Moving drives to HBA from onboard controller

juicebox12 · 21. September 2017

I've recently decided I need more drives than my SuperMicro X11SSM motherboard can take, so I've purchased a HBA (LSI 9201-8i) to expand my storage into the future.

Current setup:
OMV3 (latest) + omvextras
7 x 2TB HDDs (Storage Pool - EXT4 + mergerFS + SnapRaid dual parity)
1 x OS SSD
all drives on intel chipset SATA AHCI ports. storage at 50% capacity.

New setup:
OMV (same)
8 x 2TB HDDs (HBA) + 2 x 3TB HDDs (chipset) (Storage Pool - same config as above desired)
1 x OS SSD (chipset)
all 2TB drives on HBA; others on intel chipset.

For the new setup storage pool, I would like to keep all data in-tact. I am OK with clearing the SnapRaid parity, but not live data as it's crucial. The new storage pool would look like:
7 x 2TB + 1 x 3TB = live data, with 1 x 2TB and 1 x 3TB as SnapRaid dual parity.

Questions:
1. Is this plausible? Such a scenario is part of my reasoning behind choosing an OMV/SnapRaid solution, but I've not had to go this far before.
2. How do I maintain my existing data while moving the drives across to a new storage controller? I feel like there would be issues in addressing existing data on a new controller mapping...
3. What would be the recommended procedure to achieve this?
4. How should I deal with mergerFS/Snapraid? Should I completely disable SnapRaid (clear parity/content, disable plugin) prior to the hardware upgrade, then re-enable and reconfigure it when the new HW is in? I've had issues before with a SnapRaid drive replacement not 'mapping' correctly and preventing a rebuild; admittedly this was on a semi-unstable test system.

There are probably a few easy answers here, and I'm sure this kind of scenario would have been attempted before! Any input would be appreciated.

Sc0rp · 21. September 2017

Re,

since you use the drives as "bare" block-devices with no underlaying array-functions, it makes no sense to me to move any of the drives from onboard controller to the new HBA. Don't touch the running system, just add the HBA and connect the new drives to the HBA-ports. Format them, and then bind them to which pool you want, it is absolutely no problem to have mergerfs/SnapRAID-pools across different controller-chips ...

Adding new drives with SnapRAID/mergerfs is just simpel - add them in their configs, and you'll be done.

Maybe using both (new) 3TB as parities is better for you, if you plan to upgrade your data-drives in near future from 2TB to 3TB ... but you can play with the config without changing the ports, even in your head. Moving data between the independent disks is maybe not needed, but when, easyly done with MC (or even the console "mv" command).

Sc0rp

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