Adding Additional Drives Post-Installation

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LightestDawn

Dabbler
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Mar 11, 2017
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Hello,
I'm new to FreeNAS and will be setting mine up shortly, as the parts are on the way.

I'm starting with 2 3tb WD Red Drives in Raid 1 (or RAIDZ1) for 3TB usable space with 1 disk redundancy. My question is, later on I want to add another set of 3TB Drives and have it be run in RAID 10 or the ZFS equivalent. Is this possible to do after installation or is it necessary to have all 4 drives when I set up the zpool?


Side note: I wanted to add a Sandisk 120GB SSD as Cache, if I did that what kind of benefits would I see, I know that it is non-volatile memory so it should have less chance of corruption or errors, but would it see any kind of performance boost?

Thanks for any help you can offer.
 
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gpsguy

Active Member
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Jan 22, 2012
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Your configuration is called a "mirror", not RAIDz1. RAIDz1 needs a minimum of 3 disks.

Yes, you can extend your volume by adding 2 additional drives in the future. Rinse and repeat for as many drives that your case will hold.

Read up on L2ARC. Generally it's better to add more RAM first, since L2ARC uses some of your base memory to manage it.
 

LightestDawn

Dabbler
Joined
Mar 11, 2017
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Hey gpsguy,

Thanks for answering. I'm sorry for the mix-up, mirroring is in fact what I want.

For starters I am going with a FM2 Motherboard with a A4-7300 APU and 16GB of Non-ECC RAM. Because of this I don't want to max out my RAM, and I would rather have it run for now and then at the same time I add more Drives, I will put in a Supermicro board, with a pentium processor, and max out with ECC Ram.

As for adding more volumes. Am I correct that I cannot extend an existing VDEV and will have to instead create an additional VDEV which will make it like this:


VDEV 1:
Drive 1
Drive 2
VDEV 2:
Drive 3
Drive 4

Where each VDEV is mirrored and then VDEV 1 and VDEV 2 are striped together. Making it an approximate usable space of 6TB and allowing one of the drives in each VDEV to fail before data loss?


Thanks for your help.
 
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