My First FreeNas is reaching its limits

[Fisher]

I built my first NAS with FreeNas a year ago with 3x3TB WD Red Drives on an Intel Core i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz 16GB ram running FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201511020249

System is reaching its storage capacity I think as I have read on here that I should keep it close to 80%.

My question is the pool shows 6.4TB Used with 1.7 TB Available and then shows it again as 4.3 TB Used and 1007.9 GB Available. Why am I seeing these two very different stats for Storage?

I understand to expand I can add another 3x3TB drives or replace each current 3TB drives with say 6TB one by one. I have another Core i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz system just sitting around and it would only need the 16GB of ram added so I could build out another FreeNas system. Perhaps setup one to for just media and the other for my code projects and files.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Please read this post: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/the-faq.30209/#post-194030

Yes, you can expand this way. However a RAID-Z1 with drives this big is risky, I recommend to add one drive and switch to RAID-Z2 (but you'll have to copy the data elsewhere, destroy the pool, recreate it and copy the data back).

 

[joeschmuck]

You have 4.3TB in iTunes? Wow, that is a lot of music!

Anyway, you have a few different ways to go but the first thing to answer is: What is your expected maximum storage size?

It's easy to run out of space right after building your first NAS if you didn't think that far ahead but now that you have maybe most of the data on it, do you see it expanding much further? Either way you should plan you storage limits to cover the next 3 years at a minimum and then in my opinion, double it. That is the capacity you should be shooting for. It's tragic that your current drives are only a year old.

Next question: How many hard drives can you connect (both physically and actually fit into the current case) to your machine?

Next question: Is this data critical, this will decide if you use RADZ1 or RAIDZ2. Of course we here push RAIDZ2 because even if the data isn't' that important, the amount of time to recover the data can be substantial and it's a real time saver if you just have that second drive of safety, replacing a drive is much quicker that rebuilding a database.

So if I were you and I could fit a total of six hard drives into my case and I had six SATA connections available, because I already had three fairly new 3TB Red drives, I'd purchase three more 3TB drives and build a RAIDZ2 system which would hold just over 10TB of storage. Now each additional drive added would be about 3TB more added (generalized) or if you dropped to RAIDZ1 (not recommended for the storage size you have) you could recoup about 3TB of storage.

No matter how you slice it, unless you are planning to replace the 3TB drives you already have with 6TB drives, you will need to backup your data and destroy the pool. Even if you were to replace the 3TB drives one at a time and resilver them, backup your data, all it takes is for one issue to occur and everything is gone. The only way around that would be to create a second pool of three 6TB drives and you could extend your pool or just copy the data and remove the 3TB drives pool.

You have options but you need to think about what you really want in the end and how much money you want to spend.