Suggestion about new drive for upgrade

[vatastala]

Hi all,

I'd like to have a suggestion about a possible upgrade on my NAS composed by 6x3TB disks...At the moment, I have a failed disk and I have the possibility to give It back to the seller a choose a new one.

My question is...Make sense to take a 1x4TB disk for future upgrade for my NAS? I would like to have much storage, but I don't know If It is convenient to start to buy new units with more space...I mean, at the moment ( till I will upgrade all disks to 4TB ) the system will use only 3 of 4TB of the new unit, isn't It? Also, at the moment I don't have external storage to move data temporarily from my pool.

If you have any suggestion about the best practice for this kind of purposes will be appreciated

 

[Arubial1229]

If you replace the 3TB with a 4TB, the system will only use 3 of the 4TB on the new drive. Once you replace all the drives, you will then get the extra space automatically. I would advise against using 4TB drives since that's not much of an upgrade. I would look at 6TB at minimum.

 

[Chris Moore]

If you have any suggestion about the best practice for this kind of purposes will be appreciated :)

Your idea is not a bad one, but the results wouldn't be very significant. If you replace all six of your 3TB drives with 4TB drives, you only increase your storage by just a little over 3TB. The best 'bang for the buck' last time I looked was 8TB drives.
It won't hurt anything to take the larger disk, but it might not be very helpful in the long run.

 

[vatastala]

Thank you guys, so what you think about this...

I can buy an 8TB disk, create a standalone volume and move a lot of data on It...later, when another disk will die ( and some of them are very old, so I think soon) I can add another 8TB...but could I create a mirror when data is already on the first disk?

 

[Chris Moore]

I can buy an 8TB disk, create a standalone volume and move a lot of data on It...later, when another disk will die ( and some of them are very old, so I think soon)

Sounds like a risk. Depends on your tolerance for loosing your data.

) I can add another 8TB...but could I create a mirror when data is already on the first disk?

You can do that from the command line, but there is no feature for that in the GUI.
It is a fairly involved process, so I will link you to a write-up that was done on the process.
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/create-zfs-mirror-by-adding-a-drive.14880/post-453864