Going from 1TB HD to 2TB in freenas

[Darrell Patenaude]

I was running freenas on 4 1TB drives, but ran out of room right away, and with the motherboard only allowing 4 drives I ended up reading more on here and decided to go the server route. I ordered up all the crap for a new server, which supports 6 drives. I have another 1tb drive which I will throw on the server build.

My question is this. I would like to upgrade to 2tb drives eventually. My plan is to buy a 2tb drive and then swap out a 1tb drive, and eventually getting rid of all 1tb drives over time (as money permits). Once I have all 4-5 drives swapped out so every drive is 2tb, will freenas use the extra 1tb of space?

Can I keep the data stored on the pool and just have more hd space or will I have to remove all data and start fresh with the 2tb drives and copy my data back?

 

[Bidule0hm]

Yes, you can expand a pool without moving the data by replacing the drives one by one and waiting for the resilver each time. When all the drives will be replaced the pool will grow automagically ;)

 

[Darrell Patenaude]

Awesome that is what I was hoping for. Pretty stoked. Hoping to have all parts for build by next weekend.
Parts list for new build
Fractal Design Define R5 case
Silverstone Strider 750 Plus 750W
5 1TB WD Black drives of various ages.
Supermicro X9SCM-F board
Intel Xeon E3 1220V2 Quad Core Processor 3.10GHZ they didn't have 3.3 and 3.1 should be more then enough
Kingston KVR13E9/8I 8GB DDR3-1333 CL9 DIMM ECC Single Channel Memory KVR13E9/8I x 2 sticks

The ram I know I am not suppost to buy Kingston ram but you'd be surprised how hard it is to find non Kingston ram in stock, and or anywhere
Does anyone know if this ram will not work with the motherboard? This is the only got-ya item times 2 I am unsure of. If it doesn't work well then I am semi screwed but I'll live.
Thinking if it does work, I might end up buying another 2 sticks for 32gb ram. Not sure I need that much ram but everwhere I read here keeps telling me 16 is ok, but get more ram, you need more ram.

 

[Bidule0hm]

The PSU is way overkill on the power side and I don't know this brand so it's probably not the best quality. Personally I recommend SeaSonic PSUs, the best I ever saw and not too much expensive ;)

7200 RPM drives aren't recommended because they are power hungry and they are more difficult to cool but there is no technical problem otherwise.

For the RAM you can buy from the Crucial website directly (same as Micron RAM FYI) for example.

Kingston RAM is well known to cause problems if you go for 32 GB but 16 GB should be ok, however I don't recommend that and personally, just for the principle, I'll not buy anything from Kingston anymore.

 

[Darrell Patenaude]

Over kill is how I always do power supply's, I also only buy Silver Stone Power supply's I have a 750watt silver stone in a old computer and a 1200watt continuous on my main computer which weights like 25 pounds and at the time cost like 350$
I not sure why power hungry is an issue? 7200 rpm heat on 6 drives doesn't seem to be an issue to me as well? I will have 2 140mm fans pushing on 6 drives in a 8 bay case. so there will be 2 slot spacing between drives.
I will not buy directly from the US because we get hosed trying to bring it over the border for the ram. (Canada)
So your saying buying another 2 sticks of ram at 8gb each might cause issues? I will be buying the exact same type of ram. I'll have to see. any links of issues with this?

I have been reading all night on hard drives, I simply do not like the idea of 5400 rpm drives for some reason. It reminds me of hard drive company's trying to sell me of school spindle speed.
Can you tell me any other reason why I should be thinking 5400 RPM WD Red hard drives?
I.E. doesn't matter spindle speed because there are 6 drives pulling the data? What about when the head has to move around and wait for the disk to spin...

 

[ser_rhaegar]

Reds support tler: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control

 

[Bidule0hm]

There is a difference between slightly overkill and way overkill. The best efficiency for a PSU is generally at about 50 % of his max load. With this setup and a 750 W PSU you'll be under 10 % at idle and not only the efficiency will be lower, but some PSUs don't like to be so lightly loaded and can do bad things.

With a NAS the main criterion to chose a PSU is the drives consumption at startup and because of that the PSU will be already oversized ;)

"I not sure why power hungry is an issue?" Because electricity has a cost. For the heat the problem is you should keep the drives in the 30-40 C range so even if the power is relatively low the temp delta is also low so it's why the drives are generally the most difficult thing to cool in a NAS. Of course if noise and electricity are not a concern you can put some Delta fans and no problem anymore...

If you use gigabit ethernet the drives won't be the bottleneck unless you have a high random I/Os workload (iSCSI for example) but even then 7200 RPM vs 5400 RPM is not that faster (compare that to SSD or RAM for example...). It was just an advise, you can chose the drives you want, it's not my concern ;)