Expansion: Requesting Opinions

[Thegiantcat]

Hello,

I recently inherited a freeNAS system as part of a new job I accepted. To get to the point it is at 85 % utilization and I would like to expand it and am pretty much at this point just trying to get peoples opinions on the cost vs effectiveness of the different options, and of course to make sure I am not overlooking anything. Here are the deets of the system:

Version: 9.3.1
Drives 4 WD Red 4TB Drives (Raid10)

Now my problem is that this was not built on the most expandable of infrastructure and as such there are no free ports / expansion slots that would allow me to add additional drives and create another zPool with those drives separated into 2 vDevs with two drives in each.

So pretty much I'm left with replacing the drives one by one to expand the storage, or replacing most of the hardware to a more scaleable model.

In peoples opinions who have been in this situation before which one did you have the best luck with.

 

[danb35]

You don't even have room for another pair of drives? It's kind of unusual for hardware that's otherwise suitable to have only four SATA ports, though I guess four drive bays isn't that uncommon. Replacing drives with larger drives is easy, but (1) you're throwing away good drives with this approach (which is what led me to buy the 36-bay monster I have now), and (2) you're operating without redundancy while you're doing the replacement. OTOH, you wouldn't need to replace all four drives to increase your pool size--you could replace one mirrored pair (one at a time), and do the second pair at some time in the future when you needed even more space.

 

[Thegiantcat]

Thank you,

Honestly, I think I might go with replacing the drives as it would be more cost effective short term (we may come under new management so this storage system may be switched out entirely so I'm trying to keep it cheap)
From what I can tell though the machine was built from spare parts they had lying around. Which wouldn't surprise me considering this setup didn't even have a UPS when I started(I have since rectified this).

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

the machine was built from spare parts they had lying around

Do you have a known good backup of the data? If not, consider starting with that.

Here you are, in a new job, trying to pull this presumably important storage device back from the brink of failure. If something goes wrong, you could end up looking like the bad guy.

 

[Thegiantcat]

Do you have a known good backup of the data? If not, consider starting with that.

Yes, that's actually one of the first things I checked to make sure of actually.
Never hurts to be doubly sure though.