I'm new at this...differing HD size question

[Brandon Woosley]

I'm sorry if this is a really simple question, but I can't find the answer anywhere. I am trying to set up a NAS with FreeNAS, using an extra laptop I had around. I've got a 16 GB USB with FreeNAS on it, and three hard drives: a 320 GB internal drive, and 2 2TB external drives. It appears that the 320 GB drive is going to limit the size of my usable storage to that size - is that right? I'd be glad to not use the 320 GB drive at all, but I can't figure out how to remove or ignore it. Is there a way to do that?

Thanks, in advance, for any help you can offer to someone trying to get started.

 

[Jailer]

Thanks, in advance, for any help you can offer

Start reading in the resources section at the top of this page. You're headed down the wrong path already.

To answer your question all drives in a single vdev will appear the same size as the smallest drive in the vdev.

 

[nojohnny101]

To add to that, once you create a pool, you can only add vdevs, not remove them. If you have already created something with the 3 drives and you don't want to use the 320GBs because you correctly assume it will limit the 2 x 2TB drives to a suable 320GBs, then you will have to destroy the pool and rebuild it again with only 2 drives (which is what I would recommend, in a mirror specifically).

 

[danb35]

When you create a volume, you can easily select which disks will comprise that volume. Simply select the two 2 TB disks, and not the 320 GB disk, and you'd be fine in that regard. In all other regards, though, you'll be in trouble; laptops make notoriously poor choices for FreeNAS hardware.