Upgrading From 1 Hard Drive Striped

[Wakos]

I just built my FreeNAS with a single WD Blue 2TB Hard drive due to limited budget. This was my first NAS and wanted to make sure I was comfortable with the system before dumping a lot of money into it. I later planned to add more storage and redundancy. I have browsed around and haven't been able to find many people with 1 HD builds and questions of them upgrading. I would plan on adding another 2 TB drive that would be striped and give me a 4TB total space. I assume all that would need to be done is then go into the Volume Manager to extend the current volume and select the new disk I installed (granted it shows up as an option to select) and choose the total size of the new volume. Am I missing anything? Do I need to backup my data to copy it back to the newly created volume?

Thanks in advance

 

[danb35]

No, but keep in mind that when one of those two drives fails, all your data goes away.

 

[gpsguy]

That's correct.

Backups - you should be doing those anyway. And, with 2 disks in a stripe, backups will be even more important. If either disk fails, all your data is gone.

You mention plans to add redundancy later. Can you elaborate on that? If you add another disk at this point, you won't be able to add redundancy to your existing vdev, unless you backup your data and start over. If you wanted some redundancy, you could add a second disk as a mirror to your existing disk. It requires command line work, but can be done. If you wanted to slowly grow your volume, you could add additional mirrors in the future.

I assume all that would need to be done is then go into the Volume Manager to extend the current volume and select the new disk I installed...

 

[Wakos]

Currently I am backing up everything externally. Most of the data resides on my desktop computer's internal 2tb HD and anything else goes to an external USB HDD. For now I centralize everything on the FreeNAS so I can stream media etc. I would like to add the 2nd TB to grow to 4TB volume striped and continue to backup externally. Once i have collected more then 3TB data and my bank account allows the plan would be to start over with a minimum 4TB Mirror with WD Reds for my redundancy. I can't afford to shell out the $300 + for 2x 4TB Red so until I can I still want to have more then 2tb storage on my FreeNAS.

 

[Mirfster]

If you haven't already, I would highly recommend taking the time to read CyberJock's thread "Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!". Will help to explain a lot and let you know the pitfalls that you would want to avoid. ;)

It always comes down to space vs speed vs redundancy, everyone should take time to think it through and get the most information they can first beforehand. There are a ton of great guides here and everyone is well worth the time investment. I find myself constantly re-reading threads or finding new ones that give me more insight (I'm still a FreeNas noob in training..).

 

[Wakos]

Thank guys I really appreciate the responses. I will look into these options.