Add disk to zpool?

[ScottNZ]

Hi All,

Two questions:

1. Is it possible to add extra disks to a zpool thus increasing its size?
2. Are "spare" disks utilised automatically by ZFS?

From what I've read, I think the answer to #1 will be 'no', but I've got two extra disks I'd like to put to use somehow. My FreeNAS 8 setup is a RAIDZ1 volume on four 500GB disks, and a fifth disk marked as "spare". I've got an additional 500GB disk that I would like to add to the zpool if it's possible. Is there any way to increase the size of the zpool with additional disks (other than replacing each 500GB drive with something larger)?

Cheers,
Scott

 

[paleoN]

1. Is it possible to add extra disks to a zpool thus increasing its size?

Not and keep your redundancy. Unless you want to add another 4 disks?

2. Are "spare" disks utilised automatically by ZFS?

I don't know what you mean by this.

From what I've read, I think the answer to #1 will be 'no', but I've got two extra disks I'd like to put to use somehow.

You could always create a separate zpool as a mirror with the two drives.

Ignore the thread rating I had scripting off apparently.

 

[ScottNZ]

PaleoN,

Thanks for the info--I'm understanding it a bit more. And by "spare" I mean that I have a volume consisting of 5 disks, and four of the disks are marked "raidz" while the fifth is marked "spare" (and maybe "cache" is another possibility?). Somewhere I think I read that the spare is meant to be used if one of the "raidz" drives fails. My question is does this fail-over to the spare happen automatically, or do I manually do a replace?

Thanks,
Scott

 

[paleoN]

It's my understanding that the spare functionality is broken in FreeBSD 8.2, if I remember right. Which means it doesn't work in FreeNAS either. Which means it's a manual process.

If your disk is "cache" that's completely different. You want an SSD for a cache device. Of course you always want to up your memory before you bother thinking about a cache disk anyway.