FreeNAS 11 Add a drive to create a mirrored ZFS volume - Wed, Aug 9, 2017

Back in 2013 I cobbled together a little guide within a post on the FreeNAS users forum on how to add drive to an existing ZFS volume and convert it in to a mirrored volume. I can’t at all remember even writing this little thing, but recent discussion in the old forum over it brought in to doubt whether or not the method would still work. So I spooled-up a VM with the latest FreeNAS (FreeNAS 11) and tried it out. Yup. Still works, see:

ZFS: Adding a drive to create a mirror

Here’s a somewhat updated version of the guide:

• Obviously there’s no warranty. Have backups, etc. I’m just some dude on the Internet, so, you know, you’re on your own
• ‘/dev/adaX’ below is the drive being added, obviously if you get this wrong, you will be very sad.
• ‘MyPoolName’ is the name of your storage pool you’re adding the drive to

• gpart create -s gpt /dev/adaX

• gpart add -b 128 -t freebsd-swap -s 2G /dev/adaX

• gpart add -t freebsd-zfs /dev/adaX

• Run zpool status and note the gptid of the existing disk

• Run gpart list and find the gptid of the newly created partition. It is the rawuuid field. In this example it would be rawuuid of adaXp2

• zpool attach MyPoolName /dev/gptid/[gptid_of_the_existing_disk] /dev/gptid/[gptid_of_the_new_partition]

With that done, you can run a zpool status and you’ll see there’s now the additional rawuuid involved, as a mirror member.

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