How to increase storage space with same amount drives

[Kurt Naeslund]

Hello,

I have a compact cabinett that houses 5 disks. They are all 3 GB and the system is running raidz1-0 on freenas 9.10.
I am running out on space quickly, so I was wondering if someone could help me expand this existing volume without dataloss.
I am not THAT experienced, so please bare with me.

Thanks,
Kurt
Norway

 

[hugovsky]

It's really easy: just replace the drives with bigger ones. Do take into consideration that because of the size of your drives, during resilver, you can lose all your pool if another drive gets an error. And probably will. Do you have backups? If not, you should have. I think it's better not to try this without solid backups.

 

[danb35]

@Kurt Naeslund: There's a manual that gives you click-by-click instructions on this.

@hugovsky: RAIDZ1 is not recommended due to the risk of data loss/corruption, but you overstate the risk. If a second drive completely fails, yes, the pool is toast. If a second drive has a bad block show up during resilvering, the impact of that would range from nothing (if it's a metadata block, as all of those have multiple copies) to a single corrupted file (if it's a data block with no remaining redundancy). Multiple bad blocks would, of course, multiply the effect. But to say that you'll probably lose all your data when trying to resilver a RAIDZ1 pool is an unwarranted exaggeration. Note that if Kurt has space for a sixth disk, even temporarily, the expansion can be accomplished without ever compromising redundancy.

 

[hugovsky]

@danb35 Thanks for the explanation and for correcting me.

It's probably something stuck in subconscious: Don't do "insert stuff here" without enough redundancy or backups.... ;)

 

[Kurt Naeslund]

Hey thanks guys,

I will check up on what you are saying here

Regards,
Kurt