Ramblings of an aging IT geek
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homelab

replacing every disk in the pool without losing my nerve

Swapping all the drives in a TrueNAS mirror one at a time to grow the pool, and the resilver patience it demanded.

A server rack with disks

The NAS was full, which on a homelab is less a crisis and more a slow tide. I had a mirror of 4TB drives and a box of 8TB ones, and the plan was the classic ZFS trick: replace each disk in turn, let it resilver, and at the end the pool quietly notices it has more room.

The theory is lovely. The practice is a test of patience. You pull one half of the mirror, slot the new disk, and run the replace from the TrueNAS UI. Then you wait. A resilver on a reasonably full mirror is hours, and during that window you are running on a single disk with no redundancy, which is the kind of thought that keeps you checking zpool status far more often than is healthy.

  scan: resilver in progress since Tue Jul 22 09:14:03 2025
        2.81T scanned at 412M/s, 2.10T issued at 308M/s
        2.10T resilvered, 74.8% done

Two disks, two resilvers, the better part of a day. I left autoexpand on, so the moment the second one finished the pool grew by itself with no reboot and no ceremony. The only real advice I'd give: have a current backup before you start, because "single disk, no redundancy, mid-resilver" is precisely when Murphy comes to visit. He didn't. This time.