a few questions..

[typo]

i am lookign to set up freenas on a older P4 pc with 2gbs of memory and 4x3tb seagate sata drives. The only problem i have is i only have 3 blank 2tb drives. 1 of the 4 has media that i use to stream to my raspberry pi xbmc pc. The end result is to have a raid 5 set up with the most harddrives my motherboard will support so i can stream to my pi. am i able to create a raid5 setup with the 3 blank ones then copy my data over from the 4th and when that completes install the 4th and expand the array to cover all 4 drives? with out losing any thing?

 

[cyberjock]

Ok, stop. You need to go read the manual. You REALLY need to go read the manual. You'd figure out very quickly by reading the manual or searching the forums that 2GB of RAM is nowhere near enough RAM. P4s do not make good machines for ZFS because they usually don't support more than 4GB of RAM and the RAM they use is so expensive nowadays its usually cheaper to buy a used newer system that uses DDR3.

Then, you need to read the sticky in the noob section and you'll understand that you can't do online capacity expansion with ZFS the way you do with hardware RAID5 and RAID6 systems.