Adding a second hard drive

[daz1761]

Can somebody please point me in the direction in adding another hard drive to me freenas setup. I have a 500gb seagate I want to merge to my current 1.5tb samsung f4, which is formatted to ZFS. Is this possible? Or will the 500gb drive end up being an addition CIFS share?

Also, is it best to format new drives as fat32 when putting them into freenas machines?

 

[gpsguy]

You really only have 2 choices.

1) You could add the 500Gb drive as a separate volume
2) Extend the current volume by adding the second drive

With the first option, if one drive failed, it wouldn't affect the other one. With option #2, if either drive failed, you'd loose all your data.

 

[daz1761]

Thanks for the reply.

I now see the implications of the second option, which makes me think I should just create another CIFS.

Is it best to format the drive as fat32, as they are currently formatted to OSX.

 

[gpsguy]

Unformatted works best. You might try removing the partition(s) with a tool like gparted live.

Be careful and don't mess up the wrong drive.

 

[daz1761]

Thanks, will do.

I've actually called my ZFS 1.5tb drive "freenas" and the share is called "MyMediaShare". So when I navigate to it from my mac its "cifs://freenas".

Looks as though I'll have to call the new drive "freenas2" maybe. If I new in advance I was going to add new drives, I would of stuck to a better naming convention!

Out of interest, I just had a look at the ZFS manager. I noticed under the "volumes to extend" the "freenas" drive. I take it I would select this if I was merging both drives?

 

[gpsguy]

I wouldn't have named it freenas, either. I called mine vol1, many users name their's "tank".

Yes, you'd use the ZFS Volume Manager and "volume to extend" to add the other disk (stripe) to your existing volume.

One other option, that would give you redundancy, but not an immediate increase in available storage, might be to add, say a 3 or 4Tb drive as a mirror. You wouldn't gain any additional storage over what you have now, but it would protect you against either drive failing. Once that was added, down the road, you could replace the "old" 1.5Tb drive with another 3Tb drive and your storage would automatically be expanded. Plus, you'd still have protection against either drive failing.

If you wanted to go this route, you'd need to add the new disk from the command line.

 

[daz1761]

Thanks again for your help, will bare that in mind for future reference

I take it I can't rename the drive?

 

[gpsguy]

First of all, we need to get the lingo strait. For example, if I do a "zpool status" (without the quotes) from the command line, you'll see something like this - you'll only see one drive and it won't be mirrored. My pool name is "vol1" - is this what you want to rename?

If so, a forum search, would yield the answer. Here's an example. I haven't done it, but 2 users did it in that thread.

Code:

 pool: vol1
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 2h41m with 0 errors on Sat May 17 16:41:54 2014
config:

NAME                                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
vol1                                            ONLINE       0     0     0
  mirror-0                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
    gptid/8a8d6666-6b8f-11e1-87a7-00012e3154c1  ONLINE       0     0     0
    gptid/8ad7c5bf-6b8f-11e1-87a7-00012e3154c1  ONLINE       0     0     0

 

[daz1761]

Thanks, yes sorry I meant volume not drive

Its the main ZFS volume, which is "freenas/MyMedia". The actual folder I drill down to is MyMediaShare, which is a CIFS. I was hoping to change the "freenas", to something like "vol1", or "tank1", etc.

So, how do you actually get to the command line? Is it through the web GUI, or do you mean the bash (osx), or the command line (win)?

 

[gpsguy]

If you are in the GUI, there's an option for "Shell". Or, your can access the shell from the Console setup screen on the server (if you have a monitor attached). I connect to my server via SSH, using PuTTY on my Windows machine.

 

[daz1761]

Many thanks for your help, much appreciated