Upsizing hard drives as pool nearly full

[Cedric Woodhall]

I run drivepool 1.2.4.7226 in a Windows Homeserver 2011 HP machine. The pool is nearing capacity and I want to replace all 4 drives (1TB) with 2TB drives. If I do it one at a time will the pool replicate across? Would it be better just to replace one 1TB drive with a much bigger one. say 4 TB which would give me ample space for the future? Should I upgrade to the latest Drivepool version?

[Umfriend]

Are you able to add additional drives to the machine first before beginning file operations? It is going to be a somewhat lengthy process anyway unless you have a full backup, then it is still going to take time but it'll be a bit faster and easier. Do you use Server Backup, I am asking because of the 2TB Server Backup volume limit that you can get around a bit cumbersome but it does work.

Yes, I would upgrade to the latest version but that is unrelated (except for dealing with the 2TB limit) to the issue at hand IMHO.

[Cedric Woodhall]

No I can't add another drive to the pool. Can I replace one of the existing drives with a larger one without losing data? Otherwise I'll have to get a 4gig drive to back it all up and replace the smaller drives and restore from backup.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Do you have duplication enabled on the pool?  If so, it may make the process simpler.

[Cedric Woodhall]

I have some folders duplicated but not all, I'll turn it on for the others and see if it can cope. Are you saying that if duplication is on I can just replace any of the existing hard drives and it will rebuild the pool without data loss?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

As long as the ENTIRE pool is duplicated, and you only pull one disk at a time, and wait for it to rebuild/reduplicate completely, yes. 

[Cedric Woodhall]

OK, I just turned on duplication for all folders and it ran out of space so thats a non starter. I now have a 4tb USB drive so I'll back up all the folders and get some bigger hard drives and restore when there's more space. Thanks.

[Umfriend]

But then you could:

1. Attach USB disk and add to the Pool;
2. Remove one HDD from Pool (through GUI);
3. Replace that HDD with a big one and add that new one.
4. Remove USB HDD from Pool (through GUI);
5. Depending on size and duplication, you can do the other three all at once or one by one.