Add a new hard drive to an existing ZFS RAIDZ system

[leenux_tux]

Hello Forum,

I have a question regarding adding a new hard drive to an existing ZFS RAIDZ pool. Currently my storage is set up like so.....

3 X 1TB RAIDZ with 1 X 1TB as a hot spare, all 4 drives are identical. System boots from a USB thumbdrive.

On top of this I have
1 X ISCSI volume (500GB) which I use for VMWare
5 X NFS/CIFS volumes for backups, music, movies, iso images etc (reason for mixture of CIFS and NFS is so that both Windows and Linux systems can access the files easily)

I have come to the realization that the "spare" drive could be better used as part of the RAIDZ setup. What I want to do is add the hot spare to the pool, thereby giving me more available disk space. Has anyone been through this process ? I have a horrible feeling that you can't simply add a new drive to a RAIDZ pool and have to save everything off, destroy the pool and re-create with the 4 drives instead of 3 ? If this is the case will saving off the config enable me to quickly recreate my volumes/users/settings etc ??

Thanks in advance

 

[cyberjock]

Check out my guide.. It'll give you the answers you are looking for...

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?t=7775

 

[leenux_tux]

noobsauce80, thank you for the info and guide. Gives me a better understanding of the challenge I have !!

Looks like getting some 2TB drives, replace one, wait for ZFS to rebuild, then replace another and so on......

Leeux_tux

 

[cyberjock]

Exactly :)

 

[survive]

Hi leenux_tux,

You might want to consider doing a pair of mirrors (RAID-10ish) instead of raidz. You will get more performance out of the drives and not have to deal with the additional parity overhead on the Atom-based system.

-Will