Replace some disks with SSD easy way

[AntaresFR]

Hi,

I plan to replace two of my pool disks with SSD. HDD are in good condition. My pool balance is optimized and everything runs well;

I thought of stopping the pool and make a copy of the hidden drivepool folder on the two hdd to the ssd to make the change fastly.

Is it possible ?

Regards

[Shane]

TLDR is stick to the GUI unless you have an urgent reason to do it manually.

DrivePool 2.x expects every poolpart to have a unique UID (the dashed alphanumeric string after the dot in the hidden PoolPart.* folder name) so you'd have to:

• either pull the old drive and clone the entire volume to the new drive on a different machine before putting the new drive into the drivepool machine and wiping the old drive's poolpart before putting the old drive back in
• or turn off any automatic and immediate/forced balancing, add the new drive to the pool first, stop the service, use robocopy (making sure to include directory timestamps) as an administrator to copy the content - excluding .covefs and any protected system folders - within the old poolpart to the new poolpart, and then start the service, remove the old drive, turn on balancing (if desired) and do a re-measure (and maybe a duplication check if you're using that).

Basically there's good reasons to use the DrivePool GUI to add new drives and then remove old drives. It's slower but can be as simple as just using the GUI to add the two new drives and then remove the two old drives (you can queue multiple drives) and then let DP take care of everything inbetween - which has much less chance of something going wrong and you can keep using the pool in the meantime; this can be particularly handy if the pool is being shared on a network with other people.

(Incidentally, I have tested copying a poolpart folder itself on a machine that had two pools, and the result after I ejected the old drive and rebooted was the new drive showing up... as part of the wrong pool - so I really don't recommend trying that).

[AntaresFR]

Yes i finally decided to follow the gui way but i faced an issue.
I added one SSD and ask Drivepool to put files i wanted only one one HDD and one SSD. It was nearly perfect, it correctly put thing on those drives like a RAID1, but it lets me the remaining HDD with an incomplete state.  On the Drivepool graph the bar was grey for this drive, and the task to remove. It has copied everything on the new ssd but it doesn't have remove few hundred of gigas on it. So i asked drivepool to remove the remaining drive from the pool, and here it was my mistake. I did it remotely and it was a mistake. The file system seams to be stuck. Drivepool put in read only mode all the pool. I wasn't able to stop the "suppress drive task" from him nor able to do anything on the drives. I had to wait to come back home from work to reboot the server. 

The pool was always in degraded mode but i was able to easily remove the stuck in suppression mode drive from it, because i pulled it away before reboot

Then it remeasured the pool, check duplication and ask me to re apply the balance. I did it and the pool went green. So it's ok. I'm no in the process of adding the second SSD. Scanner is checking it. Then i will add it to the pool, ask Drivepool to put files on the hdd and the two ssd, then i'll ask him to remove the hdd. And it should be ok, i hope