Starting with a single data drive

[Skynet5]

Just about to order my stuff.

But can I use a single hard drive to start off with? Just to play with the technology? My plan would be at a later date to rebuild with 2 new hard drives.

I'm too fussed about redundancy at this stage anyway..and everything is backed up.

I'll want to create a music share and run own cloud.

 

[danb35]

There is no requirement that you use multiple drives--you can use ZFS with a single-disk pool. Of course, you won't have any redundancy, so if your drive fails your data is gone, but if you're OK with that, go for it. You can't directly transition from a single disk to a RAIDZ, though--you'd have to create a new pool, destroying the data on the existing pool.

 

[cyberjock]

This topic is being discussed in another thread at the same time as this one.. might want to read some of the other recent threads on this topic.