I finally got all the gear together to upgrade my 5x500gb raidz to a 5x1.5tb raidz2. My plan was to get some usb ports working (by which I mean accessible from the outside of the box.. check), put all the old drives into usb enclosures, and get my current pool operational outside the machine. Then, putting the new drives in and using zfs send/receive should be simple, right?

I took out the five old drives, and moved them to some external cases. So far so good. I then pop the first 1.5tb drive into the array. It seemed to recognize it doing pfexec format, so that's good. I put the second one in, and it doesn't show.. Oh, it's probably that the second through fifth slots are running off my sil3124 sata card which is a little ghetto and doesn't support hot-plug. No worries, I just put the rest in and rebooted.