Mirrored boot pool still limited to 2 drives?

[Constantin]

Good morning,

As of the latest TrueNAS 13 stable release, it appears still impossible to add a third mirrored drive to the boot pool per the GUI? I thought this was a feature that the iXsystem gods were going to re-enable since this was a feature in prior releases?

FWIW, the drive shows up under storage -> disks but there is no “extend” option available if I open the boot pool options in the GUI. Is there any risk if I simply format the extra drive and then add it from the command line? The instructions re: adding drives to boot pools for prior releases of FreeNAS archived here should likely still be relevant, no?

 

[Davvo]

Why would you want a 3-way mirror boot pool? If you want HA shouldn't you follow jgreco's guide?

Highly Available Boot Pool Strategy

I've pounded a few versions of this out over the years, but I hate explaining over and over. TrueNAS allows a ZFS boot mirror pool to be created to increase the reliability of the NAS. This sounds great in theory, but there's a flaw. Due to...

www.truenas.com

 

[Constantin]

Hi Davvo and thanks for responding with that great resource. My goal is a little different - I don’t care so much about the unit always booting up reliably despite the vagaries of BIOS/UEFI settings, as it’s a SOHO unit that I can access easily.

I’d like to simply have three drives in the pool based on just the ports that are available on the motherboard. The board has two SATADOMs that I’m already using, I’d like to add a removable high-endurance SDXC to the mix. Ideally, I’d exchange it as part of off-site backup storage.