Best way to achieve this?

[adamgibbo]

Soon I'll be diving into TrueNAS Scale for the first time and would like to know if my "plan" will work.

My NAS box has 5 bays, but initially I will only be using 1, because . After a couple of months I plan to add another drive and setup a Raid0. Then after a few more months add another drive and then probably go with Raidz1. Then after a few more months add another drive... etc... etc...

Ideally I would like to not lose any data or have to move data externally to achieve this.

From the documentation I've read I *think* this should be ok, but any tips or suggestions would be appreciated.

:)

 

[LarsR]

ZFS expansion is not yet possible. If you start with 1 disk, you could add another one to create a mirror, so you'd have 1 data and 1 parity disk.
Then you could add another 2 drives in a new vdev to create a stripe of mirrors so youd have 2 data and 2 parity disks.
Going from Stipe or Mirror to raidz1(2 or 3) is only possible if you backup your data, destroy your existing pool, recreate as raidz1(2 or 3) and copy your data back. If you want to increase capacity again you'd have to add another vdev, idealy in the same configuration as the old one e.g. if you have a raidz1 of 4 disks, the new vdev should be another vdev of 4 disks.
So no, your current plan won't work.

 

[Davvo]

You could start with a single drive, then transform it in a mirror when you add the second drive, and then create another vdev with another 2 mirrored drives. You could use the last bay for a hotspare, or maybe for a mirrored pair of SSDs for VMs, the boot pool or similar.

You would lose a lot of space though.
The other option is as @LarsR wrote.