I recently purchased a used PowerEdge R420 rack server with a Compellent SC220 Storage Shelf. I currently have four 3.5" HDDs in the R420 and ten 2.5" HDDs in the SC220. The R420 server previously had TrueNAS installed, so all of the hard drives on both the R420 and the SC220 are formatted with ZFS. I’m now running Ubuntu on the R420 using ZFS.

The server I’m replacing is an old gaming PC running Manjaro and BTRFS. It has one SSD with the operating system and two 4 TB HDDs set up as RAID0. I’ve been using the RAID to store media downloaded via the Servarr stack.

So, my goal is to create a large pool out of all of the HDDs (except the one running the OS) on the R420 and SC220, and then migrate the media data on the two 4 TB RAID0 drives on my old gaming PC over to R420/SC220 pool. I would then move my Servarr stack over to the R420 as well. Ideally, I’d also like to physically move the two 4 TB HDDs over to the R420. Presumably, I would have to reformat the drives to use ZFS rather the BTRFS and then integrate them somehow into the ZFS pool?

Anyway, I’m not sure of the best procedure to accomplish all of this, so I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has any experience or insight. Thanks in advance.

  • sailingbythelee@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    11·
    8 months ago

    That’s good to know. I’ve been experimenting with zpool with some success this afternoon. The one weird thing is that the disks in the SC220 have two device letters each, while the ones in the R420 have a single device letter in /dev/. Like so:

    R240 Disk 1: sda Disk 2: sdb Disk 3: sdc Disk 4: sdd

    SC220 Disk 5: sde and sdo Disk 6: sdf and sdp … Disk 14: sdn and sdx

    Any idea why a single disk is assigned two device letters, and whether it matters once I create the pool?

    • user134450@feddit.deEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      could you run something like sudo lsblk -o+MODEL and note down the model for the drives? i kind of suspect that the HBA you are using is still doing some abstraction and is not in IT mode. the duplication could come from connecting two SAS cables to the same backplane, thus creating a sort of double image of the enclosure. this is usually handled and hidden by the HBA though if it is configured correctly.

      pls also check that you are in fact using the correct ports on the enclosure. if you are not building a SAN only the “A” ports are supposed to be used and the “B” ports should be unused/free.