As planned, my upgrade of the FreeNAS media server was completed, successfully upgrading our 10 TB of storage to a new total of 48 TB. The data migration only ran about 12 hours, much shorter than I had feared, and overall the upgrade was fairly painless.
In the process, I also upgraded to the latest version of FreeNAS (11.3-U4.1), and replaced the aging USB drive with small mirrored set of SSDs. To my surprise, this dramatically improved the boot up time of the system. Not that I am surprised about the speed of SSD drives, but I really had not considered how much access there was of the USB drive.
My next step is consolidating and restoring my various backups and archives, which I spread out to any available space, in order to handle the upgrade itself. This will likely take a couple of days, pulling files down from cloud storage and offline disks.
In the meantime, I now have an abundance of used, but otherwise solid, 3 TB and 4 TB drives to find a new use for.
