BUILD Home made NAS instead of QNAP TS-451

[Ericloewe]

So i can have RAID with either 4 HDDs from start or 6 HDDs from start with no way to add more HDDs later? Not sure but i recall we did something like this on office that we exchanged common RAID 5. Going to read the guide.. :) thanks for pointing there.

You can add, for instance, a mirror or another RAIDZ2 vdev to your old RAIDZ2 vdev, but you can't change the old one.

You could do something like make a new pool, copy stuff over, destroy the old pool and reuse the old disks for something else, but what's generally done is just to add vdevs as required.

 

[cyberjock]

And for the record, many RAID5 and RAID6 controllers support OCE (onlin capacity expansion) which *does* let you add single disks and slowly expand your RAID array. But that feature doesn't exist for ZFS.

 

[Aikimaniac]

Well..i rather spend more money on start have less worries later :) When i update newer versions of FreeNAS later or some bug fixes, can it have some impact on data stored in RADZ2 ?

 

[cyberjock]

That depends on the ZFS developers more than FreeNAS. Things do change, but this is one that a lot of people want, but the devs have said not to expect it anytime soon.

 

[anodos]

So i can have RAID with either 4 HDDs from start or 6 HDDs from start with no way to add more HDDs later? Not sure but i recall we did something like this on office that we exchanged common RAID 5. Going to read the guide.. :) thanks for pointing there.

Hardware RAID and ZFS are very different beasts. One important thing is that it is best to start with lots of storage capacity. For instance my main server is only 30% full. You should never fill your pool more than 80%. It can be a pain to increase storage capacity at a later date.