Storage Expansion - What to do with old drives?

[TigerXtrm]

My current installation is slowly approaching capacity, so I'm exploring options for expansion.

The most straight forward solution is to replace the current 2TB drives with 4TB drives and double the capacity. However, there's nothing actually wrong with the 2TB drives, so just throwing them out seems like a massive waste.

The more complex solution is to add 6x4TB in a new vdev and add that to the existing system for a total of 12 drives. This would require a massive hardware investment, though. I believe that would involve a SAS expander card, SAS cables, a new case and possibly a new power supply (and my understanding of SAS is limited). It would more than double the capacity, though, and I wouldn't have to 'waste' any drives.

I'm sure people here have faced a similar situation at some point, so does anyone have any insights or advice on what would be the logical route forward? Maybe a solution I haven't even considered?

Thanks!

 

[Jessep]

Agreed it seems like a waste, however you would be burning electricity on drives that wouldn't be in use. You would most likely put all data on the new drives which likely have better performance.

I my case I used them as a cold backup. Copied the truly critical data (small subset of total data) over to them in mirrored pairs (family pictures, records, etc.) and put each set of mirrored pairs in a safe place (offsite).

You could also sell, use in secondary FreeNAS, give to family, etc.

 

[reasonsandreasons]

Gen 8 HP Microservers are dirt cheap and easy to set up as a compact offsite backup system. Put that at an offsite location with a good internet connection (perhaps a friend or family member's house) and do live backups of critical data from the main system to that. Those microservers only have four drive bays, tho, so it might make sense to set up a vdev with one-disk redundancy and keep the other two disks around as spares for the backup system.