Adding HDD without losing data?

[Tmkhokho]

Hay,

to be honest am a noobie so this is why i'm asking this question... i have 4 hdd's each of them are full of movies...i just installed FreeNas... now can i add my movie hdd's without losing the date? if yes how?

cheers!

 

[pirateghost]

It generally helps to read the documentation.

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes

In case that is too much for you.

NO. you cannot

 

[aufalien]

That's actually a cool link, thanks pirateghost That FreeNAS sub-domain is very cool indeed.

 

[leenux_tux]

Actually, you can.

It all depends on what the question actually is. Yes, I know this sounds stupid but think about for a second. You have run out of space and want to add more capacity, yes ? You are asking a question that sounds like "can I add more disks to my current pool to extend the size as I have run out of space". Pirateghost is correct, you can't, however, there is a way around this. Unfortunately it does mean purchasing four new hard drives (of greater capacity than what you have now) and, one by one, replace each disk with one of your new ones, letting FreeNAS handle the resilvering (pool rebuild) for you. I have done this myself and it works fine. I replaced my original pool consisting of 4X1TB with 4X2TB drives, then kept the 4X1TB as a backup pool. Search around the forum and lots of other folks have done it as well.

 

[gpsguy]

my guess is that the OP, having just installed FreeNAS, doesn't have any storage yet. And, the 4 hard disks full of movies is probably NTFS or something other than UFS/ZFS.

If that's the case, then as pirateghost said, the answer is no. One would empty drives to create a volume and then transfer the existing data to the FreeNAS volume.