Boot-drive mirror, replace with SSD by breaking mirror?

[proxuser76]

Hi!

I have two 300GB older spinning disks as boot-drive in two of my proxmox servers (Dell R730). I want to replace them with SSD-drives.

My idea was to take one of the drives offline with zpool offline and then zpool replace -f <pool> <old device> <new device>. When mirror is up again, replace the second 300GB boot drive with second SSD the same way.


But then i read about proxmox-boot-tool and that needs to be used when replacing drives and syncing information between drives used as boot.

Is it that simple, with zpool offline/replace or is it more complicated when boot-drives?

 

[LnxBil]

Is it that simple, with zpool offline/replace or is it more complicated when boot-drives?

This is perfectly described in the handbook and does also apply to your situation.

You also have to consider the ashift value of your pool. 300 GB should imply 512 byte sectors, so your SSDs will be 4x slower due to their default blocksize of 4096.

Why do you want to replace your boot drive with SSDs? Are you hosting VMs/Containers on there? If not, the impact is really not that big and depends on the SSDs if the performance is better or not.

 

[proxuser76]

Sorry about that! Have to read more carefully.

No, they are just boot-drives, but old ones being in production for a long time before i inherited the servers so i just thought being on the safer side by replacing them with some smaller 250GB Samsung Pro SSD:s that i had laying around.

But, as you say no real impact other than the "feeling" of newer drives.

 

[LnxBil]

250GB Samsung Pro SSD:s that i had laying around.

That's what I feared ... dont' use them. They are not enterprise grade, the disks however are. I'm running old spinners for years in RAID1 for each PVE box I have and the last ones I replaced (but with never servers) were 12 years old and still functioning perfectly. The OS disk speed is negligible and you will not have any benefit besides booting will be faster and normally servers are not booted frequently. Also, a server boots very slowly and if it takes 5 minutes or 5 minutes 10 sec .. no real difference.