Future proofing my system

[frasernator]

Hello,

I have not actually built my system yet but have fiddled around with a test rig on Oracle Virtualbox.

I plan to build a physical machine with 4 2TB drives RAIDed.

As we all know drives keep getting cheaper and cheaper so down the road I may want to get larger drives.

My Plan:
At some future date I will buy 4 new larger drives
One by one take a drive offline
Replace the drive
rebuild the RAID array
Rinse and repeat until all 4 drives are replaced

I have simulated this on the virtual FreeNAS, but now I'm left with a chunk of available drive space that is not being used.

I know I can make a new Volume to use up the extra space, but I don't want to have to re-structure my data storage so would rather enlarge the volume instead. I remember years ago playing with RedHat, even before they split it off into Fedora, that there was a GUI tool I was able to use to adjust the volume size but I haven't been able to find anything that can be run in non-graphical mode for FreeBSD.

Any ideas, or is this just a pipe dream on my part that is likely to lead to loss of data.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

now I'm left with a chunk of available drive space that is not being used.

You haven't provided enough detail for us to identify where you went wrong. The procedure in the manual to expand a ZFS pool by replacing drives does work. FreeNAS supports adding larger drives to increase pool size by replacing smaller drives all without threatening your data's security.

Please provide more information (RAID level, zpool status, virtual disk sizes, etc.) or run through the procedure again.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[frasernator]

You haven't provided enough detail for us to identify where you went wrong. The procedure in the manual to expand a ZFS pool by replacing drives does work. FreeNAS supports adding larger drives to increase pool size by replacing smaller drives all without threatening your data's security.

Please provide more information (RAID level, zpool status, virtual disk sizes, etc.) or run through the procedure again.

Cheers,
Matt

This is why I like to reach out to the experts. I wasn't finding any instructions at all and just trying to muddle my way through on my own. I'll retry with these instructions and see how it goes :)

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

If it doesn't work as you expect, please let us know. Happy to help!

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Chris Moore]

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