Increasing Size of RAIDZ1 vdev

[ewhac]

The storage needs of my FreeNAS box just effectively doubled. The quickest and dirtiest (emphasis on dirty) way to do this would be to increase the size of the existing three-drive RAIDZ1 vdev. With the understanding that RAIDZ1 can be hazardous to my data:

Legend has it that the storage size of a vdev can be increased if all of the component HDDs are replaced with bigger ones. The FreeNAS manual details how to replace a failed drive in a RAIDZ vdev:

• In the Volume Status GUI, mark a drive as Offline,
• Replace the offlined HDD in the chassis,
• Select the Offline disk in GUI, select replacement HDD, click Replace Disk,
• Wait for the resilver to finish,
• Rinse, repeat.

Once this has been completed for all HDDs in the vdev, does the vdev's size automagically increase, or are additional steps required?

 

[Ericloewe]

Once this has been completed for all HDDs in the vdev, does the vdev's size automagically increase, or are additional steps required?

It should be automagic. You can check that autoexpand is active for the pool.

 

[Mirfster]

Legend also has it that using RaidZ1 with large drives is a dangerous thing to do... ;)

 

[ewhac]

Legend also has it that using RaidZ1 with large drives is a dangerous thing to do... ;)

Yah, especially with drives of the sizes I'm contemplating. Doing a straight replacement of the drives is the quickest, dirtiest, and least expensive solution. In my defense, I try to stick with HGST Ultrastars...

I could build a new six-drive RAIDZ2 vdev out of 3TB drives, but then I would have to buy a whole new box to put them in.

 

[SweetAndLow]

You box can't support 6 drives? You could just plug in your 6 new drives into the current box and copy the data over.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[ewhac]

You box can't support 6 drives?

Nope. It's an HP N54L -- only four drive bays. Five if you count the CD-ROM bay, which I don't. Nor do I count the e-SATA port on the back.

I got it three years ago when they were seemingly being cleared out -- chassis, power supply, motherboard, CPU, and RAM for $325. Just add more RAM and disks. In that time, it's been quiet, unobtrusive, and given me no trouble at all. I liked the thing so much, I bought another one to be my gateway/firewall.

 

[Stux]

Would be worth contemplating 4 drive z2.

 

[ewhac]

Would be worth contemplating 4 drive z2.

It's a question of what level of expense I can justify to myself. According to current pricing, building a 2+2 RAIDZ2 out of 4TB HGST drives would be about $600 worth of drives, and I'd only get about 8TB of storage out of it. OTOH, building a 4+2 RAIDZ2 out of 3TB HGST drives would be about $480, yielding about 12TB of storage. This would be the obvious way to go if I didn't also need to find a new small, hopefully cute box to put them in. (Seriously, why does everyone stop at four bays?)

Yes, I could also do a 2+2 out of 3TB drives (about $350), which would alleviate the current problem, but would also leave me with having to pull some extra gymnastics when I want to expand that to a full 4+2.