Reconfiguring the Drives in my Pool

[Ralphshep]

Hello,
I am trying to reconfigure the drives in my storage pool to add more space. Right now my pool consists of two mirrored 4TB for a total of 4TB of useable space. Now I want to expand the pool to 8TB, but on a budget. What I would like to try and do is reconfigure the pool to add the two 4TB drives together and mirror them to an 8TB drive for a total of 8TB of useable space. But, I'm not sure if all of this reconfiguring is possible.

So, essential what I'm trying to do is expand my pool from 4TB to 8TB of useable space and have at least one mirrored copy of my data. (On the side I will also have a local back of the server)

Any ideas?

 

[LarsR]

If you want to increase capacity you'd need at least 2 Drives and you have 2 possibilies:
1. Add another 2-Drive Mirror to your existing pool as a new vdev.
2. Buy 2x 8TB drives and exchange your existing drives one at a time, let the pool resilver and after that your capacity will increase to 8TB.

For any other pool layout change you'd have to backup your data, destroy the pool, create whatever you want, e.g. a stripe of your 2 existing drives for a capacity of 8TB. But then you'd have no redundancy and if one drive in that stripe goes bad, your Data is lost. So i highly recommend the options mentioned above. DO NOT use stripes if you value your Data.


Personally i'd go for Option 1 because 4Tb drives are cheaper then 8tb drives and adding another vdev will increase your iops

 

[Ralphshep]

Thanks for the feedback.

I’m going to return the 8TB drive I got and swap it out for two 4TB drives that I will mirror together in a new vdev and add to my current 4TB pool. That would give me the 8TB pool I’m looking for.

Thanks again!