Configuring and burning in storage

[Darren Myers]

So I am at the point where i am ready to order my first batch of harddrives, not one from the same place, i plan to order from 3 different sites to get my 7 harddrives....I read all the burn in your drives to test for failure and all that mombo jumpo.

But heres my plan, it might be ill conceived, but; i am running out of storage...very quickly lol....so here it goes

I have a 8TB RAID10 consisting of x4 4TB WD Reds. it then has 4 partitions: Video's, VM's, Misc Data, and Software

I plan to purchase x7 2TB or 3TB harddrives, create my RAIDz3 array, test/burn in. if all goes well migrate my 8TB of data from my current RAID10.

Then a month later, purchase x7 4TB harddrives, and migrate ONLY my movies folder/partition to this new 16TB RAIDz3

Then eventually, purchase another x7 3TB harddrives, and migrate my Misc Data and software from the original RAIDz3...

Questions are, is it possible to test/burn in JUST a certain RAIDzX or harddrives? Is this a good plan? Other options

The original plan was to use iSCSI...but since its best not to use more then 50% or so of the iSCSI that kind of kills my idea to use iSCSI since it would put me in the boat i am in now... So the deal is to use CIFS shares

 

[Glorious1]

You can attach the new drives to empty SATA ports in your box. As long as you don't incorporate them into a FreeNAS volume, FreeNAS doesn't care what you do with them. You can issue CLI commands/scripts to burn them in while other disks are part of a volume functioning in FreeNAS. Just make sure you point those commands to the right drives, especially if you are writing.