Reintroducing 4 TB drives into our FreeBSD server

One of the primary purposes for our homelab FreeBSD box is for data backups and storage for myself, Clara, and our family. Just over four years ago to the day, we replaced a couple of 4 TB Western Digital Blues with two 12 TB drives. It’s always a good day when you can replace a drive because you’re adding capacity, not because you’ve had a failure. I don’t know if you’ve seen the price of, well, everything in the space recently, but we needed some additional capacity recently. We have an LSI HBA controller now, so we’re not lacking for SATA ports. So for now, I added them back. A new zpool on old drives First, I removed the existing partitions. These appeared as the first and second drives on the controller: ## DON'T BLINDLY COPY/PASTE THIS! CHECK THE DRIVES! # gpart destroy da0 # gpart destroy da1 Then created a new GPT for each one: # gpart create -s gpt /dev/da0 # gpart create -s gpt /dev/da1 Then a partition we’re defining as type freebsd-zfs, because that’s what I intend to put…