Recreating my pool with additional drives, mirror -> raid5

[riegersn]

I started off this journey with just two 4tb drives in a mirror configuration. I purchased 2 additional 4tb drives and would like to recreate my pool with all 4 drives using raid5. I understand I can't keep the data on the two drive so I've moved all my data onto a temporary external drives. I'll be moving all the PC internals into a new case that can support additional 3.5 drives.

What are the proper steps to handle this? Could someone please someone provide the process for me to move forward?

 

[jgreco]

ZFS does not support RAID5; it has a different concept called RAIDZ with three different parity levels (RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3). You should think carefully about using RAIDZ1, which is roughly equivalent to RAID5 in that it allows for an entire single drive to be lost, but cannot deal with any damage beyond that point. We usually recommend RAIDZ2 as the best option if you value your data and want to retain it for a long time.

Once you have evacuated all your data to temporary storage, you may log into the NAS, go into the Storage->Pools, and export your current pool. It should ask you if you wish to erase your disks, and you may proceed to do so. Then you create a new pool, using all your disks.

Please check your new disks to make certain that they are not SMR disks, by the way. Many of the smaller capacity ones are.

 

[riegersn]

ZFS does not support RAID5; it has a different concept called RAIDZ with three different parity levels (RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3). You should think carefully about using RAIDZ1, which is roughly equivalent to RAID5 in that it allows for an entire single drive to be lost, but cannot deal with any damage beyond that point. We usually recommend RAIDZ2 as the best option if you value your data and want to retain it for a long time.

Once you have evacuated all your data to temporary storage, you may log into the NAS, go into the Storage->Pools, and export your current pool. It should ask you if you wish to erase your disks, and you may proceed to do so. Then you create a new pool, using all your disks.

Please check your new disks to make certain that they are not SMR disks, by the way. Many of the smaller capacity ones are.

Thanks. That seems fairly straight forward. This is just personal stuff, i plan to back up with a secondary service so I think i will stick with raidz1. My drives are WD Red Plus 4TB NAS drives.

 

[jgreco]

Seems like you're good to go then.