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So, I bought a new hard disk for my server recently. The intention was to expand the size of one of the zpools that is used for local backup replicas. It should have been an easy job, but easy jobs always have a way of going wrong…

I’d followed the same process that I had followed several times before, put the new drive in a spare bay, run the various tools you can to zero the drive out, write random data across it, zero it out again and so on. Everything was fine, no issues showing up, no performance anomalies to investigate. So I pushed the button to start the replacement in ZFS of the old drive with the newer larger one. Everything was still fine, the data all copied across, no downtime, no issues, zfs pool expanded, green lights across the board.

It’s funny how many things seem important in life at the time, but in the long run turn out to not really matter at all. The last time I edited this blog was back in 2021, almost exactly five years ago. It doesn’t seem like that long ago but things in life were very different then. In 2021 I only had one child, both my parents were alive, and I was not as far along in my career as I am now.