Adding capacity to existing pool

[sergdesign]

Hi,
i have a server on Xeon 4110, 32Gb RAM and 16 10Tb SATA HDD. TrueNAS-12.0-U5.1
All HDDs organized in one pool.

I need to increase my storage capacity, and I plan to buy 15 more 12TB drives.
Can I ask for advice on what to do - create another pool, or can I add disks to the existing one?
How are new disks added to the pool? Through the "Add Vdevs" menu?

Another question - is it possible to add several SSD disks to the pool to speed up I/O, and how exactly is this configured?

Thanks in advance for any help and answers!

 

[sretalla]

Can I ask for advice on what to do - create another pool, or can I add disks to the existing one?

Depends... do you like the current structure/shares, etc.? if so, adding a VDEV to the existing pool sounds like the right thing.

How are new disks added to the pool? Through the "Add Vdevs" menu?

Yes.

Another question - is it possible to add several SSD disks to the pool to speed up I/O, and how exactly is this configured?

Yes, A Special VDEV would be the way for that... a fast VDEV to catch small IO and metadata can be good (remembering it is then critical to pool survival, so mirror or even 3-way mirror is a good idea for it).

 

[sergdesign]

Depends... do you like the current structure/shares, etc.? if so, adding a VDEV to the existing pool sounds like the right thing.

Thank you very much.
Yes, the main task is to save the current information and settings

Yes, A Special VDEV would be the way for that... a fast VDEV to catch small IO and metadata can be good (remembering it is then critical to pool survival, so mirror or even 3-way mirror is a good idea for it).

Thanks again.
I will wait for the drives (it is 4 pieces of 8TB samsung 870 QVO) and I will try.

 

[TrueMan]

I am also trying to expand an existing pool but am running into an error. Any help would be appreciated.
Currently I have a pool of 3x 6TB hds and would like to add two more (2x 6TB hds) for a total of five(5), one at a time.
When I click settings/add vDev this is what I get.

 

[danb35]

Currently I have a pool of 3x 6TB hds and would like to add two more (2x 6TB hds) for a total of five(5), one at a time.

ZFS doesn't work that way. You could add another group of three disks in a second RAIDZ1 set, but you can't (currently; it's Coming Soon™) expand the pool by a disk at a time.

 

[videopete]

Your redundancy is WITHIN the vdev not the overall pool itself. So your existing pool has a single 3 disk vdev configured as RAIDZ1 (one disk could fail and you're still ok). Your screenshots are showing you're trying to add another RAIDZ1 vdev which requires 3 disks minimum. That way each vdev would have a single disk redundancy and your pool would be safe as long as you don't lose more than one disk per vdev group.

 

[jgreco]

(it is 4 pieces of 8TB samsung 870 QVO)

These are generally not a good choice for ZFS. Poor write endurance and some people have indicated that they've had significant problems with them. I believe some results are searchable on the forum.

 

[sretalla]

Poor write endurance

I'm not sure that write endurance is really a big concern for a metadata VDEV.

I can understand that plenty of folks who use generic SSDs like those for SLOG or L2ARC (against the advice of some) may find endurance is far too low though (and those are the comments that will most likely be found).

But if that VDEV is also used for small files, that could be an issue if there's a lot of churn.

 

[jgreco]

Interestingly enough, one of my 2TB Samsung 980 PRO's heard me type that and decided to start throwing read errors. Unfortunately 2500 miles away. Guess that's why I go heavy on the warm spares. Fortunately just ephemeral cached data...