Moving physical HDD from one server to another

OpenZFS
1

Like many topics here, I’ve read quite a number of topics here and haven’t quite been able to answer my own question.

I have an old server with 3x three-wide mirror vdevs (which I’ve asked questions about in several other topics), which technically only had “room” for 8 HDD (but I made the 9th fit). I have recently purchased a new server with 12 hot-swap bays and intend to eventually put new drives into it, but am trying to make sure I better understand ZFS before doing that.

I want to make sure I understand this correctly.

If I run zpool export on old server, can I then remove the disks from old server, put them into new server and then run zpool import? I ask because that just seems far too easy to do.

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Yep, that’s it. root@oldbox:~# zpool export poolname and root@newbox:~# zpool import poolname is the whole procedure. Easy as that.

If you’ve got ZFS on root on the old box, you can just shut the box down entirely and pull the drives; you might have to zpool import -f on the other side, but it’ll be fine.

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3

Thanks for the confirmation and quick response.

Much appreciated.

:+1:

1 Like