I was told i cant add drives to my volume, but theres a setting in manager to extend?

[MrHands]

I'm a little confused. I setup my server recently to RAIDZ2 (was originally RAIDZ1) using 5 x 4TB drives. I eventually want to add more drives to my server but with cost right now its kind of hard.

I thought i could just add drives as i went along but i was recently told i could not do that.

However im further confused why theres a setting to extend my volume in the volume manager if adding a drive isnt possible?

just wanted to clear this up, because if i cant add drives in future... its going to kind of suck when i run out of storage space.

 

[Ericloewe]

You can add vdevs. See cyberjock's guide, linked in my sig.

 

[SweetAndLow]

You can add drives and you can expand a vdev. Adding drives is done by adding a vdev usually with similar protection levels as your first vdev. Adding a single drive is usually silly and not what you want to do.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[gpsguy]

When SweetAndLow said that adding a single drive was "silly", he means that if that new drive were to fail, you'd loose all the data in your pool. In your case, it's recommended to add an additional 5 disks in RAIDz2. Size doesn't matter.

In addition to adding vdev's, you can replace the existing disks, one by one, with larger drives. Once all the drives have been replaced, your pool will expand to the new size.

 

[danb35]

Given that you currently have 5 x 4 TB disks in RAIDZ2, there are two recommended ways that you can expand your pool:

• Replace the 4 TB disks, one at a time, with larger disks
• Add additional sets of five disks in RAIDZ2 groups

There are also a number of other, less-recommended to non-recommended, things you can do to expand the pool:

• Add additional RAIDZ2 sets with different numbers of disks--this is reasonably safe, but not ideal
• Add more sets of disks in different RAIDZn levels--again, can be reasonably safe, but not ideal
• Stripe in additional single disks--this is strongly discouraged, and is described by some as "hating your data." If that single disk (or any of those single disks, if you stripe in more than one) fails, you'll lose everything on your pool.

There are also some commonly-requested things you can't do:

• You can't turn your five-disk RAIDZ2 into a six-disk RAIDZ2 (or a four-disk RAIDZ2).
• You can't turn your RAIDZ2 into RAIDZ3, with or without adding disks.

 

[Stux]

Also, its recommended (strongly) to have a backup. If you have a backup, then you can switch from say 5 way raidz2 to 8 way by adding 3 disks, and restoring your data. Thus gaining 3 disks worth of space

 

[danb35]

Also, its recommended (strongly) to have a backup.

Agreed--RAID is not a backup.

 

[MrHands]

Given that you currently have 5 x 4 TB disks in RAIDZ2, there are two recommended ways that you can expand your pool:

• Replace the 4 TB disks, one at a time, with larger disks
• Add additional sets of five disks in RAIDZ2 groups

There are also a number of other, less-recommended to non-recommended, things you can do to expand the pool:

• Add additional RAIDZ2 sets with different numbers of disks--this is reasonably safe, but not ideal
• Add more sets of disks in different RAIDZn levels--again, can be reasonably safe, but not ideal
• Stripe in additional single disks--this is strongly discouraged, and is described by some as "hating your data." If that single disk (or any of those single disks, if you stripe in more than one) fails, you'll lose everything on your pool.

There are also some commonly-requested things you can't do:

• You can't turn your five-disk RAIDZ2 into a six-disk RAIDZ2 (or a four-disk RAIDZ2).
• You can't turn your RAIDZ2 into RAIDZ3, with or without adding disks.

Thanks, I just ended up getting my hands on a 6th hgst 4tb drive and my motherboard has 6 Intel sata ports so going to just max them out.

I forgot that I bought my wife a 5tb hard drive for an old pc (she was into making videos for about 6 months) that's barely been used!

At the moment I have 4tb of data on my server, going to move all the data to the 5tb drive, put my 6th drive in my server, rebuild my server in raidz2 (4x2) and then copy the 4tb of data back.

Plus I'll start using the 5tb drive as a secondary backup going forward.

 

[gpsguy]

Sounds like a great plan!