This post documents the drive locations for zpools within r730-01. It will be replaced from time to time with a new post. To the left of a device is an indication of the drive physical location. Unused devices Unused drives/slots: Slots 12 & 13 each contain a 4TB SSD. Slots 14 and 15 are empty. Those drive cages are on the workbench and each hold a 2TB SSD. There are also NVMe devices […]
In this post, I’m moving my zroot zpool from larger devices to smaller devices. Why? Well, the smaller devices happen to attach directly to the main board of my server, albeit with some slight modification to a fan cowl. There have been several recent posts regarding this topic. I tried a different zpool approach, where I added new devices to the zpool and removed the old devices. That worked. It wasn’t ideal for
prod – moving to a SATADOM based zpool (zroot) using zfs snapshot and send | recv Read More »
These are some notes I want to keep handy. They will help me switch back and forth between UEFI and BIOS booting. In this post: FreeBSD 14.1 Dell R730 To move from BIOS boot to UEFI boot System BIOS | Boot Settings: Boot Mode = UEFI System BIOS | System Settings | Device Settings | PERC: Select Boot Device = None Then you have to wait for it to boot, query devices, the
Switching between BIOS and UEFI (and vice versa) on a Dell R730 Read More »
This post is part of a series of storage-related posts. The goal: move the zroot of r730-01 to smaller drives. NOTE: This approach failed. Investigations continue, however this post is not something you should try. This other successful post might be useful, although I still don’t know why the attempt in this post fails. Earlier today, as the first step in my proof-of-concept, I moved the zroot of r730-04 from 2x SATADOM device
Moving a zpool to smaller drives #ZFS #FreeBSD – fails Read More »
Today, using FreeBSD 14.3, I’m going to test booting from a drive which is a mirror of the boot drives. This is what I’m booting from: root@r730-04:~ # zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT zroot 923G 1.72G 921G – – 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE – root@r730-04:~ # zpool status zroot pool: zroot state: ONLINE scan: resilvered 3.74M in 00:00:01 with 0 errors on Thu Nov 20
Creating a backup boot drive from a zroot mirror Read More »
It is a rainy Wednesday morning and I’m drinking a cappuccino in my favorite cafe. A five minute walk from here, in the basement of an 1890 Victorian twin house, sits r730-04. Last weekend, I configured it to boot from two SATADOM drives. Today, I’ll move that zpool to a pair of larger drives. I’ve done that move before and it is a common procedure for increasing zpool capacity. Later today, I’ll move
Moving a zpool to larger drives #ZFS #FreeBSD Read More »
A recent goal is to increase the available storage space in my main development server in the basement. To that end, two recent posts: r730-01: the drive replacement plan r730-01: storage plan The SATADOM devices I purchased are meant to be plugged directly into the M/B of the server. This approach will free up two PCIe slots which were hosting 2x 2.5″ SSDs in a hot-swap adaptor (the post mentions a Dell R720;
Using SATADOM drives in a Dell R730 Read More »
Following on from What will I do with those 2 x 1TB drives?, I received a fantastic suggestion from Mike Gerdts. Do more bifurcation. Buy an ASUS HYPER M.2 X16 GEN 4 CARD and put 4x NVMe devices on each one. I can be adding 8 more storage devices to the chassis. I see posts from people using this card in a Dell R730xd – The host in question is a Dell R730.
r730-01: storage plan Read More »
I notice I also worked with some SSDs at the end of this post – I have since amended the title of this post. In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 Today I removed two existing NVMe cards, each with a 1TB stick on it. Those sticks were added to these cards: If you want the same hardware, you can use these links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. These are all
Adding in new NVMe cards and sticks – and replacing two SSDs Read More »
This post is mostly for my benefit, so I can keep track of my plan for adjusting space. It doesn’t contain much of educational value. For what I actually did, see zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs One recent day, I powered off r730-01 and took inventory of the 16 drive bays. A short overview: [17:36 r730-01 dvl ~] % zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH
r730-01: the drive replacement plan Read More »