Best scenerio for extending 12 drives pool

[blckhm]

Hi guys,


I've 12x4TB drives which placed 6 drive in a group of raidz1. Total 2 group of drives.

nowadays, our pool reached 85% of capacity so we need to extend that pool asap but 4TB drive's costs does not make any sense. We could get twice capacity near same price. So, which way is best for extending that pool?


I am waiting for your advice

 

[Nick2253]

Some resources for shopping for drive prices:

• Amazon disk prices: https://diskprices.com
• Newegg disk prices: https://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/
• PCPartPicker drives: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/

I see a couple strategies for growing the pool:

1. Add another Vdev: You could add an additional vdev. It doesn't really matter if the individual vdevs are the same size, so you could use 8TB drives (or whatever size). I would stick with the 6x drive Z1 vdev in order to keep performance as balanced as possible between the vdevs.
2. Upsize the drives: one at a time (per vdev), replace the drives with a larger drive. Once all drives in a vdev have been replaced with larger drives, the pool should automagically grow.
3. Redo the pool entirely: if you have the drive ports, I'd look at creating an 8 drive RAIDZ2 vdev with 10-14TB drives. Then tranfer the data over. However, that really depends on your performance requirements.

 

[blckhm]

Thanks for reply but we want to keep our drives working in chasis.

Could we add another vdev like 6x 10TB drives to pool?

last configuration will be like that;

6x 4TB raid-z1
6x 4TB raid-z1
6x 10TB raid-z1

 

[Nick2253]

Yes, that would work. There are possible performance concerns with something like that, but I would not hesitate to run a similar setup. And honestly, any performance hit you might get from mis-matched vdevs (and it's questionable to me that you'd really get a performance hit here) is more than likely made up for by the additional vdev.