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is FreeNAS what I need for my needs?
- Thread starter ASRV1
- Start date
- Status
- Joined
- May 28, 2011
- Messages
- 875
Hi ASRV1,
FreeNAS can grow it's storage pool (volume) but not quite the way I think you are looking for.
I'm assuming a few things: you want a volume that has a couple of drives in it for redundancy & you want to run ZFS...
First thing....you can't add single drives to a ZFS pool and retain any redundancy to protect against disk failure (not to say you can't do it, ZFS will let you do all manner of stupid\silly things with your storage). You can however add multiple "virtual devices" (vdev) to your pool and expand it that way. FreeNAS does an excellent job of masking this extra layer that ZFS uses to build the storage pool called the vdev, the basic building block of the ZFS filesystem and is the feature that allows you to grow a pool to 10's, 100's or even 1000's of drives. When you make a pool, for example, you take 4 1TB drives and create a raidz (RAID-5ish) pool on top you actually have created a 4 disk vdev.
When you need to add more space, you just add another vdev. Ideally (following the above example) you would make another 4 drive raidz that uses the same "class" of drives as the first (to keep performance consistent).
The other way to increase your pool is to swap out each drive for a bigger one, with a rebuild between each swap. Once the last drive is swapped\rebuilt the extra capacity will become available.
-Will
FreeNAS can grow it's storage pool (volume) but not quite the way I think you are looking for.
I'm assuming a few things: you want a volume that has a couple of drives in it for redundancy & you want to run ZFS...
First thing....you can't add single drives to a ZFS pool and retain any redundancy to protect against disk failure (not to say you can't do it, ZFS will let you do all manner of stupid\silly things with your storage). You can however add multiple "virtual devices" (vdev) to your pool and expand it that way. FreeNAS does an excellent job of masking this extra layer that ZFS uses to build the storage pool called the vdev, the basic building block of the ZFS filesystem and is the feature that allows you to grow a pool to 10's, 100's or even 1000's of drives. When you make a pool, for example, you take 4 1TB drives and create a raidz (RAID-5ish) pool on top you actually have created a 4 disk vdev.
When you need to add more space, you just add another vdev. Ideally (following the above example) you would make another 4 drive raidz that uses the same "class" of drives as the first (to keep performance consistent).
The other way to increase your pool is to swap out each drive for a bigger one, with a rebuild between each swap. Once the last drive is swapped\rebuilt the extra capacity will become available.
-Will
Ah, alright thank you for your promp response. I have a decent test build I can utilize along with some drives. I ll try it out and see how it works. I am asking this because for the main configuration, we have this server chassis that has hot swap bays. So far, we only have about 6 or so 1TB drives (SATAIII) in them but nothing has been configured. So, I thought I ask here if it would be simple as to just a day and the system would recognize is as more storage or add it up to the main volume. Thanks again
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