Christmas Pool Options

[ere109]

Does it make sense to reuse drives and combine them into a 12-disk vdev? I've currently got two pools: one 7x4tb, the other 5x8tb. The 8tb are five years old, and I originally thought about starting to upgrade some with larger drives during holiday hard drive sales. At the same time, I'm running about 75% full, so could use the extra space now. I also know that I lose overall system capacity with every pair of RAID-Z2 drives burned.
This lead me to consider a major game of data switcheroo. If I bought seven 6tb refurbs, I could copy all data from the 7x4 pool, make a 12-drive vdev, then move everything into the new pool. This would cost me less than $400. However, it would mean writing and moving all of my data at least twice - on five year old drives.
I'm not explaining this week enough, but the bottom line is is like to get to about 60tb of storage without buying $1,000 worth of new disks. This is a theoretical solution, but would be a risky one. There's also a question of performance and reliability of a single 12-disk pool, vs two separate.

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Jailer]

My thoughts personally are if you care about your data stay away from refurb drives. If money is tight check out WD's easystore drives. You can get them on sale and shuck them.

Also I have no experience in this but others have reported performance issues with 12 drive wide vdevs as they become filled with data such as performance degredation and very long resilver times. I personally wouldn't go over 8 wide but that's just me.

 

[ere109]

Thanks for that. You ultimately lock yourself in by what you start with. I like the 5-drive array, as it's a manageable size, but in order to get more space on either it's a big investment. The smartest path may be to invest in four larger drives and eliminate that seven disk array. I'm sure sales will continue through Monday.