I have just built my FreeNAS with 3 3Tb drive and want to add 2 more ?

[LindseyH]

I am looking at all the documentation around adding disks by extending the pool
Can you do it or not ?

I have built the system in the last week and got all the Jails setup and plugins all working, and have been steadily filling the storage.
Then Friday my 2 new 3Tb drives arrived.

I was under the impression from my old system it was easy to add them and extend the pool, but now I look this does not seem to be the case.

OS Version:
FreeNAS-11.2-U3
(Build Date: Mar 27, 2019 18:24)

Processor:
Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU J3710 @ 1.60GHz (4 cores)

Memory:
16 GiB

All the drives are the same.

Do I select my pool NAS and extend, but this is mirror and that's not what I need

or in stripe

But in all cases extend is not available ?

What is the solution ?

Please ;-)

 

[myoung]

I assume your first vdev was RaidZ1? Best practice is to extend pool using vdevs of the same size and type. You either need to get another disk to add another RaidZ1 vdev, or create a second pool with a mirror vdev made of your two new disks.

 

[LindseyH]

My system only has space for 5 drives, surely on a NAS you can add drives and expand the size.
my 10 year old Netgear was that simple, add another drive and tell is to use it, wait for the next day (not fast) and all was done.

 

[LindseyH]

Does the Add Data increase the capacity of the Raid ?

 

[myoung]

RaidZ expansion is a feature in development, but as far as I know hasn't been released yet. Simply googling what you are trying to do will show you hundreds of posts asking the same thing for almost a decade. FreeNAS isn't really designed for users who want to add and remove disks to their pools very often. The general assumption is that you will add all the disks at the begining when you are planning your pool. Most "expansion" involves some fairly hacky techniques (adding a new vdev is the least hacky method, but you data won't be evenly distributed accross all disks). You said your system is only a few weeks old, another option is to backup all the data on your current pool and create a new RaidZ pool with all 5 disks.

 

[myoung]

Does the Add Data increase the capacity of the Raid ?

This would let you extend the pool by 2,3,4+ vdev at the same time, not help extend the first vdev

 

[Chris Moore]

Does the Add Data increase the capacity of the Raid ?

No, you should have learned about ZFS (the file system of FreeNAS) before you built your system. Please read the following documentation:


Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

Why not to use RAID-5 or RAIDz1
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/

 

[Chris Moore]

I am looking at all the documentation around adding disks by extending the pool
Can you do it or not ?

No

I have built the system in the last week and got all the Jails setup and plugins all working, and have been steadily filling the storage.
Then Friday my 2 new 3Tb drives arrived.

You should have waited for all the parts to arrive. You have no choice but to destroy the pool, create it again with all the disks in place and copy the data in all over again.