Solved ZFS raidz disk replacement with new drive

A

arnov

Hello,

I have a raidz zpool consisting of 4 500 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 drives. I have always been under the impression that I could replace a defective drive with another one of equal or greater size, and that I could even enlarge my pool by replacing them with 4 larger drives one by one. (replace one, resilver, replace another, resilver etc).

Because the zpool is starting to get full, I have been reading into this further, and it seems that I might have a problem because my old drives have 512 byte sectors, and newer drives have 4K sectors. When I read the specifications of newer drives the sector size is specified as 512e, which seems to be some kind of emulation mode.
Can I use these 512e drives to replace my existing drives?

Thank you
 
The zpool(8) section in the Handbook describes how to do the replacing. Replacing is fairly straight forward. If you replace all drives you'll need to set the "autoexpand" property so that the pool fills in the gap after you replace all the drives. Regarding the 512e drives, they should work just fine but be warned that you'll get a message every time you run a zpool command regarding a non standard sector size that is impacting performance.

FreeBSD Handbook Zpool Section: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/zfs-zpool.html
 
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