
 
Irrelevant, but because I can't get FreeBSD 8 to work on the machine and ZFS isn't good enough on FreeBSD 7 for my needs.
 
How many data is stored on your ZFS without snapshots?

Did your new raid controller support online expanding the array in association with the OS/FS you want to use?

--

What was the problem with machine & FreeBSD8? Would be interesting.
 
It's just over 4TB of actual data, so it would need maybe 2x 2TB drives and I could probably find some space on other machines around the place.

I haven't bought a new RAID controller yet but online capacity expansion seems to be a fairly standard feature from looking around. I would assume file system expansion is just handled by the partition editor once the capacity has increased, but I have not tried before. I've seen cards list online expansion but not seen any that say which filesystems they work with.



The problem with FreeBSD 8 is here. It looks like I would need a new motherboard, new CPU and probably new RAID card (I don't think my current card is supported anyway, RocketRAID 2680 - in 7 it needs the rr2680 driver, htprr etc don't work). At that point I may as well just spend the money on a decent hardware RAID controller instead.
 
Or, save money, a get a decent, supported SATA controller, and continue on with ZFS. :)

LSI makes some nice 8-port controllers. And SILI3124-based boards are well supported in FreeBSD 8.
 
You need to backup to either disk or DVD, install the new controller, create the new array, partition it, create the filesystems, and then restore the data.

Or, just continue to use ZFS but with a different controller.

Which sounds like more work? ;)
 
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