extend my pool by adding a 3rd hard drive not working

[Nas-dude]

I am having a problem with extending my pool to a 3rd hard drive,

I started off with 1 hard drive and ran out of space, then added a 2nd hard drive, and it added successfully,

but when i went to add a 3rd , i got this message
"You are trying to add a virtual device consisting of 1 device(s) in a pool that has a virtual device consisting of 2 device(s)"

I create a pool with my 1st hard drive





added successfully




I add my 2nd hard drive by "gear icon" settings->extend





added sucessully, you can see my new size is 668.43GB





then i go to extend/add my 3rd hard drive

but i get this message "You are trying to add a virtual device consisting of 1 device(s) in a pool that has a virtual device consisting of 2 device(s)"






it won't let me extend it

 

[Nas-dude]

i went to the legacy UI, and added it manually and it worked, then i went back to the new UI and i see that it worked there as well, My new size is correct after i added all my drives,

 

[Heracles]

Hey Nas-dude,

Are you aware that the instant any of these 3 drives fails, you will loose it all ? What you did is not recommended at all. You have no redundancy at all, so your FreeNAS actually increases the risk of loosing everything. If you really don't want any redundancy, you would be safer to keep at least 3 separate pools of a single drive each. That way, the day one pool dies, only that one goes and you will keep the data that is in the 2 others...

Very unsafe and unstable setup, not to be trusted with any sensitive data you care about...

 

[melloa]

Please read this to understand what ZFS is about. With the cost of disks going down I don't see why not do the right configuration. Plan for a raidz2 at least, use your small disks, and grow the space by replacing with bigger ones as $ became available.

 

[Nas-dude]

i never thought about that, i might keep 3 different pools,

the problem with mirroring is it won't let me add mirror hard drives after i've already created the pool

for example, i created a MyFirstPool with 1 hard drive of 500gb

then later i go to "extend pool" so i can add another 500gb hard drive for mirroring, but i can't add a mirror hard drive

there is no option

also i can't use any raids because it requires hard drives of the same size,

most of my hard drives are all different sizes and i dont plan to buy more, i just want to try freenas to backup a bit of files

so if i use raid i can only use 5 hard drives for space, or less because they are not the same size,

i want to maximize my space and use all 10

 

[Nas-dude]

These are my hard drives

3x 240
3 x500
1x320
2x160
1x40

So i have a total of 2.7TB

If i make 3 pools, that gives me a total of 913GB each with no redundancy

i was going to buy 3 x 1TB hard drives for and put 1TB for each pool for mirroring, but then i found out i can't do that, i have to use the same size hard drive for mirroring,

so i don't really have an option, i don't want to buy more hard drives, i want to get as much use from these old hard drives before i get rid of them
someday

so im only able to do "stripe"

but i think i'll do what Heracles suggests and do 3 separate pools, until i can afford to buy lots of TB hard drives all at once,

the cheapest 4tb is 88usd, so if i do 3 pools of 8tb plus mirroring, i need 12 hard drives, so it would cost 1300usd, i cant afford that



1) but why can't i do

1 x 240GB - stripe
1 x 500GB - stripe
1x 160 GB - stripe
---------------
3xHD Total - 900 GB
--------------
1 x 1 TB - Mirror




2) and why can't i add a mirror hard drive after creating the pool

 

[G8One2]

https://www.ixsystems.com/community/attachments/freenas-guide-9-10-pdf.30762/

 

[Chris Moore]

the problem with mirroring is it won't let me add mirror hard drives after i've already created the pool

You can't do it from the GUI, but you can do it from the command line and if that is soemthing you want to do, here is the link to the instructions:

Add a mirror drive to an existing single disk vdev:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/create-zfs-mirror-by-adding-a-drive.14880/post-453290

Just understand that each individual drive you have now is a vdev and you will need to add a mirror to each of them. Just take it one mirror at a time.

 

[Chris Moore]

also i can't use any raids because it requires hard drives of the same size

Not exacly. You would be limited to the size of the smallest disk. So, in a mirror, you could have a 250GB drive and a 300GB drive mirror each other and the capacity of the mirror would be 250GB. The smaller of the two.