[solved]Zfs on Linux Bootable rpool setup(Proxmox 5.3)

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
Hi everyone,
Haven't been here for a while.
Have a strange question , maybe?
I have a Proxmox 5.4 server setup on ZFS.
The setup is as follows:
A system is on 2 SSD in mirrored pool
And around 16 HDDs of various sizes in mirrored pools based on disks size. Like I have a pool with 2T disks. A pool with 3T disks and pool with 4T disks.
All HDD based pools are for data storage.

Now last week I found that one of the SSDs failed. The rpool was running in degraded mode.

The initial setup was on 120gb SSD.
I ordered several 240gb SSDs to replace. I swap the failed with new , did all the partition copy from a good one, id randomise and DD the boot grab.
Added to the pool, it resilvere and reboot. All is good so far as I did not test the bootabiluty of new drive yet.

My question is this, since the new drive is larger, it make sense to swap the other disk to. But should I expand the pool size after.
I read some where that if you use zfs on SSD you can size the pool so it does not use all the space on the disk and leave that space for wearleveling this prolonging the disk life. Is it true?
Should I do it this way.
My disks are not Enterprise.
They are Soho.

This is the new disks
Inland Professional 240GB SSD 3D NAND SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" 7mm Internal Solid State Drive

Thanks.
 

arglebargle

H̸̖̅ȩ̸̐l̷̦͋l̴̰̈ỏ̶̱ ̸̢͋W̵͖̌ò̴͚r̴͇̀l̵̼͗d̷͕̈
Jul 15, 2018
657
244
43
I'd leave the drives as-is and not expand them. They'll never have the performance or endurance of enterprise drives but they should last longer with more pages free for wear leveling. This only works if you secure erase or execute a full drive TRIM so that the unpartitioned pages are marked free in the controller's map, so be sure you do that before you write data onto your new drives.
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
Thank you. That what I was thinking.

But I still have an issue. My new drive is not bootable.
I followed several tutorials and yeat it still will not boot.
My distro is a little behind the trend.
It actually 5.3.x and most posts I seen are 5.4 and up.
But grub is grub. Not sure what I am missing or doing wrong but now I am worry that my good drive will kink out and I will loose my system.
Maybe I can find a tutorial on how to preserve existing setup and upgrade install new version 6.
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
Marking this as solved. Turned out my MB was screwing with me.
It was a strange bios setting.
Also MB only allows 2 bootable HDD.