New FreeNAS build

Discolai

Cadet
Joined
Jan 24, 2019
Messages
5
Hi I am planning my first freenas build. I have figured out most of the details by browsing the forum and reading the guides, but I still have some questions.

I already own 1 wd red 4tb drive and I will be buying 5 more and set up a raidz2 array of the 6 drives. The drive is quite full so I don't have enough spare storage to place the data while I set up the pool in freenas. However, from what I have read I can create a pool with the 5 new 4tb red drives and stick in an old 2tb drive which will create a 8tb pool. Then copy over the data from my old 4tb drive to the new pool, and replace the 2tb drive with the 4tb drive to end up with a 16tb pool. Would this be wort it or would it just put unnecessary strain on the new drives while resilvering?
 

Chris Moore

Hall of Famer
Joined
May 2, 2015
Messages
10,080
Would this be wort it or would it just put unnecessary strain on the new drives while resilvering?
No, that is a great plan.
When you build the NAS, you should do some testing on the drives before you ever create the pool and copy any data onto it. This will help to ensure the drives are not defective. Here is a guide that talks about setting up your new NAS:


Uncle Fester's Basic FreeNAS Configuration Guide
https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fester:intro

There are still some bugs popping up in the new UI that came out in version 11.2, so I would suggest setting your system up with FreeNAS version 11.1-U6.3 here is a link to it:

https://download.freenas.org/11/11.1-U6.3/x64/FreeNAS-11.1-U6.3.iso
 
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