expanding

[froggeraj]

hello as of now i have a 3x3tb red storage pool called main in a raidz1 how would i go about making this bigger? can i buy another 3x3tb and make the pool bigger?

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Hi @froggeraj, welcome back to the forums. For general questions like this a good place to start is the User Guide. It will have direct and clear instructions for common things such as this.

For example, in this case you have two options to expand. You can either replace every drive in your RAIDZ1 vdev with a larger disk, and when the last disk has resilvered the pool will grow to reflect the larger size drives. The User Guide calls this Replacing Disks to Grow a Pool. The approach you suggested is Extending a Pool by striping a vdev. If you have 3x3TB RAIDZ1 already striping another identical vdev is a great expansion alternative.

I hope this helps, good luck.

 

[froggeraj]

Hi @froggeraj, welcome back to the forums. For general questions like this a good place to start is the User Guide. It will have direct and clear instructions for common things such as this.

For example, in this case you have two options to expand. You can either replace every drive in your RAIDZ1 vdev with a larger disk, and when the last disk has resilvered the pool will grow to reflect the larger size drives. The User Guide calls this Replacing Disks to Grow a Pool. The approach you suggested is Extending a Pool by striping a vdev. If you have 3x3TB RAIDZ1 already striping another identical vdev is a great expansion alternative.

I hope this helps, good luck.

Thanks!

 

[froggeraj]

Hi @froggeraj, welcome back to the forums. For general questions like this a good place to start is the User Guide. It will have direct and clear instructions for common things such as this.

For example, in this case you have two options to expand. You can either replace every drive in your RAIDZ1 vdev with a larger disk, and when the last disk has resilvered the pool will grow to reflect the larger size drives. The User Guide calls this Replacing Disks to Grow a Pool. The approach you suggested is Extending a Pool by striping a vdev. If you have 3x3TB RAIDZ1 already striping another identical vdev is a great expansion alternative.

I hope this helps, good luck.

would i just use the extend feature to add the new drives or a different way?

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

would i just use the extend feature to add the new drives or a different way?

Correct, extend will do it. Are you using FreeNAS encryption by the way? If so there are very specific steps you need to take as outlined in the Manual.

 

[froggeraj]

Correct, extend will do it. Are you using FreeNAS encryption by the way? If so there are very specific steps you need to take as outlined in the Manual.

nope! just normal storage so i wouldnt loss my data integrity with losing 1 drive?

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

nope! just normal storage so i wouldnt loss my data integrity with losing 1 drive?

You lose data if you lost your pool; you lose your pool if you lose any single vdev within that pool; you lose a vdev if more drives in the vdev die than it can handle. For a mirror of n disks that is n-1, for RAIDZ1 it is 1, for RAIDZ2 it is 2, and for RAIDZ3 it is 3.

Before you expand your pool you can tolerate a single drive failure in any of your drives without losing your pool.
After you expand by striping a second RAIDZ1 vdev to your pool you can lose 1 drive in EITHER vdev but not 2 in any 1 of them.

Do keep in mind that when you lose a drive and replace it via resilvering the other drives are working VERY hard. If a second drive fails while you're resilvering you will lose the vdev and thus your pool.

You are adviced to have quality backups of your data to safeguard against this. You could, if you chose to, use RAIDZ2 rather than RAIDZ1. One option would be to move your data off your pool temporarily, destroy it and rebuild it with RAIDZ2 rather than RAIDZ1 then move the data back onto it.

 

[Jessep]

You are adviced to have quality backups of your data to safeguard against this. You could, if you chose to, use RAIDZ2 rather than RAIDZ1. One option would be to move your data off your pool temporarily, destroy it and rebuild it with RAIDZ2 rather than RAIDZ1 then move the data back onto it.

Agreed. If you can safely rebuild your pool without data loss into a 6 drive RaidZ2 you would have better redundancy. You should still have backups, "RAID isn't a backup", not even ZFS RAID.