Adding Additional Disk Space to System

[w14219]

Questions:
Is it possible to start the FreeNAS with 3 physical drives and later add additional disks to the current configuration for additional storage?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[fracai]

Yes, with a but. ZFS doesn't function like a Drobo, so while you can add space by adding drives, you can't change the arrangement of the drives. For example, if you start with 3 drives in RAIDZ (2 function as data, 1 as parity), you can add 2 more drives in a mirror arrangement (effectively 1 data, 1 backup). But, you can't add those 2 drives to the original 3 to get a 5 disk RAIDZ (4 data and 1 parity).

Basically, once you create a group (VDEV) of drives, you can create more VDEVs that will all live under a pool, but you can't change the number of drives in an existing VDEV, without destroying and recreating that VDEV.

 

[Stephens]

Possible? Sure. Advisable? Maybe not. You'll likely end up with a bastardization of what you really want. Please read noobsauce80's ZFS primer.