Upgrading Capacity

[poptrek]

I did some poor planning when I first setup my pool. My budget drove me to go with too little storage. I started with a RAIDZ1 with 3x 6TB drives(Non Critical and will eventually be backed up ...) Unfortunately they are videos and they filled the pool rather quickly. I know raid expansion won't be available until ZFS 2.3 is pushed to trueNAS, hopefully next year. I also don't have the space to move 12TB of data too. So, I purchased 3x 12TB drives that I plan on putting in another raidz1. I have a spare 6TB drive that was holding the original data before the move to trueNAS that I have to use. I was wondering what would the best/optimal way to increase my pool size.

My current plan is to make the 3x 12TB raidz1 in a new pool move the data over, verify it did it successfully, Delete the old pool for now, rename the new pool to the old, and if I need more space make a new 4x6TB raidz1 and add it to the pool at a latter date.(If possible mabye stripe 2 of the 6TB drives together as a hot standby). And If I run out again resilver the 6TB drives to something larger

I have a few problems with my plan tho. I have a 8 bay case so with the new drives, I had to move a 2x mirrored SSD pool for apps inside the case free floating ... to make room. I am also running a SATA expansion card and worried about bandwidth on the PCI-e bus. I have a NVMe drive on the bus as well.Also, If I run out of room before raid expanision is hopefully pushed. Then I would have to use the standby 6tb drives. I would then have two raidz1 in the same pool with none of the benfits of losing two drives to parity. Also I was thinking of striping the 6TBs togther when raid expansion comes out to give me more room with out losing a 2nd drive to parity, if this is possible.

I know my setup has become kind of frankstien at this point(I am running the boot pool on a 128GB USB SSD :O) This is my frist NAS setup and I was hoping if anybody has any pointers or suggestions min/maxing my cost to storage ratio. I know I should backup but I had just enough money for first NAS and I have no elsewhere to hold this amount data. Important files will be backuped some where in the future they have yet to make it to the NAS.

 

[PhilD13]

Instead of making a Frankenstein machine and attempting to somehow update it without losing data, why not replace one by one the smaller drives with larger ones (change 3x6tb to 3x12 tb drives? You keep the same setup and gain more storage space and is easy to do. If you have 8 spaces you could add another vdev with additional drives to the pool like so: 3x vdevA - 3x vdevB, and 2xdrives in mirror for boot. If you have DOM connections on the motherboard you could use 64 or 128GB DOMs for the boot mirror freeing up 2 spaces. Then you could also make a m2 drive mirror for fast storage requirements.

 

[NugentS]

as @PhilD13 says.
If you have a spare SATA port then you do not have to remove a disk. You just insert a 12TB on a spare port and then using the GUI replace one of the 6TB drives with the 12TB drive. This way the RAIDZ1 gets resilvered onto the 12TB, and the 6TB gets kicked out of the array when the resilver is complete. You maintain parity. Once the 6TB drive is kicked out, remove it and insert another 12TB and replace another 6TB. RINSE AND REPEAT

One caveat - make sure you know which drive you are replacing by both serial number and location - be 100% certain of this

 

[Davvo]

If I were you I would add a hotspare. Raidz1 with 12TB drives is... brave.

 

[poptrek]

Thanks for the input. I just moved pools back and forth it took about 18 hours, I figured it was quicker and less risky than trying to resilver a raidZ1 as I still have the original pool and haven't wiped it

I was thinking of using a striped 2x6TB as a hot spare(Can one do this?) once I was confident on data migration until I need to use it for space. I made the room and I am just not happy that if I have to expand again I would have two RaidZ1s in the same pool with no way of fixing it once raid expansion gets pushed short of making an even larger pool. I am guessing that you can not remove a data VDEV even if the other data VDEVs in the pool carry enough free space. I might make two pools and split that data if I need room.

Are 12TBs more prone to failure than 6TB? Like I said it is mostly movies and any critical files will be backed up. So if I do lose data it would just me the time invested to recreate them from the original source to restore.

I just love trueNAS, I just dislike the fact it currently doesn't allow incremental expansion and it's 2023 ...

P.S I placed the bay # in which it resides into the description field as I have a hot swap capable case and added them one by one when they were new

 

[NugentS]

You can add multiple hotspares - but they are individual disks, not mirrors
You can remove mirrors (where all other vdevs are mirrors), but not RAIDZn vdevs

So adding 6TB disks as spares to a pool with 12TB disks will not work