I recently purchased a used PowerEdge R420 rack server with a Compellent SC220 Storage Shelf. I currently have four 3.5" HDDs in the R420 and ten 2.5" HDDs in the SC220. The R420 server previously had TrueNAS installed, so all of the hard drives on both the R420 and the SC220 are formatted with ZFS. I’m now running Ubuntu on the R420 using ZFS.

The server I’m replacing is an old gaming PC running Manjaro and BTRFS. It has one SSD with the operating system and two 4 TB HDDs set up as RAID0. I’ve been using the RAID to store media downloaded via the Servarr stack.

So, my goal is to create a large pool out of all of the HDDs (except the one running the OS) on the R420 and SC220, and then migrate the media data on the two 4 TB RAID0 drives on my old gaming PC over to R420/SC220 pool. I would then move my Servarr stack over to the R420 as well. Ideally, I’d also like to physically move the two 4 TB HDDs over to the R420. Presumably, I would have to reformat the drives to use ZFS rather the BTRFS and then integrate them somehow into the ZFS pool?

Anyway, I’m not sure of the best procedure to accomplish all of this, so I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has any experience or insight. Thanks in advance.

  • user134450@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    datasheet for one of the drive models apparently these have a dual SAS interface, so what you are seing could be completely normal. i dont have any experience with this type of setup though.

    btw you can uniquely identify partitions by using something like lsblk -o+PARTUUID,FSTYPE the partuuid should never repeat in the output even if the partition table was somehow used as a template (though "dd"ing from disk to disk will duplicate those of course)

    also check out the “SERIAL” column for lsblk to uniquely identify the drives themselves.

    • sailingbythelee@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Thanks, you are incredibly helpful. The four HDDs in the R420 are SCSI drives, while the ones in the SC220 are SAS drives, and it is indeed the 10 SAS drives in the SC220 that have two device letters each. Wow, how about that. If this is the explanation for why there are two devices per drive, I see on the SAS wiki that it has something to do with: “SAS devices feature dual ports, allowing for redundant backplanes or multipath I/O; this feature is usually referred to as the dual-domain SAS.”

      That gives me plenty to go on for further online research. I was just getting crap search results before, but now I have a better idea what to search for. Thanks a lot!!