Starting RAID 0, then going RAID 1

[radiocolin]

I'm planning to set up a box with two 4TB drives mirrored in the next few weeks.

Money being what it is, I'm planning to buy the drives in stages. Buy my first drive, save up for the next one, buy it a few weeks later.

I understand all about backups, data loss, etc, and have plenty of cloud and local backups of all my data. So a drive failure will not be catastrophic.

So, is it possible to set up my box with ZFS on a single 4TB drive, then a few weeks later add a second 4TB drive and set it up as a RAID 1 mirroring setup, without having to erase and start over?

 

[warri]

Create zfs mirror by adding a drive?

 

[radiocolin]

Is ZFS mirror something different from a RAID 1 configuration?

As I'm reading the docs, it says that it will automatically set up the best configuration for the number of volumes you have. Does that hold as I add drives as well?

 

[Dusan]

Create zfs mirror by adding a drive?

As the thread is referenced now and then I updated the instructions in post #2 to include the 2GB swap partition (so that people do not need to piece together the full instructions from all the posts).

Is ZFS mirror something different from a RAID 1 configuration?

ZFS mirror is the ZFS implementation of RAID 1.

 

[warri]

As I'm reading the docs, it says that it will automatically set up the best configuration for the number of volumes you have. Does that hold as I add drives as well?

I think this only holds for the ZFS volume manager, can you give me a reference to the context in the manual? You need to use the CLI to add a mirror drive later, since this is not supported by the GUI.