Upgrade ZFS path

[dchouinard]

ZFS sound like magic. I'm having hard time to put every features together.

I've been using Freenas for quite a while now, But it did not mattered much since it changed do much! I'm grateful that Freenas is so user-friendly.

Anyway. I got quit a few drive full of stuff. I don't mind to loose most of it, but I really need to secure Photos and musics.

On my machine I have a 3TB drive with few videos on it. I want it move to my FreeNAS.

I have other movies on a 1TB drive. a 500GB drive is holding my music and photos. This last one used to be RSYNC elsewere.

So this week I bought another 3TB drive and mount it as a ZFS pool in my FreeNAS machine.

I think I can copy my old files on the new 3TB drive and add a drive to the pool. I expect to end up with a nice humongus drive with reduduncy.

But it look too easy and I beleive I'm missing somehting.

 

[fracai]

You're overlooking that ZFS pools can't be expanded like that. Ideally, you'd put the 3TB drives together as a mirror and use the 1TB and 500GB as either backup for important data or use them for stuff that you don't care to store redundantly on ZFS.

Basically, once you create a VDEV within a pool it's frozen in size, unless you upsize each disk that is part of the VDEV. So you can't just put 2x3TB, 1TB, and 500GB togeter to get 7.5TB of space with redundancy. There are basically two ways to expand your capacity: upsize every disk, or add another VDEV. Each has their downsides.

Read noobsauce80's guide and also the FreeNAS FAQ and User Guide.