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Unplugging 1 of 2 drives in one pool to provide third drive port to upgrade capacity in another (double drive) smaller pool?


Christian

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Hi StableBit community; been using DrivePool for many years and love the reassurance it brings in data redundancy.

I've read the preferred way of migrating a pool with low free space to larger capacity drives (i.e., 2x 8TB -> 2x 12TB, for example) is to add the higher capacity drive to the pool and then remove one of the existing drives.  The situation I'm in is that I've got 4 SATA ports taken up by two 2-drive pools.

Could I temporarily disconnect one of the drives on one of the pools, and use the freed up SATA port to attach the higher capacity drive and migrate the data as described above?

I also have a two-port PCI SATA card that I may be able to find (and might be working) - would that be a more preferred path to add a SATA port?

Thanks in advance.

--- Chris

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I am sure it is possible to do it that way but it is, IMHO, messy and prone to issues. If you physically remove a drive, the Pool would become read only and I am not sure you could add another drive and then transfer, even if you did it outside of DrivePool.

I would certainly recommend going the PCI SATA card (or better yet, install a SAS HBA like an IBM M1015/Dell Perc H310 and enjoy an abundance of SATA ports) route.

Personally, I always ensure I have at least one SATA port available for upgrading/troubleshooting.

Having said this, for this upgrade, you could also use a USB3 drive adapter (although I do not recommend USB for long time use).

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On 6/23/2021 at 12:27 AM, Umfriend said:

I would certainly recommend going the PCI SATA card (or better yet, install a SAS HBA like an IBM M1015/Dell Perc H310 and enjoy an abundance of SATA ports) route.

Thanks, Umfriend - I'll slot myself into going the additional SATA port route.  Will look into the SAS solution you mention above as well; thanks!

Now - I hadn't read this anywhere, but at a basic level - I was always thinking the additional SATA card would be a "kludge", added ports which operate in parallel with the motherboard ports, but to a lesser performance level - and possibly introduce anomalies and issues?  Is this misguided?  You aren't the first fellow storage user that has recommended the additional SATA card in the past.  In fact, one comment I received a ways back said that the cards are better than what's offered on the MB.

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I don't really know. I speculate that MB-SATA may not be designed to be optimal. For instance, I do not know whether they can actually deliver 600MBps on all ports simultaneously. I guess it can be found through Yahoo but not sure. PCIe SATA cards, I have read that they can deliver lackluster performance, as in shared bandwidth dependent on the actual number of PCIe lanes it uses, but never that they'd interfere with MB-Sata. Again, I don't actually know and I am sure that there may be different qualities out there.

But really, I think your PCIe SATA card will be fine and give no issues. It should work for your transition. I'd leave the card in the PC once done so that, AIW you need it, you have two ports readily available. The SAS HBA route is one I would recommend if you expect storage to grow as measured by number of drives. For me, it works like a charm and as these are, AFAIK, all made with enterprise servers in mind, I am pretty comfortable about performance, compatability and endurance.

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