Expand storage - best option? Advice needed

[rungekutta]

To all ZFS and storage gurus! Need some advice.

I currently run FreeNAS on bare metal, Supermicro X11 with i3 CPU and 6x 3TB WD Reds in a single RAIDZ2 vdev. All HDDs on SATA directly on the m/board and installed in the case (Fractal Design), using all space available. The m/board has 2 additional SATA ports that are being used for the SDOM boot drive and an SSD for ZIL, respectively.

The NAS serves as media storage, backup server for laptops and desktops, and disk for a bunch of VMs running on ESXi on another machine (access via NFS).

All works very well and I’m extremely happy with the setup. However I suddenly find myself using 70% of available space so need to think about expansion options. (This happened quicker than I had anticipated...)

Need some advise of best way forward. Options I can think of myself:

1) Replace the existing 6x 3TBs with something larger, one by one, and grow the existing vdev once all drives replaced. Would have to try and sell the old disks to recover some of the money.

2) Buy or build a separate JBOD case and add a SAS HBA card in my FreeNAS box to connect it up - add disks in a new vdev and maybe stripe together with my existing - or set up as new and additional.

3) Buy a new server altogether with space for more drives, move existing drives over, add a few more, and sell the old case and m/board

Or other options I’m not thinking of..?

Based on this information given, what are your thoughts around pros and cons and best way forward? Looking to spend as little as possible while not pairing myself into a corner immediately.

 

[Heracles]

Hi Rungekutta,

House keeping may be an option... Delete some of that stuff instead of saving it all... Your backups are probably not incremental, so use a lot of redundant space. By doing some cleaning in your data and snapshots, you may free enough space. A reason to hope for good result here is the fact that you said you filled it faster than expected. Maybe you were not taking that much care thinking you had plenty of space.

Other than that, the listed options are the regular ones. Auto-expand using bigger drives is probably the cheapest because in all cases, you will need more drives.

 

[rungekutta]

Thank you for your thoughts... I've looked at the options a bit more closely.

1) HDD sweetspot looks to be 8TB right now (10TB and beyond starts to get very expensive per TB), so realistically 6x 8TB and replacing one drive at a time would eventually give me 2.7x times capacity once all replaced and I can grow the pool

2) Seems to just add complexity and is also not cost efficient vs my other scenarios

3) Ditto

4) New option - replace the case with a Fractal Define 7XL and move all existing components over alongside an additional 6x 3TB drives and a HBA, set up a new vdev and stripe it together, for 2x capacity in total. This case is relatively cheap and can take 20 HDDs - I keep everything else and in addition 3TB drives are quite cheap now, so this would likely be the cheapest option. Downside being that I "only" double my capacity and also don't replace my existing 3TB drives, that are approx 4 years old by now, so I guess at some point will start to fail.

5) New option - throw out the 6x 3TB drives in RAIDZ2 and replace with 4x 10TB in RAIDZ2 for "slow" storage and 2x 2TB SSDs in a mirror for fast (VMs).

The last option is intriguing but actually ends up quite expensive and still less storage capacity than option 1.

So I think I'll go for option 1 - which is also what you recommended. ;-)

Btw valid point on house keeping but it only gets me that far unfortunately...

Edit: spelling