ZFS and Upgrading Drives

Yea, okay, so this is common. In fact, I've done it with VMs before. I still think it is neat that I was able to upgrade an array without any downtime.

Before:

root@bluelight:~# zpool list
NAME    SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
data    888G   511G   377G    57%  DEGRADED  -
rpool   298G  6.28G   292G     2%  ONLINE  -

After:

root@bluelight:~# zpool list
NAME    SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
data   2.73T   511G  2.23T    18%  ONLINE  -
rpool   298G  6.27G   292G     2%  ONLINE  -

I ran into one snag. When I issued zpool replace data c4d0s0, it gave me a message about there being no such device. The solution was zpool replace data c4d0. I suspect that "s0" at the end of the original disk was a slice, and probably an artifact of how I set the system up to begin with.

The larger impact is that I've got a lot of room at very little cost. There aren't as many advantages to the high-end gear that there used to be. Everything I used is commodity class, or free. It doesn't suit all situations, but there isn't a reason for small businesses to be paying a lot of money.