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 😃

A few days ago; sitting outside — drinking coffee and minding my own business, I received an email from my UPS:

Utility power not available.

2021/06/01 18:38:27

My homelab had lost both power sources 😮 This whole area had a power outage — a good opportunity to do a UPS and power down test 😛

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.