Adding hard drive to plex jail

[Hunter Norman]

I setup a freenas server strictly as a plex media server (I'm probably under-utilizing freenas) and I've used it for a while buy I'm maxing out my storage and wanted to add a hard drive to my existing plex jail library.

So I have 1 hard drive now as my media jail with movies and TV shows folders. I'm hoping I could just add this drive to what I have so that I wouldn't have to dump my existing data and then add them both at once from scratch.

Could I do this, and if so how? I'm not worried about backups or redundancy

 

[nojohnny101]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but what you want to do is not possible*.

It sounds like you didn't do too much research when you initially built your box. An inherent limit of ZFS is that once a video is created, you cannot add drives to it (only replace). You can add additional vdevs, but that would require a minimum of 2*.

Your only options are to get enough drives to add another vdev to your pool, or destroy and start over again.

Here is a great overview we usually recommend, at a minimum, that everyone read through and thoroughly understand before building a system:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

 

[danb35]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but what you want to do is not possible*.

Of course it is, if OP doesn't care about redundancy (which he obviously doesn't, as he currently has a single-disk pool). Just add the new disk to the pool as a stripe. Of course, when a disk fails, all the data in the pool goes away.

 

[nojohnny101]

Of course it is

Hence the asterisk. Anything is really possible, but with how bad striping a single disk to an existing pool (especially given his use case) is, I was trying to avoid mentioning that. If he really wanted to do it bad enough, he probably could have figured that out I'm assuming.

 

[danb35]

A striped pool is not necessarily a bad thing. Again, he has a single-disk pool as it is, so he obviously doesn't care about redundancy--and if all he's doing is running Plex, maybe he doesn't need to.

 

[sretalla]

If the only requirement is to have more space available to Plex, you can create a second pool and mount it to the plex jail, adding a second folder to your libraries as needed (plex can bring multiple folders together in one library).

In that way, you don't risk anything more than you already have by having a single disk pool (if one disk dies, you will have whatever is on the other one rather than a completely broken striped pool)

 

[Hunter Norman]

Thanks everybody. So this has been my conundrum: Do I keep the FreeNas server and add storage OR do I start from scratch on my higher-powered windows Tower with more ram and processing power with sever HDD and External drives raiding them into a single pool with a large external as a backup