Increasing capacity by replacing drives

[Norm Powroz]

I'm running a 9.10 system with 4 * 3TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration, so one drive is parity, giving me 9TB for storage. The box boots from a small SSD separate from the main drive cluster. It's been rock-stable for a couple of years.

I am thinking about expanding its capacity and am wondering whether I can achieve this by replacing each existing drive with a larger model, allowing the array to rebuild, then replacing another drive, and so on. Will I ultimately end up with the full capacity of each new drive, is there some additional step I will need to take, or will I simply end up with the same capacity in the new configuration along with a whole bunch of unused and inaccessible space?

If the latter, should I simply back up the entire NAS, replace all the drives, and then recreate the volumes and reload from the backup? That will be a very lengthy and painful process, although it will achieve my objective.

 

[dlavigne]

Yup. Seehttp://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool for details.

 

[fracai]

This doesn't change anything regarding how you upgrade in size, but you said you have 4 disks in a RAIDZ2, but also said one drive is parity and a total of 9TB.

Either you actually have a RAIDZ1 or you really have 6TB total.

Also, with RAIDZ you don't have a single drive dedicated to parity, all data and redundancy is spread across all your drives.

 

[nojohnny101]

I'm running a 9.10 system with 4 * 3TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration, so one drive is parity, giving me 9TB for storage.

What @fracai said, the above is a contradictory statement.

Regardless, what @dlavigne said is one of the beauties of FreeNAS. If it doesn't automagically happen then there is a small setting you might have flip on (autoexpand=on) but that is trivial and we can help you out with that. Once you replace the last disk with a larger one, boom, larger space.

 

[Norm Powroz]

This doesn't change anything regarding how you upgrade in size, but you said you have 4 disks in a RAIDZ2, but also said one drive is parity and a total of 9TB.

Either you actually have a RAIDZ1 or you really have 6TB total.

Also, with RAIDZ you don't have a single drive dedicated to parity, all data and redundancy is spread across all your drives.

I apologize for getting anything wrong. I know when I built the box I set up the system as 4 drives configured as striped with parity, so whatever variation of RAIDZ that translates into is what I'm running. I haven't been able to find anything in the WebGUI that tells me what I need to know to definitively answer the question. When I said I lose one drive for parity I should have said "I lose the capacity of one drive for parity".

 

[Norm Powroz]

Yup. Seehttp://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool for details.

My thanks for the link. I was hoping for something as easy as that.

 

[Jailer]

I apologize for getting anything wrong. I know when I built the box I set up the system as 4 drives configured as striped with parity, so whatever variation of RAIDZ that translates into is what I'm running. I haven't been able to find anything in the WebGUI that tells me what I need to know to definitively answer the question. When I said I lose one drive for parity I should have said "I lose the capacity of one drive for parity".

If you open a shell and type zpool status it will tell you the layout of your pool.

 

[danb35]

I haven't been able to find anything in the WebGUI that tells me what I need to know to definitively answer the question.

The Volume Status page will show it. Go to the Storage button on the top of the web GUI, click on your pool in the list (the top entry), then click the Volume Status button at the bottom (looks like a sheet of notebook paper).

 

[Norm Powroz]

If you open a shell and type zpool status it will tell you the layout of your pool.

And that said "raidz1-0", thank you very much.

 

[Norm Powroz]

The Volume Status page will show it. Go to the Storage button on the top of the web GUI, click on your pool in the list (the top entry), then click the Volume Status button at the bottom (looks like a sheet of notebook paper).

Once more I failed to look far enough down the page. This time I found it and it told me raidz1-0 (with no disc errors in my pool). Thanks for the pointer.

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

Yup. Seehttp://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#replacing-drives-to-grow-a-zfs-pool for details.

This helped me too, and that almost 3 years later!