Building a NAS: part 4 - ZFS mirror
At the end of the previous post I had a ZFS pool backed by a single vdev. This is all well and good until a disk fails. To improve fault tolerance ZFS allows you to add a mirror disk. This obviously isn't a backup; but should make life easier if a disk fails unexpectedly.
Adding a mirror
Assuming you are starting from a pool backed by a single vdev, adding an additional vdev to mirror the content is relatively straightforward.
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First make sure the pool is online:
$ zpool status pool: mypool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM mypool ONLINE 0 0 0 sdc ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors
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Then identify the device to join to the pool using
lsblk
:$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 37.3G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 731M 0 part /boot ├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part └─sda5 8:5 0 36.6G 0 part └─sdb5_crypt 253:0 0 36.6G 0 crypt ├─vghost-root 253:1 0 35.6G 0 lvm / └─vghost-swap_1 253:2 0 976M 0 lvm [SWAP] sdb 8:16 1 492M 0 disk └─sdb1 8:17 1 491M 0 part sdc 8:32 0 3.7T 0 disk ├─sdc1 8:33 0 3.7T 0 part └─sdc9 8:41 0 8M 0 part sdd 8:48 0 3.7T 0 disk ├─sdd1 8:49 0 3.7T 0 part └─sdd9 8:57 0 8M 0 part
Note: in this case
/dev/sdd
is the device we want to use. -
Clear any existing partitions from the disk (make sure you have the correct disk!):
$ parted /dev/sdd mklabel gpt Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdd will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue? Yes/No? yes Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.
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Finally attach the blank disk to the pool, ZFS will automatically start resilvering the new disk to setup a mirror:
$ zpool attach mypool /dev/sdc /dev/sdd $ zpool status pool: mypool state: ONLINE status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will continue to function, possibly in a degraded state. action: Wait for the resilver to complete. scan: resilver in progress since Mon Apr 6 22:40:24 2020 38.6G scanned at 963M/s, 432K issued at 10.5K/s, 2.76T total 0B resilvered, 0.00% done, no estimated completion time config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM mypool ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 sdc ONLINE 0 0 0 sdd ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors
Eventually ZFS will finish resilvering and the mirror setup will be complete.