How can I add more drives if I'm out of SATA ports?

[Wolfeman0101]

I'm running a 6x2TB RAIDZ2 and I am out of SATA ports. I need to increase my storage, how can this be done?

 

[pirateghost]

buy a card with SATA ports and add it to your machine??

is this a trick question?

 

[Wolfeman0101]

I don't know is it? It just seems like that is too easy. What about if I'm out of space in my case? Do external drives work?

 

[survive]

Hi Wolfeman0101,

I highly, strongly suggest you read through this before you do anything:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...explaining-VDev-zpool-ZIL-and-L2ARC-for-noobs!

There are some rules with expanding your zfs pool that you must follow or else you will find yourself facing some very uncomfortable choices.

As to external drives.....not many folks will advocate using external USB drives with ZFS. That is really simply a bad idea.

-Will

 

[Wolfeman0101]

I will read that. I'm just concerned about not being able to expand.

 

[ben]

Wolfeman, there's also the option of expanding in place. Basically, take a clean, redundant pool and swap the drives one at a time for larger ones. If you build a redundant pool with 2TB drives today, a year from now you can rebuild it with 3TB drives (or even bigger). This takes time and is not without risk, but it's a viable option.

 

[Wolfeman0101]

Wolfeman, there's also the option of expanding in place. Basically, take a clean, redundant pool and swap the drives one at a time for larger ones. If you build a redundant pool with 2TB drives today, a year from now you can rebuild it with 3TB drives (or even bigger). This takes time and is not without risk, but it's a viable option.

Yeah I'm thinking that is my best option. If I switch to 3TB drives I will get an additional 4TB of storage, 4TB drives I'd get 8TB more. I'll just have to make this work until I can afford 6 drives.