In the fall of 2022 I turned off Zeta, my file server, due to the extreme price of electricity. I migrated all the data to a 3x18 TB raidz1 pool on Alpha instead.

But last year I brought it back — and used the opportunity to add some more memory, and rebuild the main storage pool 🤓

It’s time for another ZFS pool expansion. When I last expanded; I doubled the capacity of my 2nd vdev — going from 16 TB to 32 TB raw capacity. This time I’m doubling again — replacing the last limiting drive, and fully utilizing the all the 8 TB drives 😃

I’ve been planning to enable scheduled S.M.A.R.T. scans ever since I built my file server, but it was just one of those things that I never got around to do.

Well — when one of the 8 TB drives suddenly started reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors, the scheduled scans got back on the agenda. So let’s do that now 👇

I moved my main hypervisor, Alpha, into a new server case; a compact Inter-Tech with 8 hot-swappable bays in the front.

I also moved the four SSDs over from the failed ZFS SSD pool project, and this time it worked! 😃

This post was suppose to be a “look I made an SSD ZFS pool”, but will instead be the first post in a trouble-shooting series. Trying to get my SSDs to behave.

But — I am getting ahead of myself… Let’s start at the beginning.